Open And Affirming

An open and affirming school climate helps everyone all around. A new study is out how family support makes all the different in a successful transition.

Study looks at well-being of transgender youth
Postcrescent.com
By Lindsey Tanner, AP Medical Writer
February 26, 2016

CHICAGO - Young transgender children allowed to live openly as the gender they identify with fared as well psychologically as other kids in a small study that suggests parental support may be the key.

Rates of depression and anxiety were equal in the study, which compared 73 transgender kids aged 3 to 12 with 73 nontransgender youngsters. The trans kids also fared as well on both measures as a group of their nontransgender siblings.

Rates of anxiety among trans kids were "a smidge higher" than national averages for children of the same age, but otherwise they matched national norms, said lead author Kristina Olson, an associate psychology professor at the University of Washington.

She said it's the largest study to examine the psychological health of transgender youth who have socially transitioned. Parents recruited from support groups, conferences and a special website rated their kids'well-being on a standard mental health scale.

While the opposition say,

Opponents of allowing these youngsters to adopt names, hairstyles, clothes and pronouns opposite their birth gender have argued that kids so young "cannot possibly know their gender at such an early age," said Sherer [Dr. Ilana Sherer, a Dublin, California, pediatrician], the editorial writer.

Letting these kids live openly as the gender they identify with "can be an incredibly affirming process," Sherer said, "showing the child that their identity is supported." She was not involved in the research.

Here is part of the introduction that Dr. Sherer wrote,

Those of us who work with transgender children frequently face decisions based on evidence that is conflicted or lacking and encounter opponents who are rightfully wary about what they see as experimental treatments without well-examined outcomes. However, in a transgender population where nearly one half experience suicidal ideation, the risk of nonintervention is quite high. In this issue of Pediatrics, Olson and colleagues provide evidence in support of social transition, a completely reversible intervention associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety in transgender prepubescent children. Socially transitioned children, or those who have adopted the name, hairstyle, clothing, and pronoun associated with their affirmed, rather than birth gender, have become more visible in the media over the last several years. Although to date there has been no published evidence to support providers in suggesting social transition as a beneficial intervention, many families, often guided by mental health professionals, make that decision based on observational evidence in response to seeing how suffering can be alleviated by allowing the child to express their own sense of gender.

I wish that I could see the rest of the research paper but you need to be a member of the  American Academy of Pediatrics..

When I do a lecture in a multicultural education class I show a video of a trans children, she went from taking 14 different medications down to none once she came out. The whole alphabet soup of diseases disappeared once she transitioned. Any who knows or have worked with trans children knows how much better off they are once they transition, it is truly amazing!

Here is a video from KING News 5 about the research.

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It is a beautiful day here in Connecticut... Time to go out for a walk in the woods on one of the Rails-To-Trails

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Update 2/29/16 9:40 AM
Here is a link to the full report