Change your gender at 13 years old?

Isaac was born a girl

Transgender teen’s story of starting female to male transition at just 13

Daily Mail: A teenager has told how he began his transition from female to male at the age of just 13. Isaac, now 17, from New York, describes his parents’ initial resistance, judgement from his school and peers, and how a mastectomy and puberty-blocking drugs stopped him developing a feminine shape.

In an interview with New York Magazine, he says he longed to be a boy from early childhood. ‘Around six, I just started getting pissed at girls who wore pink,’ he said. ‘Why are you doing that to yourself?‘

He successfully convinced his parents that it was more than a passing phase after presenting himself as male at a sixth grade summer camp. ‘I’d been to the same school since I was two and never had a blank slate,’ he explained. ‘I couldn’t stop myself.’

Predictably, his parents were stunned when they arrived to collect their daughter at the end of the camp, only to find that they had a son instead. The couple, both artists and completely accepting of their child’s desires, had assumed that Isaac was just ‘gender-queer’.

But this was just the first stage in what would be a long and difficult process, as the family now had to address the impending puberty process, which Isaac was desperately keen to prevent. But despite the support of the city’s top medical and psychiatric opinions, the prospect of puberty-blocking drugs was too much for his mother, who insisted that he wait. ‘I instinctually didn’t want to start messing with Isaac’s endocrine system. I said no,’ she admitted.

Isaac’s distress at getting his first period was the moment that changed her mind, and by the start of the next summer, he began taking the drug Lupron. ‘I chose a pill form,’ he told the magazine. ‘I should probably have started injections, which have a stronger effect, but I don’t like shots. I should have manned up.‘

The way Isaac was born, as a girl

That was the year Isaac also posted a video self-portrait on YouTube, detailing his transformation from a long-haired little girl to teenage boy. A montage of photographs set to music, it was titled: There Once Was a Little Girl (Who Never Existed), and sparked a supportive and enthusiastic response from the almost 20,000 people who viewed it.

But while the online community – and, indeed, those sixth grade summer campers – had been completely accepting of Isaac’s decision to become a boy, the Manhattan private school he attended was less so. Isaac was required to stand in front of his class and field questions about his gender change, which, though he answered willingly and honestly, did not stop him from becoming a social outcast. The school rejected the teenager’s requests to make a presentation to his fellow students on the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Now at a new school, Isaac is firmly accepted as his male self. He has fallen in with a group of girls, some of whose parents, he admits to the interviewer with a degree of pride, do not let him sleep over.

He looks and speaks more like a man now too, thanks to the testosterone he started taking at 15, and a mastectomy last summer in California, (the only state where some surgeons will operate on under-18s) to remove the breast tissue that had developed before he began taking the puberty blockers.

His parents could not be more proud and told how they had ‘very quickly got used to the pleasure of having a son.’ But Isaac doesn’t feel the need to overdemonstrate his masculinity. I act as a fairly effeminate male a lot of the time,’ he says. ‘I’m giggly, I have no interest in sports. I’m not the most masculine transperson. But I’m a guy.‘

Well Isaac may believe he’s a guy but he was born a female. You read these stories yet they never mention if parents sought psychological counseling for their children. That is crucial as the human brain reportedly becomes fully developed at age 25. Prior to full brain development children exhibit the following behaviors more coincidentally vs. consistently:

• Decision making
• Use of appropriate judgment
• Rational thinking
• Integration of emotion & critical thinking
• Ability to think clearly about long-term outcomes that stem from behaviors

How can a child, whose brain isn’t fully developed, have the capacity to make decisions regarding their gender when they lack comprehensive critical thinking skills? What little girl/boy doesn’t dread the impending puberty years? Why such a distaste for the color pink?

I just hope that when Isaac is fully grown that it doesn’t regret this decision. It will be too late by then to reverse an early decision to physically mutilate and alter her body.

DCG