Reply To: Kids… Should they get gender affirming surgery, take HRT, etc?

[Elli Snow]

I look at this from a couple very different points of view.  I, too, knew before I got to 1st grade that I would rather be a girl than a boy.  I was more interested in the things they did and were interested in than I was in the things boys did and were interested in.  The closest I ever got to mentioning it to anyone was on a shopping trip with my mother when I decided I wanted a pink shirt and rainbow colored tutu when I was about 5.  This wish was quickly shot down, because it as 1958 and little boys just didn’t do things like that back then.  She was an educated women and was well aware of the cost of being outside of the cis community.  Transgender wasn’t even a word then, nor was the concept of the different types of sexual attraction.  Back then there were two accepted sexes, and two accepted sexual attractions, hetero and homo.  If you want to read some real horror stories, read about how homosexual people were treated by the government and society.  Besides being completely illegal back then, conviction generally meant a long stay at a very unpleasant psychiatric hospital where huge doses of mind and libido altering drugs were administered along with lots of the darling of psychiatrists back then, electroshock therapy.  Transport that same little child and his/her parents 50 years forward, and I think both my parents would have been fine with it.  As I grew older, I would have been expected to to a lot of reading and research on my choices, but that is because I came from a family of educators and researchers, and being both self aware and understanding consequences were important.  I suspect they would have gone along with HRT, but not SRS.  Like most 18 year olds, I was full of myself and thought my parents were completely out of touch with reality.  It took me until I was about 25 or 26 before I started to understand just how much more my  parents knew of and understood the real world than I did.  Mind you, my parents for their time were very supportive of everything I or my brothers chose to do, even when they knew it would end in disaster, because they knew we learned from experience then more than from the wisdom of our elders.  However, they were there to help pick up the pieces and make sure we learned the lessons we has set before ourselves.