Transgender Youth

The second topic I will be discussing is transgender youth. I am choosing this firstly because this topic has been in the news lately and is gaining publicity. The second reason is because I am fascinated about gender and how ones physical body can differ then what gender they feel they are. The final reason is because I think this is a topic that needs to be addressed so that people can become more accepting. First it is necessary to provide a definition of transgender. According to the article 'It's me in a different way' by Jeff Kass, "Transgender does not necessarily refer to someone who has had a sex-change operation. Advocates define transgender as a person who does not identify with the sex based on their genitalia - in other words, someone born with male genitalia who does not identify as male and someone born with female genitalia who does not identify as a female. A transgender person should be referred to as the gender they identify with, according to advocates."

An 20/20 interview with a young transgender girl

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/tony-zamazal-transgender-prom-_n_3021109.html
This article allows for us to see some of the struggles that face transgender teens; simple things we take for granted like being allowed to wear what we want to wear or going to our high school prom. The below excerpt of the article gives a summary of the triumph of one teen girl.

"A Texas-based transgender teen has won the right to wear a dress and heels to the senior prom..."All I wanted was to get to wear a dress to prom, because I wouldn't have felt comfortable at all showing up in a tux," Zamazal is quoted in a press release as saying. "I'm so grateful that my school has agreed to let me be myself on such an important night."... Zamazal's case is merely the latest challenge to high school prom regulations across the country in recent months. Students and staff at an Indiana-based high school tried to quickly distance themselves from international media frenzy over a local group's plea for a "traditional" alternate prom that would ban gay teens. The most vocal member of that group, special education teacher Diana Medley sparked the most controversy when she compared LGBT teens to special needs students and said she "honestly didn't" feel gay people had a "purpose" in life."

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/mar/01/its-me-in-a-different-way/
The article above tells they story of a young transgender girl. I chose this article because it allows us to see into the lives of transgender youth as well as shows us at what an early age a child can know that they are different. It also allows us to see that they are like any other boy or girl. Below is an excerpt of the article

"On the first day of eighth grade, Melaina Marquez wore a polo shirt, wedge shoes and denim skirt with ruffles.... At age 2, Melaina recalls playing with Barbies and her favorite toy, a kitchenette. When she played house in pre-school, "I would always want to be the mom." Melaina says she never struggled with her identity. But her mother, Michelle Benzor-Marquez, cannot say the same. When Melaina was around 8 years old, she was allowed to wear light-colored lip gloss and a little blush, but only at home. Melaina's hair grew longer, little by little, but her mom had the stylist chop it off one day in sixth grade. Melaina cried the whole 20 miles to her grandmother's home. Benzor-Marquez hoped Melaina was gay because she figured the world could better handle that than transgender."I know people think it's wrong to be transgender," said Melaina, who on a recent day was dressed in black jeans and a black and gold striped blouse with decorative bow. "But God made everyone different in his own way, and you can't change that. It's not a choice.""

Statistics about transgender youth

http://ida.lib.uidaho.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=36609344&site=ehost-live&scope=site
This scholarly article address the controversy on giving transgender teens hormone blocking drugs(Jazz discusses using them in the video below) to stop their natural developments to take place. I think this is an important article to include because for some transgender youth these drugs are life or death.

Diane Ehrensaft came to this conclusion about the drugs, "The rates of depression, suicide, and hate crimes are higher among transgender youth than in the general population as a result of social stigma, familial aspersion, and internal turmoil when one’s gendered body and brain are out of sync with one another. Playing with nature by switching the tracks of an individual’s physical gender development through drug treatments or surgery admittedly generates anxiety in all of us as it challenges the heretofore basic premise that one’s biological sex is immutable bedrock in the human condition. Yet it should not be the stance of the psychoanalytic community to therefore dismiss this approach to transgender experience but rather analyze our own discomfort and evaluate the limitations of our own theories in the face of these children’s needs. As clinicians, it is not for us to bend twigs, but to recognize when a twig has been unwittingly twisted and help get it untwisted. With that said, I began this paper with an answer and I would now like to finish with two questions. If a course of drug treatment can significantly reduce extreme risk factors for transgender youth, why wouldn’t we? If a goal of development is to allow the True Self to unfold and a drug treatment proves instrumental in facilitating that process for transgender youth, why wouldn’t we?"

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
--E.E. Cummings