Society

Massachusetts Couple Announces That It Will Raise 5-Year-Old Biological Girl As A Boy In Controversial Transgender Case

Gender_differences_male_femaleWe have previously discussed the issues surrounding decisions to raise children according to their non-biological sex at a young age. Now, a Massachusetts couple has decided that their five-year-old daughter must be a boy and has decided to raise the child a such. I will readily admit that I am not an expert in this field, but as a parent of four I find such a decision to be highly troubling and premature. A five-year-old child seems far far too early to make such an extreme change. Indeed, this determination was made a year earlier.

The child is now called Jack Lemay rather than Mia Lemay. The change occurred after, at age four, the parents took the child to a family therapy team which concluded that the four-year-old was transgender.

The mother, Mimi, insisted that what she saw as a “psychological burden that I don’t think anyone should have to deal with, especially not my child.” She said that the child began early on saying that she liked boy things and saying that she was a boy. The father, Joe, said that “he was showing real signs of a lot of shame and self-hatred.” Now, as Jacob, they say that the child is thriving.

They are indeed the parents and must act according to their best judgment for their child. However, as a friend, I would have strongly discouraged such a change at such an early age.

What do you think?

Source: CBS

373 thoughts on “Massachusetts Couple Announces That It Will Raise 5-Year-Old Biological Girl As A Boy In Controversial Transgender Case”

  1. Max, these poor parents who are being proactive in their kids’ lives are having to face the types of people we see here on these threads. With the continuing stigma of not having a cookie cutter sexual identity no wonder the suicide rates are so high. I still have questions about the early age of the gender switch, but I don’t think these parents deserve the derision we see in some segments of our society.

  2. Squeeky, I don’t know what you are talking about and I don’t really care. What silliness to quibble over. I used the TITLE of the piece to describe it. What is your problem? I won’t indulge you another comment on this.

  4. The sociatal pressure to “conform” to ideals places children at risk to suicide.

  5. @Ingannie

    Well, I have already established that you don’t read your own links. Now, it appears that you don’t even read what you write. TWICE, no less. From 2:22PM above

    Experts answer questions about transgender kids.

    And from 2:59PM above:

    Experts answer questions about transgender kids.

    Are you just being ironic or something???

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  6. Squeeky – that is very concerning, and exactly why such major decisions should not be made until the child is emotionally mature enough to make such a life changing decision.

  7. Nick:

    “Anyway, parents put so much pressure on kids that they don’t deserve.”

    When I went to college, I noticed that almost all windows above the 2nd story were sealed shut. The first quarter finals, I learned why. Every single year, students committed suicide, especially after finals. Sometimes they did it because they just didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer, and couldn’t face their parents’ disappointment. One of the girls in my bio class jumped to her death in the quad. You had to guard your backpack like it was your life savings, because some pre med students would steal them to make someone throw the final and affect the Bell Curve. One of the people who lived on my dorm floor had his backpack with all his notes stolen the week before finals, so we were all scrambling to get him copies and he had to borrow books.

    There can be a dark side to being a “Tiger” parent.

  8. This is directly on point:

    In this month’s Hastings Center Report, Jack Drescher and Jack Pula take up the complex issue of medical treatment for children who reject their assigned birth gender. They quote from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health latest Standards of Care that gender dysphoria in childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood. The stats are overwhelming: 77-94% of gender dysphoric children do NOT become adults with gender dysphoria.

    It’s a horrifying experiment being performed on very young kids, some as young as the age of 5, to encourage them on the path to gender change when the research shows that the majority grow out of it.

    How can anybody encourage, assist and inject young people with hormone blockers when it is well established that childhood gender dysphoria rarely persists into adulthood? There is up to a 94% chance that a kid will not even be dysphoric as an adult.

    Is this political correctness gone mad or medical insanity?

    This is the very unfortunate story of my life and why I’m so passionate about stopping the madness of gender change for kids. I was a child transgender encouraged by my grandmother at the age of 4 and it resulted in my life being torn completely apart as an adult. This is the worst kind of child abuse. The very ones children trust the most are the ones who destroy their lives, although the destruction will not become evident until they reach adulthood.

    “Only 6 to 23 percent of boys…treated in gender clinics showed persistence of their gender dysphoria into adulthood. Further, most of the boys’ gender dysphoria desisted, and in adulthood, they identified as gay rather than as transgender.”

    http://waltheyer.typepad.com/blog/2014/10/child-transgenders-94-will-not-be-gender-dysphoric.html

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  9. I think this is way too young to actually treat her as a boy. In my opinion, true transgenderism should be diagnosed at a later age. Early onset of different gender self identification can be one of the early signs, but it should not guide making an actual decision until much later.

