PMS time? Maybe. How else to explain weeping at the end of Jennifer Finney Boylan's
"Modern Love" essay on becoming a transgender dad? Because, I mean, this was hardly tragic; rather, it's like the Ozzy and Harriet of transgender dad stories, when you think about it. Jim has always felt trapped inside his man's body, and years into his marriage, begins his transition. His wife and sons are totally cool with it.

Because of the love of my spouse, Deedie, not to mention that of my boys, I found the courage, somehow, to traverse the weird ocean between men and women, to make the voyage not only from one sex to another, but from a place where my life was defined by the secrets I kept to a new one, where almost everything I'd ever held in my heart could finally be spoken out loud.

Deedie, he finds, "decided that her life was better with me in it than not" and their domestic routine continues, seemingly as untroubled and enviably organized as ever. Recently, the author relates, their older son came to them with a confession and the parents, Mommy and Maddy, brace themselves for a seismic revelation about gender identity. But, poignant family sitcom style, the boy just wants to become a pacifist, take up the Irish fiddle, and give up the tuba. Later, this son (who is apparently perfect) pens the following essay for school:

Once the transition had taken place, I was comfortable with it. But I was worried what my friends would think. I kept it secret for a little bit, but eventually they found out. They all accepted it a lot better than I thought they would...Maddy is funny and wise. We go fishing and biking. We talk a lot, about anything that is on our minds. One night this spring, Maddy and I had a fancy dinner at a restaurant in Waterville. It was a special night. I wore a jacket and a tie. I had a steak. It made me feel like Maddy and I were really close. Maddy said that she thought I was growing up and that she was proud of me.

In my progressive, aggressively secular elementary school, we had a bi-weekly class called "Ethics" in which we read stories, discussed them, and came to mutually satisfactory conclusions about what constituted a good person. The stories were often like this, with saintly kids undergoing family changes that other kids Don't Understand, but ultimately helping other people grow and change and appreciate difference. I was invariably moved to tears. As indeed, I was reading this. My friend returned from getting our coffees at the mediocre 60s-tinged spot where we had escaped the heat and asked me what was wrong. "This transgender father..." I choked out, and wordlessly handed her the paper. She read it and looked at me blankly.

"What?" she said. "It seems pretty straightforward. Feel-good. But isn't it pretty cliched?"

Well, yeah. Isn't that kind of the point?

‘Maddy' Just Might Work After All [NY Times]

Dr. Norman Spack, an endocrinologist in Boston, was an early adopter of the treatment. He tells NPR, "We can make it possible [for a transgendered child to] fit in in the way they want to. It is really quite amazing." British psychologist Polly Carmichael is less gung-ho about medicating patients this way, mostly because she doesn't trust that someone so young can know themselves well enough to change genders. "You can have a child who is presenting with absolute certainty, but it may be that at a later point they will decide that is not in fact what they want and their feelings may indeed change," she says.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, for example, knew she was a woman as soon as she was old enough to recognize gender existed. In her best-selling 2003 memoir She's Not There, Boylan writes, "One day when I was about three...[I saw] my mother ironing my father's white shirt...'Someday you'll wear shirts like this,' said Mom...I didn't understand what she was getting at. Why would I ever be wearing shirts like my father's. Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind." Boylan, who was born as James, didn't have her gender reassignment until she was in her forties. I asked Boylan for her opinion on the NPR story, and got the following email in response:

I haven't heard this story, although I knew it was running...I don't think I'm going to be able to help you because I don't have any authority here.

But I can tell you that, as a general principle, the "Dutch protocol" is the one that many parents are using to treat transgender children. This involves a hormonal cocktail that delays the onset of puberty in trans children, and allows the family and the child to get used to the idea of what the future may hold, and to begin to get an understanding of what life in the new gender might mean without having to commit, at such an early age, to the irreversible process of gender shift and surgery.

It's controversial, of course. How could it not be? Some trans activists feel that the Dutch protocol stands between the child and an early, complete, and more efficient transition. Others feel that the age of consent ought to be much older, and that children aren't in any position to make these kinds of lifelong decisions.

My own sense is that the Dutch protocol is a very good choice for families and their children, that people dont' make these decisions lightly, and that they should be respected for the choices they're making. Dr. Norman Spack, at Childrens Hospital in Boston, runs the country's only clinic exclusively for transgender youth, and he employs the Dutch protocol as his standard strategy for care.

As for me, personally, I wasn't ready to make the transition any earlier than I actually made it; I wish I'd had the courage, but I didn't, and it took me nearly 40 years of living as a guy to realize that a second-best life wasn't the life for me. But I had to go through all those years to learn this. Other people make their decisions in their own time, and in their own way.

Like I said, I haven't heard the show, but I know that there are thousands of trans kids who seem to know exactly who they are and what they need. How can we not help them ?

[Image by James Bowdoin]

Earlier: Parents Of Transgendered Boys Take Different, Provocative Paths