In recent years there has been increased professional awareness that transsexualism can often be detected during childhood and that early diagnosis and recognition of the problems involved can be of massive help in minimising suffering both at the time and during all of later life. One(!) UK clinic specialises in this field.

The intention is not to diagnose in childhood with a view to attempting to divert the child into a socially acceptable brainwashed state; that does not work. The altruistic objectives can only be to provide informed support and qualified counselling for the child, its parents and possibly siblings, to educate those around the child, and to provide the best available medical treatment to minimise both current and potential suffering for the child.

The reaction of parents to the realisation that their child is ts varies. Some parents immediately want the very best for their child, realising ts is a congenital condition. Others try to force the child into being what they expect it be, sometimes with beatings, insults, threats and hatred. One mother said, "If I'd known how you'd turn out, I would have put a pillow over your face when you were a baby and flushed your corpse down a drain".

Identity suppression during childhood scars for life as thousands of adults can painfully testify.

Where it has been tried, early diagnosis and genuine support has proved exceedingly beneficial. This doesn't help only the sufferer: untreated, the condition can cause extensive difficulties for parents and siblings which can be minimised with skill, foreknowledge and understanding. Things could be worse; given support and sympathetic treatment, the child's life expectancy and productiveness will be excellent and their wisdom will most likely be considerable.

Medication can slow down puberty, thus relieving the child of considerable future suffering for ever. The development of secondary sexual characteristics inappropriate to their psychological gender can thus be reduced. If it is later found that the individual is not, after all, transsexual, puberty can then be re-enabled.

Puberty inhibition via medication reduces otherwise immeasurably huge physical and psychological problems. In addition to eliminating much trauma for life, it can be of physical benefit. The ts>f may not then have to undergo such long, costly and painful electrolysis and will be far less likely to always have some masculinised anatomical characteristics visible to all. She will experience less vocal difficulties, requiring less speech therapy. The ts>m may have less breast development and less feminine characteristics.

When the decision to reassign the child's sex is made (which usually means when their doctors, parents - and everybody else who is not suffering - all wake up to the fact that the situation is real and will not go away), hormonal reassignment can be commenced. However, it is unlikely to be offered until the child has stopped growing, otherwise bone desnity may be affected which could potentially become a serious and chronic condition. By the time the child has stopped growing and convinced everyone that hormone therapy really would be appropriate, the advantages of even earlier treatment may have been lost. With currently available medication this is a Catch 22: chronic, crippling bone disease wouldbe a very a high price to pay.

With puberty slowed, and sufficient support given in the meantime, the need for professional support in later life will be very much reduced. Hormonal reassignment will also be more effective than where puberty has not been suppressed.

There can be few adult ts and formerly ts people who would not say that if time machines existed, such treatment would have answered a life-long daily prayer and prevented much trauma in the past, in the present and in all the future. It should be noted that the inhibition is not total; it can slow down, but not stop, puberty.

This treatment is by no means new, but any unless the child can attend a specialist gender clinic it is very rarely made available and is even less often spoken about. This appalling situation is primarily caused by apprehension in everyone except the child. In a nut-shell, people's approach tends to be, "I would dread to lose my original sexuality, therefore everyone must have the same fears as me". What they really mean is, "My bigotry is more important than this child's future life-long suffering".

One other point must be made very clear. Not all children with gender identity problems prove to be transsexual and there is no label to look at, no blood test to assist with diagnosis. However, this is not a cue for parents to try to convince their child, "See, it says here you might not be ts, so snap out of it!" Whatever the child is, s/he IS, and no amount of coercion can stop someone from being them self. But coercion to conform to stereotypes can (and often will) instil resentment and feelings of rejection which can lead to suicidal thoughts.

If science and society at large wish to reduce human suffering, good quality support for children with gender problems must be taken seriously and be realistically funded.