    A difficulty is that hormones taken during puberty can have greater affect on final adult body form than those taken after puberty. So there is great debate about allowing hormone therapy during puberty.

    However, to make this decision at 4 years old, when self identity is still forming, can be a destructive mistake IF the child is not truly transgender.

    Give her a boy’s nickname. Let her play with whatever toys and wear whatever clothes she wants. All I know of this case is the few lines in the article above. But my impression is that a better parenting technique would have been to tell her that it will be her decision to make, but at a later age, when she’s ready. The intervening years are for growing, maturing, and learning more about herself.

    She could be a tomboy, more interesting in playing with the boys. She could be a lesbian. She could be transgender. Let it unfold in her own time without rushing it.

  11. @David Cary Hart

    Your outright dismissal of Witherspoon could be rephrased as, “They’re all nuts because they don’t agree with my opinions!” or, “They shouldn’t be listened to because their agenda is the opposite of mine!”

    A lot of those Witherspoon people are those who have lived both lives, as it were, and have changed their minds about things. That doesn’t make them automatically right, but it doesn’t make them automatically wrong either.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  12. I won’t pretend to know the particulars of this case, but I can’t help thinking it’s thin ice. If this was my kid, I’d tread the middle ground of letting the child pick clothes, toys, and activities–which is pretty much like what we did anyway. My daughters had both dolls and giant yellow tonka toys, pretend kitchens and plastic swords. The only place I ever drew the line was Barbie–because they’re a consumer trap and a bit too sexualized for little kids. In our case, the Tonka trucks rusted, the swords used to beat up dad before being abandoned for the easy bake oven, and they begged for barbies from grandparents, aunts and uncles. Even the Tomboy-ish clothes languished in the closet, despite being an active, outdoor, sports-oriented family. I’m against pushing kids into any roles–in everything, not just accoutrements, we endeavored to expose our kids to as wide a set of varieties as we could manage and let them find themselves.

  13. ” the Swedish study. It’s conclusion is that sex reassignment, alone, is insufficient and that transgender people need therapy as well.”

    Well, no.
    It’s conclusion was that sex reassignment did not solve their problems and they stayed depressed or killed themselves anyway.

    They wondered whether transgender people need more therapy (because they had had lots of it already) or (??something else unnamed) as well.
    That was not a finding of the study, but a supposition, not proved by their data.

  14. bam, Even a gun to my head would not get me to watch. But, thanks for the invite.

  15. @Ingannie

    You keep using the word, “experts” to describe the pro-transgender kid diagnoses folk. We tend to hand out the word, “expert” like candy in our culture. Watch the Ancient Alien TV show, and you have “experts” on Ancient Alien theory. We used to have experts on Phrenology, which was diagnosis by reading the bumps on peoples’ heads. American “experts” make ADHD diagnoses at a rate 20 times what doctors in France do.

    Sometimes, a little common sense goes a long way. These “experts” can not intervene in a child’s life without altering the future course of the child’s life. That is not really ethical, IMO. Any decent study on the issue would have to set aside a group of “placebo” kids, and track them against other kids receiving whatever kind of crap passes for therapy. Once again, not medically ethical.

    Sooo, i don’t automatically assume that an “expert” is really an “expert.”

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

    1. Squeeky – a lot of diagnosis for ADHD are made by GPs who are not experts. Actually, the diagnosis for ADHD is a diagnosis of exclusion. You exclude everything else and it has to be it. Think Sherlock Holmes.

  17. “The issue is how to lessen that disadvantage.
    Right, so where’s the study comparing sex transitioning head-to-head with birth sex retraining?
    There isn’t one?
    Why not?

    If your goal is “to lessen that disadvantage” (i.e. greater mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity among transgenders who completed sex reassignment), you should be open to the idea that maybe the answer is not a more complete transition, but lessening it.

    That is, true science would test the null hypothesis.
    But transgender therapy, as it stands now, assumes only one outcome is the correct one.

    So it’s not science, but ideology.

  18. Nick

    You’re invited. I make a mean bag of popcorn. Bring your appetite.

  19. These are thoughtful compassionate parents who are doing their best to respond to the needs and desires of their unique child. Why do people need to censor or denounce them? Many responses can be characterized as ‘meddling’ and ‘chauvinistic.’ In time the family and child will make an informed decision about how to proceed. It will in no way affect your personal genitals.

  20. I am familiar with the Swedish study. It’s conclusion is that sex reassignment, alone, is insufficient and that transgender people need therapy as well. It certainly does not support McHugh.

    There is no controversy that transgender people are at a disadvantage. The issue is how to lessen that disadvantage.

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