This is a post which appeared today regarding a young persons battle with prejudice regarding their gender struggle and initail return to secondary school.
A school that called an assembly to announce a pupil had changed sex over the summer has been strongly criticised by a gender expert.
The child in question, a 12-year-old boy, turned up for his first day at secondary school wearing a dress and with long hair in pigtails, according to the Sun newspaper.
He has reportedly suffered relentless bullying, while the parents of other pupils are furious they were not warned or given help to answer their questions.
“It is very unfortunate,” a spokesman for the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (gires) told Sky News Online.
“It needs a careful process of familiarisation, not the big bang approach.
“The proper way would have been to train all staff before the term started, to work with the child’s peer group and to prepare the teachers to be able to talk to the other pupils and their parents individually to answer their questions.
“What one school did was get the pupil to talk with peers in an interaction that was supervised by teachers. That kind of careful process is what’s required.”
According to the Sun, the unnamed boy is preparing to have hormone therapy and may later undergo surgery that would make him one of the youngest people in the world to have a sex change.
“It’s important to understand that in a typical case like this, the child will know something’s not right from a very early age,” the gires spokesman said.
“If they have a supportive family and a supportive school that’s fine, but what they find hardest is the bullying. Dreadful things can happen to these children.”
Gires has spoken to adolescents with gender identity disorders who have experienced violent confrontations, verbal abuse and social exclusion.
Another battle they face is getting access to the hormone therapy that will prevent them from going through the ‘wrong’ puberty.
“In the US and many other European countries, if the child starts to become extremely distressed at the onset of puberty, they will be offered very safe medication to delay the process,” said the gires spokesman.
“The child then has time to consider which gender he or she wants to be as an adult.
“British doctors refuse to do this because they say that a youngster is not mature enough to make that decision until after puberty, but all it does is create huge distress.
“There is a very high risk of suicide among this group: 23% have engaged in self harm or taken an overdose.”
The spokesman cited the case of Kim Petras, a German teenager who was born a boy, had hormone treatment from age 12 and a full sex change operation at 16, as an example of a successful transition.
According to the NHS choices website, “the use of hormone blockers in children under the age of 16 is a controversial subject in the medical community”.
Kim Petras who was born male and was the worlds youngest sex change patient at the age of 16