In the United Kingdom transsexualism, and those affected by it, are too often seen as an inconvenience. Sufferers are deliberately and wrongly referred to with wrong gender labels: another way to pretend the condition isn't there. The incalculable suffering during childhood and teens, which could easily be reduced for want of better education of everyone else, is usually ignored in the UK by adults working with children in all disciplines. With only one clinic trying to serve the entire United Kingdom's ts children - if and when they are referred there - most ts children in the UK receive no help at all.

Major traumas experienced during childhood can damage for life and scars run deeply. Later counselling is an oops-sorry affair which cannot erase painful memories etched deeply during formative years.

Unless the child is treated with compassion, there are likely to be physical scars inflicted during childhood too. Ts children commonly suffer daily beatings at school, accused of being weird, perverted, and alive on sufferance. They may not know why. Transsexual syndrome is not like `flu; a transsexual child doesn't see lots of people suffering the same condition: how can they know what exactly it is? By adulthood, constant bullying will have ensured the individual will feel inferior. It has been said that ts sufferers tend towards persecution complexes. A complex concerns something imagined. They do not have a complex. They almost certainly have been persecuted for years.

Bullying and coercion does not only come from other children. It comes from parents, uncles, aunts, neighbours, teachers, games instructors, ministers, family doctors, social workers, child minders (. . .) and the pressure to be what all these adults wish the child to be, rather than what the child intrinsically is, is damaging in the extreme. It is all around, it is constant, and it does nothing but hurt. This is mentioned in the hope that mature adult readers will realise how much permanent damage is deliberately inflicted upon children who do not choose to be born transsexual.

Some parents complain, "I had a SON!" or "I had a DAUGHTER!" Such statements are thoughtless because had their offspring any other medical condition, they would not complain, "I had a healthy baby!"

The accurate statement is: "I had a transsexual baby".

Parents sometimes try to use brute force in the vain hope of making the child "pull its socks up". This is as helpful as ordering a child to stop having measles. Forcing ts>f children to, e.g., play rugby will in no way change their transsexualism; it will reinforce their feeling of being on the outside of people, looking in. Forcing ts>m children to play with dolls is as helpful as leaving a child with pneumonia out in the rain.

Brute force tyranny stems from insecurity and inadequacy in the parent using it.

It is hard for any child to love someone who forbids them to be them self or, in that situation, to feel loved and wanted.

One parent might be empathetic and supportive whilst the other insists the child "must" be made (forced) to conform to a stereotypical image. Such a strained situation may terminate in divorce which, in the circumstances, might be the better option all round. Unfortunately, the child has then been used as a scapegoat by the tyrannical parent who is insecure about their own (not the child's) identity and doesn't realise that a child is a person in its own right, not a clone.

Generally, social workers have no formal training in ts and might therefore do more harm than good. There have been cases where social workers have suggested removing a child from its parents, believing they had taught the child to be transsexual(!). It is no more possible to teach someone to have ts syndrome than to have any other clinical condition or disease.

Support for ts children is urgently needed. It calls for knowledgeable back-up which is available from specialists, albeit not a great many specialists. A notably significant step forwards would be for the syndrome to be included in the curriculum of training in general medicine and social sciences, and for it to be added to the check lists of GPs and social workers in particular. It is actually simple to detect that a child may be suffering from the syndrome, if only more eyes were opened and less blinkered. This alone would be a major achievement in helping to eliminate indescribable life-long hurt for these children.

The work of clinicians specialising in gender identity development in children is to be acclaimed. They can advise parents and parochial carers, and will do so gladly. Such support is strongly recommended because for carers to go in blindly can cause even more problems for the child than existed in the first place.

All these observations are equally relevant for those offering support to adult transsexual and reassigned people, most of whom will have experienced all these traumas during childhood and been unlikely to have had any means to dump the memories.

No apology is made for these graphic descriptions. Innocent children have to live with such realities because too few adults care.

IN ADULTHOOD, BUT PARTICULARLY IN CHILDHOOD,
TO BE FORBIDDEN TO BE ONESELF IS CRUEL.

Mermaids is a family support group for children and teenagers with gender identity issues. Click here to visit to their web site.

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