Buck's taken shit from lesbians, from gay men, from Howard Stern and his crew, from pretty much everybody because he just won't conform. He won't get the add-on that would make him look "normal" as a man but that would leave him potentially without the ability to ever orgasm. And he deals with the question of the status of his genitals all the time, even as he announces to the world every day what they are, calling himself The Man With A Pussy. (If you're really, really curious, if you just have to know, 20 years of testosterone therapy has its side effects and an extremely Not Safe For Work Or Your Mother picture can be found here). He's living, breathing, fucking evidence of the fact that, even in the gay community and the sex-positive community, even when people are marching and fighting for the right to keep from being discriminated against for what they do with their genitals, everyone wants to know exactly what his look like. Being dumped by all his lesbian friends when he decided to be a man hurt, he says:

Fuck communities then, Buck thought, if all they do is uphold the tenets of a rigid, unchanging identity, and then spit you out when you deviate. The dykes won’t stick with a trans-man, and the trans-men get offended by a guy who has the balls to trumpet the virtues of his vagina. Why go through the effort of establishing nomenclature for every variation of queer identity if they’re going to be used as tools of division? If only your average straight-laced queer-baiter knew how closed-minded some sects of these hated deviants can be.

Everyone has prejudices, even people against whom too many people hold prejudices. But Buck forces us to confront not only issues of prejudice but of identity. Am I a woman because I have a vagina and breasts and a uterus and ovaries? Is Buck not a man because he is only minus one of those things? Biologically, he and I have the same chromosomes, but the state agrees to recognize him as a man and some people insist that he must still be a woman. My sex is female, but my gender is a more complex question, and a more complex answer because gender is an identity that doesn't reside in my nether regions. I'm a woman because everything in the mass of cells above my eyes knows that I'm a woman, and Buck's a man because the same mass of cells tells him he is. If he can get us all to think of gender as opposed to sex, to think about our chosen and established identities and those of others rather than which bits we all have and how we use them, and if he can do it by sticking a dildo in his big man pussy, then Buck Angel can be my feminist hero.

A Man Without a Cock or Country [BME]
Buck Angel, A Man With a Pussy: LGB Without the T [Village Voice]

Image via of Buck Angel Entertainment

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]

So, Congressman Barney Frank, the only openly gay Congressman, introduced a bill to provide protection for our gay, lesbian and bisexual friends against discrimination in the workplace. Yay! However, according to Roll Call, he had to take out provisions that would have provided equal protections to our transgendered friends to try to get enough votes to pass the rest of the bill. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (the only openly lesbian Congresswoman) has announced that she plans on introducing an amendment to restore the transgender provisions, and so Speaker Pelosi has put off passing anything until Baldwin and the transgender community can prove they have enough votes to pass their amendment, which they don't and probably won't, so gay rights in the workplace will have to wait a bit longer so that some Democrats can prove to other ones that America isn't ready to be fair to transgendered people, too.

Meanwhile, the bill exempts religious organizations and the Armed Forced (naturally), there's no indication it could pass the Senate, President Bush has vowed to veto it because he says it messes with states rights to discriminate against teh gays (and because the veto pen is his new favorite toy), and your boss remains able to fire you because he thinks it's gross/creepy/against God's will if you love a person of the same gender or engage in certain kinds of sex acts on your own time. Oh, and if you're an MIT- and Harvard- educated neurobiologist at Stanford doing groundbreaking research, well, according to one GOP leadership aide, you'd best be thankful that you live in the Bay Area because the rest of "us" don't think you should have "special" rights.

Gay Rights Bill Stalls in House [Roll Call]
Transgender prof defends women scientists [MSNBC]