Tag: parenting

The Christian right just hates the idea of transgender children.  Their specific target this time is a camp for transgender girls.

The camp, known as “You Are You”, is in its third year.  It’s a place where trans kids and their families can gather to network with others in a similar situation.  You can see for yourself just how obscene that can be as documented by photographer Lindsay Morris.  Or, you know, you could choose to see kids being happy.

The camp offers itself as…

…a temporary safe haven where gender-variant boys can freely express their interpretations of femininity alongside their parents and siblings.

But there is a different view from those so-called “activists”.

There is a risk of locking children into a life course, which, if they had been left to develop naturally, they would have outgrown.

–Peter Sprigg, Family Research Council

Here’s a great story.  Before I delve into it, I’d like to point out that there is some controversy over it.  At base it is about a boy who likes to wear skirts and the actions of the boy’s father.  Now, the story is in German at the feminist magazine EMMA.  oneandonlygabriel has provided a rough translation.  Then Gawker picked it up.  And Aravosis added his two cents about whether or not the child is transgender.

In my view, it doesn’t matter whether or not the child is transgender.  Because the child was born with a boy’s body and likes to wear dresses, the child is gender-variant.  And the father in question still gets my applause.

I generally troll the Transgender news regularly looking for stories to use in my quest to enlighten people about why transpeople need to be treated better than vermin.  This week I was deleted to discover a feature article by Ann Tornkvist at GlobalPost, entitled Transgender Actress mourns her “forcible sterilization”.

We like to think that Scandanavia countries like Sweden are bastions of good treatment for people like us.  I read the article and stand corrected.  Some things are apparently pretty much the same all over.

The article features the story of Swedish actress Aleksa Lundberg.  Now 29 Lundberg completed transition when she was 18.

Aleksa Lundberg remembers being four years old and standing by the kindergarten’s wading pool. The teachers began separating the children into groups for an autumnal walk through the nearby woods, ushering boys to one side, girls to another. Lundberg remembers being unsure which side to choose.

“I knew that I was expected to join the boys, but equally I knew that I wanted to join the girls,” Lundberg says.

As Lundberg moved to join the girls’ side, a teacher with a tight, graying perm framing a face contorted in anger grabbed Lundberg by the wrist and “half led, half pulled” her to the group of boys, telling her firmly that this was where Lundberg belonged.

“It was my first experience of an ‘authority’ telling me what I could do, what I should be, and it led to what is my first memory of an anxiety attack,” says Lundberg, now a popular 29-year-old actress who completed the transition from male to female when she was 18. “The silhouettes of the boys standing around me transformed into jail bars in front of my eyes.”

This remembrance strikes so close to my own experience that I had to keep reading.