It Makes A Big Difference.

There is one thing that reduces all the negative impact being transgender have on children and adults and that is having a support system.

Parent Support May Help Transgender Children's Mental Health
NPR Heard on Morning Edition
By Gabriel Spitze
April 11, 2016

Six-year-old Sophie says she has always known she's a girl. "I used to be Yoshi," she says. "But I didn't like being called Yoshi." And she didn't like being called a boy.

Sophie lives with her family in Bellingham, Wash. Her mother, Jena Lopez, says she started seeing the signs before Sophie turned 2.

"She'd say things like, 'I'm a she, not a he,' " Lopez says. "She would cry if we misgendered her. She'd become angry."

I think anyone who has been in the community long has seen trans children. It is amazing how transitioning changes them. When I do guest lectures I give them a homework assignment to read “Learning To See: A Mother’s Story” from Tapestry Vol 112.

The article is about a mother who finds out that her son is trans and want to transition to become a girl. “He” was diagnosed with ADD but once she transition all the negative diagnoses vanished. In a video that I show in class another child is taking 14 pills a day and when she transitioned she didn’t need any medication.

It is simply amazing to see the transformation in the children.

There's very little data on children who have fully socially transitioned, says Kristina Olson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Olson got interested in the subject when a friend's 10-year-old was transitioning from male to female. Olson knew attitudes about transgender people were changing, both in society and in science.

"Forty years ago everyone considered this to be a pathology," Olson says. It was considered a "gender identity disorder" until 2013, when it was changed to "gender dysphoria" in the fifth edition of the DSM, the diagnostic manual for mental health.

Olson says a lot of research still works under this assumption and is based on children in clinical settings where they've often been brought to be treated. 

Ms. Olson was amazed in what she saw in the child after she transitioned.

So Olson decided to do her own study looking at families who are supporting their child's decision to live as a gender different from their biological sex. The study, published in the March issue of Pediatrics, looked at the mental health of 73 transgender children between ages 3 and 12. What it found was strikingly different from other research.

"They had exactly the national average for depression," says Olson. "They are no more or less depressed. They show a marginal, like, a tiny bit of an increase in anxiety, but nowhere near the rates that previous work has found."

And I can’t help but wonder if the increase in anxiety is due to the way society treats trans children and the hate like I talked this morning.

The hope is that if Sophie's gender identity is validated early on, she will be less vulnerable to mental health issues. Her mother says that rings true for her family. "She's blossomed," Lopez says.

What we do need is to follow these children throughout their life time to see what the long term results are, how will they be in their forties, fifties and in their eighties.