Why is this more fishy than any other unsolved murder? Because earlier this year Johnson, while getting arrested on prostitution charges, was beaten by her arresting officer, a man named Bridges McRae. He also peppered her with anti-gay slurs, which eventually resulted in the firing of McRae and fellow officer James Swain, who held Johnson down. The entire incident was caught on tape and splashed across the internet.

Johnson was in the process of settling with the city of Memphis for $1.3 million when she was murdered. There is no evidence linking McRae or Swain to Johnson's death at this time, but the circumstances of her death remain suspicious. Jonathan Cole, the Shelby County chairman of the Tennessee Equality Project, tells the International Herald Tribune, "For the most part, I think people in the South treat each other well. But there are prejudices that people have, and those prejudices come out in ways that are often violent when no one is looking." However, the cruelty and hatred hurled towards Thomas "The Pregnant Man" Beatie shows that it's not just the South, but the entire country, that needs a lesson in transgender tolerance.

Murder Of Transgender Woman In Tennessee Revives Scrutiny [IHT]
Transgender Day of Remembrance [GLAAD]

Earlier: Why Do People Hate The Pregnant Man So Much?

Despite serious consequences from their friends and relatives (Brandon's best friend, Abby, is the child of Evangelical parents who now forbid her to play with him), Tina has encouraged Brandon to embrace being a girl, and Brandon is now living as Bridget. And experts are still debating over whether this is the proper direction to take.

Earlier this year we covered a two-part NPR story about transgender children. The first part compared and contrasted two children who felt they were born to the wrong gender — Bradley and Jonah. Bradley's parents were trying to get him to act like a stereotypical boy, while Jonah's parents were allowing him to live as Jona, a girl. The second part was about an aggressive new treatment that allows transgender preteens to block puberty so that they do not have to develop the secondary sex characteristics of the gender they feel is not truly theirs. Rosin covers much of the same ground as these stories and interviews some of the same experts, and she also explores the issue of whether or not being transgender is biological. She comes up with a slightly different, and fascinating, conclusion from the NPR stories.

She interviewed Catherine Tuerk, a woman who runs a support group for transgender parents in D.C. and is the mother of a gay son. Tuerk noticed that many conservative parents were surprisingly comfortable labeling their children as transgender, and she had the following theory: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.” In one case study, a 17-year-old girl requesting cross-sex hormones told her doctor, “Doc, to be honest, lesbians make me sick … I want to be normal.”

As I said when I first wrote about the issue of transgender children, most of these parents just want to do right by their children, who are obviously suffering greatly. Above all, what one comes away with from Rosin's story is that even for a child like Brandon/Bridget, whose mother is letting her live as the gender she feels she is, the road is a rocky one filled with tough transitions and outside prejudice.

A Boy's Life [The Atlantic]

Earlier Transgender Boys Take Different, Provocative Paths
Controversial Treatment Allows Transgender Children To Delay Puberty

Related:

In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Marybeth T. Hagan says that when she first heard about the transgender child, she exclaimed, "Where is the school? California?" (It seems that in Marybeth's world, transgender students are a product of new age methodology and organic produce.) Hagan, shocked to find out that this was occurring in her own backyard, objected to the way the situation was handled, because she feels that parents were not given enough advanced warning. "Introduction of sexual abuse prevention programs over the years should have taught these educators that most parents like to have a say in all aspects of their children's sexual education - particularly one that could be controversial," she reasons.

Other parents have spoken out harshly on the Haverford Township blog and eight parents called the principal to ask that their children not attend the transgender counseling session, according to the Inquirer. I have no doubt that the educators thought long and hard about how to present this issue to their students — according to reports, they consulted transgender experts, the student's family, and child psychologists. One parent, Valerie Huff, whose daughter is friends with the transgender student, thinks that the letter didn't need to go out in the first place, as "The kids don't make any big deal about it at all." It's not surprising in the least that 9-year-olds are being more open minded about differences than some of their parents.

School Challenge: Transgender Student Is Age 9 [Philadelphia Inquirer]
3rd-graders Asked To Help Classmate in Gender Change [World Net Daily]
School's Sensitivity Is Off-Target [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Earlier: Parents Of Transgender Boys Take Different, Provocative Paths
Controversial Treatment Allows Transgender Children To Delay Puberty

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

Both Bradley and Jonah are under the care of psychiatric professionals — Dr. Ken Zucker and Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, respectively. Zucker and Ehrensaft have conflicting theories on how best to deal with a transgender child. Zucker, based in Toronto, believes that boys like Bradley should be socialized as boys, even if they see themselves as girls. He reasons, "Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? ... I don't think we would." Eherensaft, who works out of the Bay Area, sees Jonah's condition as clear cut case of transgender identity. "If we allow people to unfold and give them the freedom to be who they really are, we engender health. And if we try and constrict it, or bend the twig, we engender poor mental health," she tells NPR.

I know both sets of parents are just trying to do right by their children, but it's incredibly difficult to defend Zucker's point of view when you hear how unhappy Bradley is. Since his parents took away all his "girly" stuff, his mom says, Bradley "really struggles with the color pink. He really struggles with the color pink. He can't even really look at pink...He's like an addict. He's like, 'Mommy, don't take me there! Close my eyes! Cover my eyes! I can't see that stuff; it's all pink!'" Meanwhile, Jonah — now Jona — is thriving. According to her teacher, "Jonah is one of the most popular kids. Kids love her, they want to play with her, she's fun, and it's because she's so comfortable with herself that she makes other people comfortable."

Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences [NPR]
Q&A Therapists On Gender Identity Issues In Kids [NPR]

But this joyous occasion did not come without a price. In a personal essay in the Advocate, Thomas writes about all of the prejudice he faced when trying to find adequate medical care. One doctor, "after a $300 consultation, reluctantly performed my initial checkups. He then required us to see the clinic's psychologist to see if we were fit to bring a child into this world and consulted with the ethics board of his hospital. A few months and a couple thousand dollars later, he told us that he would no longer treat us, saying he and his staff felt uncomfortable working with 'someone like me.'" Even Thomas's own brother was unkind, telling Thomas after his first pregnancy turned out ectopic, "It's a good thing that happened. Who knows what kind of monster it would have been."

Thomas isn't the only transmale facing difficulties. In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, there was a story about the opposition transmen are facing at women's colleges. The piece profiled Rey, a college freshman who started his university career at Barnard, only to transfer to Columbia because of the number of issues he faced. According to writer Alissa Quart, Rey is not alone in his alienation: "Many trans students feel themselves to be excluded or isolated at women's schools and at coed colleges. Some talk of being razzed or insulted by fellow students." But Quart also discusses the question of how colleges meant for women are supposed to serve people who no longer identify as women in the first place.

Will society ever be able to accommodate all the facets of the gender spectrum? Or will cases like Thomas's and Rey's always be a struggle for acceptance and personal freedom?

Labor Of Love [The Advocate]
When Girls Will Be Boys [New York Times]