Wisconsin first grade teacher sets great example for dealing with gender variance among children

Thanks to Shannon Minter for alerting me to this heartwarming account of a Jackson County, Wisconsin teacher's experience with a gender variant first grader.  Melissa Bollow Tempel, in "It's Okay to be Neither," sets an amazing example of how to deal with gender issues in the classroom, including a girl, Allie, who was often taken as a boy.  Equally heartworming, the girl's parents were accepting of their child.  When the teacher called home to ask if she should correct children who said Allie was a boy, Allie's mom asked her what she wanted.  (She wanted the teacher to tell them she's a girl).

There's a growing number of custody disputes between divorced parents who disagree about how to deal with a gender variant child, including children who meet the diagnostic criteria for GIDC (gender identity disorder - children).  Judges are inclined toward the parent who wants to discourage gender variance.  I'd like this Wisconsin teacher's approach to gain ground among teachers and all who deal with children, in the hope that judges will catch on.

Primetime My (Extra)Ordinary Family sends mixed transgender message

I was all excited about the ABC Primetime program last week on transgender children. Especially excited because in my class this coming week I am teaching a court opinion in a dispute between divorced parents over custody of their son who wants to dress like a girl. The court sides with the father, who insists the child's gender variance should be discouraged. The case is as painful to read as those in which a trans parent loses his or her child after transitioning -- including having parental rights terminated, the most extreme measure the state can take against a parent.



Just a couple of years ago, Barbara Walters did an extraordinary job covering trans kids on a 20/20 special. Same network. I figured it would be just as good.



Well some of it was. The journey of a couple to understand their son who always knew he was a girl...including their decision to allow him to start a new school year, at age 10, as a girl. (The child's older sister goes into the classroom first to explain to the situation to the other students. Priceless.) The mom who wrote a book, "Princess Boy," because her son said that's what he was. Even the 19-yr-old MTF who finances her surgical procedures by earning money as a sex worker. That was hard to watch but it felt real.



But there was a catch. A big catch. Let's call him the repentant transexual. A man who decided in his 30's to transition to a woman who later regreted it and had surgery to revert to being a male. What was the point of this segment? If I have to ask the old Sesame Street question -- which of these things is not like the other? --this segment wins and it's not because he regreted his choice. It's because he was never a transgender child. That's right. A show about trans children -- young people, some very young, who know they are not the gender that matches their bodies -- with one segment about a man who never thought he was a different gender as a child and who makes his later journey sound like it was about fitting in with the trans friends he had later in life.



Maybe the producer of the show thought this added some kind of "balance;" maybe someone at the network thought such balance was necessary. But this wasn't balance. It was an adult describing a life trajectory completely different from everyone else's. All it will do is fuel the fire of those who are convinced there is no such thing as a transgender person, young or old.



Shame on you, ABC.

National Geographic Explorer does good job on gender

As a young law student and lawyer in the 1970’s, John Money was one of my heroes. John Money was a Johns Hopkins University psychologist who researched gender and sexuality. He concluded that sexual orientation was fixed at a young age and that a lesbian mother could not “make” her child gay. He was willing to testify for gay parents when their custody or visitation rights were challenged by their heterosexual ex-spouses. When you remember that Anita Bryant was getting gay rights ordinances repealed by arguing the need to “save the children” from “recruitment” into homosexuality, you can see how important it was that a respected expert would say that custody with a gay parent would not make a child gay.

Dr. Money also articulated the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity; and concluded that nothing about gay and lesbian parents would make their girl children identify as boys or their boy children identify as girls. This, too, was an important part of debunking the myths and stereotypes that cost so many parents who came out after heterosexual marriages access to their children.

Unfortunately, Dr. Money also believed that gender identity itself could be molded through upbringing if started at an early age. And this was his downfall. In what may his most famous case, he persuaded the parents of a boy whose circumcision had gone wildly wrong and resulted in destruction of the penis that their son could be turned into a daughter through surgery to create female-appearing genitalia, through hormones, and through consistent upbringing as a girl. The life story – and ultimate suicide- of Money’s victim, David Reimer, was told in As Nature Made Him.

I thought of Money while watching an excellent National Geographic Explorer episode, Sex, Lies, and Gender. The show highlights three distinct situations: intersexed individuals, focusing on a soldier whose MRI well into adulthood reveals that he has ovaries; transgender children, focusing on one family whose son identified immediately as a girl and how his parents came to allow the child to be fully herself; and the hijra in India, focusing on one person who balked at an arranged marriage to a woman, was ejected from his family, and went on to become an advocate for hijra, also known as the “third sex.”

I highly recommend this program. Among other things, it rightly criticizes Dr. Money for the damage he and his theories caused. That I remember the contribution he once made towards educating judges and the public about gay and lesbian parents in no way excuses the harms he caused by believing that gender was malleable at birth.