Transgender Before Puberty

The documentary Just Gender has a short clip from a Barbara Walters 20/20 episode titled "My Secret Self: A Story of Transgender Children." You can (and I believe should) watch it here:

One scene shows an 11-year old transgirl, Riley, with Barbara Walters. Riley is fully a girl on the outside and attends school as a girl although she must use the nurse's restroom. The school and students know she is biologically male and she is the brunt of childish teasing. When Barbara asks her how she feels when she's teased, her face crumples into such profound sadness and she starts crying. That touched me so deeply, from within my core. I just started crying too as I am starting to do now as I remember it.

Elsewhere in the program, Barbara interviews the parents and their trans daughter, Jazz. Jazz's mother said "all of the younger male-to-female younger transgender children are obsessed with mermaids." Geez, I was too. I studied them in the movies, books, and cartoons so thoroughly. I really wanted to be a mermaid.

While I found Just Gender to be extraordinary in its scope and depth, and I recommend it highly, this 20/20 program brought it all home for me. I really am transgender and always have been. It's not a phase, it's not sexual, it just is what it is, which is me.

It helps me to talk about these topics here and I hope it will help others, too. I considered sharing some of my other pre-pubescent fantasies here to underscore this but I think you get the point. I really wanted to be a girl.

Emma

Photo: Just outside Cape Town, South Africa is a marvelous bird sanctuary called World of Birds. It spans acres and has thousands of birds. It's fenced in with mesh (the height is maybe forty or fifty feet above the ground) so visitors just wander through. I don't know what this bird is called but it's very pretty, isn't it?