Listening to NPR yesterday I caught this story on the air, about two families taking two different approaches towards the apparent gender identity confusion of their sons. The remarkable thing about the story is how young the boys are - both boys were just two years old (!) when the parents report noticing something amiss. The parents of the first child encourage Jonah to live as a girl, under the supervision of therapist Diane Ehrensaft, who takes a radical approach to cases of childhood gender identity. The parents now refer to Jonah as ’she’ when they speak of her, and dropped the ‘h’ from her name so that she is now ‘Jona.’ They enrolled Jona in a school accepting to her situation, let her grow out her hair and wear pink dresses. As of now, Jona appears to be thriving in school, popular with the kids and comfortable with her new self.

The parents of the second child have a different therapist who suggests a more conservative approach: Ken Zucker argues that no child under at least ten years old can be said to have gender identity disorder. Children are flexible, he says, and would a therapist ever suggest changing the race of a black child who insisted she was white? Why should gender be treated differently?

To be perfectly honest, liberal as I may be, the skeptic in me would agree with Zucker’s initial assessment of things. I doubt that most children, especially as young as two years old, have a sense of any identity, let alone gender. And having read John Colapinto’s “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl”, and the tragic life resulting from a highly ill-advised gender transition, I find myself reluctant to believe that well-meaning therapists and parents don’t have any influence over a child’s reported gender identification. Does a two, six, even ten year old really have enough self-determination to say that he is definitely a girl trapped in a boy’s body? Especially if the adults in his life suggest and thus reinforce the notion that he is really a girl? I’m against overly medicating developing children anyways, let alone administering drastic hormone treatments. But without the hormone treatments, then what will happen when the new girl reaches puberty? There are so many complications with this issue that I do agree with Zucker, that gender transition should not be treated lightly.

That said, I find Zucker’s therapy methods alarmingly barbaric. Taking away the child’s favorite toys? Isolating him from other girls his age? Shielding him from the color pink? I get that the parents were concerned about other kids bullying their son for not being ‘normal’, but let’s face it: this kid is probably not going to be ‘normal’ no matter what, and the last thing he needs is his parents bullying him in addition to the outside world. The mother was concerned about her son leading a double-life, hanging out with girls at school, and lying to his parents when he came home. That, I suspect, would cause much more psychological damage to him over the long term. The precedent has been set - he already can’t trust or communicate with his parents, and he’s only what, six years old? What about when he’s a teenager?

Also, I find both philosophies, Ehrensaft’s and Zucker’s, to be lacking in that they both assume rigidly defined gender roles, if not necessarily sex. Why can’t Jonah just be a boy who plays with Barbies and wears dresses? Why can’t poor Bradley, the one undergoing Zucker’s treatment, love the color pink? Why does ‘boyhood’ have to entail playing with Transformers, guns, baseballs and monster trucks? Nobody balks at tomboy girls nowadays, but a tomgirl boy (tommy girl?) is still unacceptable.

Let me clarify - I am not ruling out the possibility that gender dysphoria exists as early as Ehrensaft says it does. I think I’ve seen it in my own family. I’ve observed one of my cousins over the years, and maybe about five or six years ago I went back home for a family visit and thought: “who’s that boy running around with my cousins?” It took me awhile to realize who she was. When they were much smaller (kids grow so fast these days), I remember the cousin in question often wearing the boyish equivalent of what her sister wore, but thought nothing of it.

Lately when I’ve come home, Marissa (not her name, but trust me, it’s just as unfortunately girly), now thirteen years old, has adopted the posture and gait of a teenage boy. She’s always wearing baggy jeans, anime t-shirts and has her hair cut short. I don’t think she’s just a tomboy, as she flat out just looks and acts like a boy. I’ve even noticed that her voice sounds a little deeper these days when she talks. It doesn’t seem like she gets much flak from her parents or other relatives, but I am admittedly not around all that much. I get the feeling that our relatives think of her as a bit of an odd duck, she likes boy things but hey, whatever. It might turn out to be problematic when she gets older and starts dating, or if she suddenly starts adopting male pronouns.

But for now, she’s more or less accepted as who she is, no urging one direction or the other. And that, I say, is natural.

** Update on the NPR story today: Parents Considering Treatment to Delay Son’s Puberty. I guess hormone blockers are preferable to actual hormone injections (estrogen or testosterone), as the aim is to buy time until the child is mature enough for self-determination. But this method of treatment, pre-puberty, can also render the recipient sterile.

So many decisions, so many issues to consider. I definitely don’t envy the parents in this situation. I’m not sure what I would do!