Parenting
When Your Child Has Gender Questions
Elliot and Beth Clement
ANSWERS PARENTS NEED TO KNOW By Terri Akman As a child in Medford, NJ, Elliot Clement often felt uncomfortable. Assigned female at birth, his favorite moments were taking on “boy” roles when he and his friends played make believe. Now 23 years old, Elliot is transgender, having transitioned socially and medically into a male. He started the process four years ago and today says he’s a happy, healthy, firstyear graduate student studying library science. “Now I feel so much more comfortable in my everyday life,” says Elliot, who lives in New York City. “It doesn’t feel like this big, sweeping change. Just normal, like this is the way it’s supposed to be.” He and his mom, Beth, are now advocates for transgender youth, telling their story to help other families navigate unfamiliar territory. The percentage of individuals who are transgender is not clear, but the most common statistic is that three in every 1,000 individuals are transgender, says Dr. Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, who is a pediatrician and one of the country’s highest-ranking transgender public officials. “This number has not changed significantly over the last number of years.”
Understanding gender
As a child, Elliot didn’t realize that girls and boys felt differently. He recalls just feeling uncomfortable, that something didn’t fit right. He did traditional “girl” activities — ballet lessons, wearing bikinis at the beach — all in an effort to try to fit into what he thought a girl was supposed to be. It wasn’t until he learned the word transgender, around age 12, that he was able to understand his feelings. “I remember thinking it would be so much nicer to be a boy and I wished I was, but I thought that’s just how I was born,” he recalls. “I thought it was something everybody felt.” At 14, Elliot first approached his mom about his feelings. She took him to the doctor, but she chalked it up to puberty and the changes his body was going through. So he backtracked. “When I found out that was something people would frown upon, I
MARCH 2020
just tried to forget about it and deal with what I had,” he says, worried about the stress it was causing his family.
Transitioning to male
Then Elliot went away to college. “When I was 19, I made the decision to transition both socially and medically, because I’d reached the point where continuing the way things were wasn’t an option for me anymore,” recalls Elliot, who began hormone injections and had chest reconstruction. “Even though I was trying to push those feelings away, they would cycle back up and it got harder and harder to live in the world as something I didn’t think was right.” At first, his transition was tough on his Mom. “I was very selfish about how this was going to impact me versus the struggle that my child had been going through,” admits Beth Clement, who now serves as VP of PFLAG of Collingswood, NJ, a support group for parents, the LGBTQ community and supporters. “I cried a lot and mourned the loss of my daughter because it felt like a real loss to me. Now, I think it was more mourning the loss of the future I had planned for that child. He’s still the same person, he’s happier and his anxiety is gone. But, it was a hard process for our family.” When Beth began reading about suicide rates — approximately 40 percent of transgender adults reported having attempted suicide, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey — “that got my head on straight,” she admits.
Gender identity
There aren’t reliable statistics on how many young kids question their gender, says Charles Zimbrick-Rogers, adolescent medicine physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Gender identity starts to emerge in children around the ages of 3 to 5. “That’s also when some kids start identifying that they don’t fit into those categories,” he says. For example, in preschool, when kids are asked to line up in a row of boys and girls, a questioning child might stand in the middle, unsure of where to go, Zimbrick-Rogers says. Even at
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