A doctor helps children change their gender

you just cannot appreciate the depth of their anguish, unless you choose to become informed.
please, just take some time and read about these kids.
and then, you can make an educated decision.

leslie

.... Children are children, not little adults. They should not be allowed to make decisions of this magnitude on their own, nor should their parents make them for them.

... There is no way these children are giving informed consent because their minds do not see beyond the here and now. I believe this to be completely unethical. They have no right.

We watched a video on this for a psych class. There was one boy who absolutely identified as being a girl, who truly gave me the impression of in the wrong body.

There was another boy who seemed always to have always been timid and fearful from toddlerhood (family videos) and who seemed to feel safer as a girl exempted from male competition and physicality. His mother seemed to have played to his fears rather than trying to build his confidence, and to have indulged him in dressing as a girl very early as a comfort measure and in secrecy from her husband, a conspiracy between the two of them, with all the strain of "We won't tell your father." Very sad, very sick, and yet the mother was portrayed as a sensitive, noble advocate for her child.

There was also an adult male-female transsexual who'd gone as far as castration and breast augmentation, who seemed to be completely narcissistic, fascinated with his own body as an erotic object. He lived in partnership with another male-female transexual - so why go to all the surgery and trouble to be a woman (with a penis) just to end up like that?

There seem to be many motivations for transsexualism beyond the sense of being in the wrong-sexed body. IMO the physicians ought to be more careful about who they give the go-ahead to.

Thank you, the voice of reason.

I spent my entire childhood wanting to be a boy. I even had an elborate fantasy that I actually believed that I was really a Martian boy named Jupiter who had come to Earth in this body (a female) in order to study the human race. I believed this for a year, I had an invisible penis. Since I was adopted, it all fit together nicely.

Once I hit puberty I started coming to terms with my gender and have had a normal (average, ordinary, not unusual) sexual life as a heterosexual woman, borne several children, enjoyed breastfeeding, etc.

When I was a girl, the thought of getting breasts appalled me! They sounded like totally inconvenient appendeges.

I too was a tomboy. Maybe the problem isn't with the kids - it is with the definitions.

Let girls be tomboys without teasing them. Let boys play piano and dance without teasing them.

Then maybe they wouldn't have sex changes. They would be comfortable with who they were and with their bodies.

Maybe we are coming at this from the wrong end . . . . instead of changing the body - change peoples' expectations.