My Story Part 61 – Childhood

What are your earliest memories? Were they happy? Are they fond memories?

I was reading an article in the Huffington Post last and they had a link to a research study. As I was reading the study and there was a section titled, “Common Experiences” of transsexuals. This section hit a very personal cord it had three common experiences listed…

I used to dream that God made a mistake and got it wrong and I would wake up as a girl

I go to bed and pray I’d wake up and everything would be put right

Used to cry myself to sleep, wishing I’d wake up as a girl from about 7 years old

I did all of those. I use to kneel by my bed at night saying my prays and I would add that to my prays and wonder why God didn’t listen to my prays. I am five years younger than my brother, so I went to sleep before he did and I don’t know how many time I curled up into a ball and just cried until I feel asleep. When I got older, I use to dream that a mad scientist would kidnap me and switch my brain with a girl’s in some type of mad experiment. Aren’t these great childhood memories to have. (sic)

The Huffington Post article writes about when you should tell children about transgender people,

Should We Introduce Children to the Concept of Transgender People?
Joanne Herman
Posted: January 9, 2011

Should we introduce children to the concept of transgender people? The answer is yes according to an article published in the December 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed Graduate Journal of Social Science.
[…]
Critics will cry that introducing all children to the concept of transgender people will cause children to "become transgender." But the authors found that schooling has little impact on gender identity development in children. In fact, children who develop a transgender identity seem to do so in spite of often unwitting but nevertheless pervasive efforts by schools to enforce gender conformity.
[…]
By having schools introduce the concept of transgender people to all children, the authors assert, transgender children will "feel they are not alone and that their gender identity is as valid as any other." This will, in turn, greatly diminish the damaging consequences currently observed as these children mature.

That is exactly how I felt, that I was the only one in the whole world who felt that I should have been a girl. As a result, I internalized all the guilt and self-loathing and became introverted.

Now many children know about transgenderism and are coming out earlier. I know children who transitioned in Kindergarten and because of them coming out in school; we need to educate all the students. We need to teach all the students about diversity in order to stop bullying and harassment. We cannot hide our heads in the sand and hope that this will go away like the critics want. Don’t let them go through what I went through.