Visible Man: Poster child

Children are a major pressure point for conservative forces that seek to turn public opinion against anything they regard as deviant. Is it good to offer up a child who is struggling with his gender identity and body issues? In the long run, it probably is. People need to see that young people do face these issues. It's important that mainstream audiences don't always hear about transgender issues in retrospect from 40-year-old transsexuals who seem to repeat the same lines about how they "always felt like they were in the wrong body as a child, from as far back as I can remember." Sure, transsexual people can say that. And everyone knows our grandparents all walked 10 miles to school every day, uphill, in the snow. People trust what they see with their own eyes, and until people can see that we trans people exist in all colors, shapes, sizes, sexual orientations and ages, they won't understand that gender variance is a commonly experienced phenomenon.

However, "Protect the Children" is a powerful rallying cry, and nothing will frighten people who oppose transgender and transsexual experience more than seeing children who they believe are too young to make this kind of life-altering decision actually asserting themselves. Will those who don't believe we have the ability to know our own minds be galvanized to greater resistance by seeing Kaden struggle with the words to describe his feelings, to explain the depth of his knowing? Most parents feel their own 11-year-old children are barely capable of deciding what they want to do when they grow up, let alone knowing that they would be content for the rest of their lives having their body altered as dramatically as sex reassignment alters it. According to the current Standards of Care, Kaden is not able to have testosterone or surgery until he is physically mature, but he is able to start on depo-provera to prevent menstruation. It's a start. ...

But it makes me wonder about the way our medical system treats pubescent transsexual people. Hormones are important to both physical and emotional/psychological development, and simply keeping Kaden androgynous by preventing him from becoming a maturing girl also keeps him from maturing as a boy. How will he and other young transsexual people who receive hormone blockers manage to maintain a socially appropriate self-evolution? Even without medical acknowledgment and treatment, many transsexual people suffer from the inability to mature properly when they undergo puberty with the hormones that their bodies produce, and this causes immense stress. Kaden is spared this particular stress, but he must undergo another kind of stress: watching while his peers mature and he does not.

We don't know what kind of repercussions this treatment has. It is reassuring for most people that the treatment is reversible, but all that really means is that stopping depo-provera will permit Kaden's ovaries to resume estrogen production and reinstate the puberty that is now merely being delayed. While we do know that transsexual people who are permitted to transition hormonally are more comfortable in their bodies, and we also know that young people are usually very concerned about fitting in, why is it that we make young people like Kaden forgo the potential of well-being that hormonal balancing could give him? Most of those effects are equally reversible should Kaden later change his mind. Giving him the chance to have more of a male body and psychological development would, I think, offer him a more realistic social adjustment than making him simply remain an androgynous child.

The media may dub Kaden the new poster child for transsexual treatment. His mother Angelina, who clearly wants to do the right thing, is honest and forthright about her reservations and her awareness of Kaden's positive progress under treatment. She is obviously a loving parent. But will the media make Angelina out to be irresponsible? Will they follow Kaden throughout his process and keep asking him to analyze himself, to keep giving the audience a perspective on his experience that he cannot possibly have? This is a great deal of pressure to put on an 11-year-old. Yes, Kaden is capable of expressing himself, and according to some doctors he is capable of knowing who he is with respect to his gender identity -- and that's great. Some young people are this capable, and some are not, and I cannot say what is true or not for Kaden. But the burden of correctness is now upon him. Five years from now, if he was wrong and wants to be a girl again, how will that affect other young transsexual people?

I think Kaden has every right to change his mind. I will not think less of him if he does, and it certainly would not affect my feelings about the correctness of allowing young people access to the medical technology of transition. But I question whether our mainstream media is capable of seeing things in shades of gray, or of showing a spectrum of vibrant color to their audience. They seem to want black or white, nothing in-between. Only time will tell how this kind of scrutiny will affect either Kaden or other young transsexual people. Meanwhile, I wish Kaden and Angelina all the best for fulfilling, productive and loving lives.