<
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23281683/trans-kids-transition-medicine-surgery>
"When Mae Sallean was a teenager, her body and mind began to slip away from
each other. Her body and face began to sprout thick hair, her voice dropped,
and she felt dissociated from her physical form. Something had gone wrong, and
she could not reconcile the person she was with the person the world perceived
her as. The disconnect left her profoundly depressed and deeply lonely.
Mae knew, somewhere deep down, that she needed to be a girl. She lacked the
language for it. In Mae’s heavily religious Texas community, the existence of
queer people was barely acknowledged, and trans people, she says, were only
seen “in pornography and on
Maury.” But she knew, all the same.
When Mae was 15, her mother discovered a secret box full of women’s clothing
that Mae wore when no one else was at home. Though very Christian, Mae’s mother
didn’t freak out. She wanted to help. So she found a Christian counselor for
Mae. The counselor, who had no formal training, tried to convince Mae that
being trans was one of the worst things she could be and that if she didn’t
change her ways, she would go to hell.
“He framed it on the same level as pedophilia,” Mae says. “That was the number
one thing that stuck from those meetings until I started transitioning: I am on
the same level as a pedophile.”
The conversation about trans kids right now is fundamentally broken. Because it
is led, by and large, by cis people, it focuses on the potential regret
children and adolescents might have after transitioning, and ignores the
social, physical, emotional, and psychological costs of not transitioning. It
ignores the reams of studies that underline the need to support trans kids. It
ignores the lived experiences of many trans people, who despair that they were
kept from transitioning as youths."
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
