New Horizons

There were two news articles about trans-kids coming out before they even start school. One was about a 6 year old who transitioned and the other story was about the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. Back on May 27, the Whittington family posted a video about their trans-son and the video went viral, ABC News said,

A YouTube video with over three million views tells the story of just one child but it has many people talking.

The seven-minute video explains the story of a six-year-old transgender child, Ryland Whittington, who was born a girl but, according to her parents, began insisting she was a boy as soon as she could speak.

“This is my sister Brynly, and I’m her brother, Ryland,” a young Ryland can be heard saying in the video, posted last week to his family’s YouTube page.

The video’s narrative explains that Ryland’s parents, Jeff and Hillary Whittington, discovered around Ryland’s first birthday that their daughter was deaf.  After being fitted with cochlear implants and learning to hear and speak, some of Ryland’s first words were, “I am a boy.”

The video created a firestorm in comments and on the conservative news network, Media Matters report that,

Fox News "Medical A Team" member Dr. Keith Ablow assailed the parents of a transgender child whose story has gone viral on the web, suggesting that six-year-old Ryland Whittington would have been better served by "anti-psychotic medication" than by having his parents affirm his gender identity.

What none of these news stories said was that this was just a social transition that nothing was done medically, everything is reversible. The only thing being done now is to let him explorer his gender identity and it will not be until he reaches Tanner Stages 2 or 3 and then they are only given puberty blockers, it only when they reach their teenage years that they are given cross gender hormones. Up until that point it is all reversible. Actually one a small percentage of those children go on to hormones, one study found it was only about 15 percent went on hormones.

Following this approach has reduced suicide idealizations and self-mutilation in the children and it has improved their quality of life. It also prevents the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as deepening of the voice and facial hair in trans-girls and breasts in trans-boys.

There are a number of hospitals around the country that are specializing in caring for trans-children, there is Fenway Health in Boston and the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC that the article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette mentioned in their article,

The drug that stops pubertal development "allows us to bide time, because you'll have a kid who tells you, 'I don't want a period, I don't want my breast development freaking me out,' and why, indeed, should he? We want to let them have an adolescent transition as a male and see how it works for them."
[…]
The first hormone blockers, which stop puberty, were first administered in a Dutch clinic in 2000, and today they're used in Pittsburgh's Children's Hospital program, with girls beginning around age 10 and boys at age 12.

Here in Connecticut Hartford’s Children’s Medical Center’s GUPPE Clinic provides care for trans-children and just north of the border in Springfield Massachusetts Baystate Health Center provides care for trans-children.


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