If you are a member of an LGBT family with young children, or the friend or the ally of an LGBT family with young children, or your an friend, family member, or ally who wants to expose your children to what the broad, LGBT community looks like, you need to expose yourself and these children to the picture book 10,000 Dresses. This is the first picture book aimed at 5 to 7-year-olds I’m aware of with a transyouth as the main character.

And, 10,000 Dresses is an absolutely beautifully written and illustrated book (written by Marcus Ewert; illustrations by Rex Ray). Frankly, I was expecting a mediocre children’s book when I received a copy to review, and was extremely surprised at the quality of the book — my eyes welled with tears the first three times I read it. From this artsy, trans woman’s perspective: yes, the book is that good. This children’s book is no doubt as important a work as Heather Has Two Mommies, and it certainly is as well done.

In fact, Lesléa Newman, the author of Heather Has Two Mommies, gives a back cover comment for 10,000 Dresses:

Three cheers for Bailey, whose creativity and artistic vision will inspire readers of all ages to celebrate exactly who they are.

The transyouth at the heart of the 10,000 Dresses is a child named Bailey. She’s a child that is being told she’s a boy when she really knows she’s a girl. Each night she dreams of one of 10,000 magical dresses, and each day she tries to figure out a way to have significant people in her life help her obtain a magical dress. Many days she discovers she’s not ever going to have that special dress she imagined in her dreams that night before. The story has a very happy ending — I won’t spoil it by describing it.

Perhaps the most important endorsement of 10,000 Dresses comes from Shannon Garcia, the president of TransYouth Family Allies (TYFA). She wrote a short review of the book for their Recommended Reading section:

10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert is a charming tale of a “boy” named Bailey who dreams of wearing dresses. His parents and brother tell him that boys don’t wear dresses and Bailey is sad because she doesn’t feel like a boy. Bailey finally meets a friend that understands the desire to wear dresses and helps her achieve that goal. It is a story with beautiful illustrations by Rex Ray that uses just enough words to say what is needed. I highly recommend it for children of all ages (adults too), although it is definitely a book that would be enjoyed by the under 10 crowd. 10,000 Dresses helps us understand the workings of the gender variant child’s mind from their point of view and it is very nicely done.

10,000 Dresses is a very important book. If you’re involved with LGBT families at all, don’t skip this book. If you have a local bookstore nearby you — especially a local LGBT bookstore — ask them for a copy of the book. If they don’t have a copy, ask them to order you a copy. Hey, you won’t be sorry, and neither will the bookstore.

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10,000 Dresses

By: Marcus Ewert
Illustrated by: Rex Ray
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Hardcover: $14.95

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FaceBook: Ten-Thousand Dresses

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Further Reading:
* San Francisco Chronicle: ’10,000 Dresses’: A book about gender identity

This is a crosspost regarding something I posted in this blog, as well as over at Pam’s House Blend
~~A~~

I had know ideat we here at Pam’s House Blend could generate so much heat over at Focus On The Family, but apparently we did with our diary FOTF: The Endocrine Society “Entered Into Ethical Bankruptcy” Over Treatment Of Transyouth.

From OneNewsNow‘s Puberty-halting drug ‘tragic,’ ‘ethical bankruptcy’ (emphasis added):

[Caleb H. Price, research analyst at Focus on the Family] says Focus on the Family has caught a lot of heat for referring to this philosophy as “ethical bankruptcy.” He contends teens are not stable enough emotionally to make a decision of such magnitude.

“We see this as a situation that’s tragic, foolish, and unconscionable for a professional medical group to encourage young people to move forward on a road where they might be making a decision about changing their gender,” he adds.

According to Price, the drug treatment program is another example of parents and physicians bowing to political correctness and to the demands and feelings of young people.

No other news organization appears to have covered the PHB take on the story; I can’t even find another blog that didn’t just post a link to our PHB piece {or the crosspost over at (Ab)Normal Heights} as a part of a blog feed, or post in a piece that just highlighted the piece as part of a news summary. So, apparently we at PHB — in and by ourselves — can generate a lot of heat over at Focus On The Family. Who knew?

By the way, I still have the same problems with Price’s original analysis of The Endocrine Society‘s draft policy update (Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline), and his slightly revised statements, as I did previously. From the PHB’s diary where I evaluated Price’s comments:

[Excerpt from previous PHB diary where we generated "a lot of heat" at Focus On The Family below the fold.]

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday afternoon, the Atlantic Monthly posted a story online by reporter Hanna Rosin entitledA Boy’s Life. The article horribly presents transyouth and their families — everything from the headline getting the child they focused on wrong (which is in conflict with the Associated Press Stylebook — the “Bible” of journalism standards) to how Kim Pearson [the Executive Director of TransYouth Family Allies (TYFA)] believes that the Atlantic betrayed the trust of the families that talked to their reporter. When I asked for a comment from Kim about the article, she told me:

[Hanna Rosin] focused on the most vulnerable family she could have focused on, creating the illusion that this family was representative of all of the families — and that’s just not true. We trusted her, and we felt betrayed.

Kim also told me that Rosin has made it at least twice as hard as before for TYFA to connect families of transyouth to members of the mainstream media (MSM). TYFA’s goal in connecting families of transyouth to MSM reporters is so that readers will be educated about transyouth, and in this case with the Atlantic reporter misrepresented what kind of article she was going to write. Instead of educating people about transyouth, Kim and most of her TYFA parents felt betrayed; they felt the Rosin not only didn’t paint an accurate picture of TYFA families, but that Rosin exploited a vulnerable family and a transyouth.

And now, a few months after the family talked to this reporter, the child profiled in the story is living full time as a girl and is doing very well at both home and at school. So, it was especially frustrating to Kim that the article gives a wrong impression how the child is actually doing; the child in question’s full time public expression of her affirmed, female gender actually resolved the conflict the child was feeling about being a girl. The impression Rosin left was that the child was presenting as gender confused, and that’s just not the case — The child has known who she is, and is comfortable about being a girl; it was the rest of her world not allowing her to affirm her gender which was previously this youth’s challenge.

I see the reasons for making these transyouth and their families available to the MSM, but I really appreciate TYFA’s dilemma of making transyouth and their families for articles that later turn out to seem exploitive. How many times does TYFA make transyouth and their families available to reporters when so many reporters apparently want to exploit the transyouth? I don’t know. Not every reporter does as well as Barbara Walters did with the story of transyouth, that’s for sure.

Way back on March 30th, in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe, there was a a Q&A with Dr. Norman Spack. Dr. Spack has a clinic at Children’s Hospital Boston; he’s “a doctor who helps children change their gender.” The article is about the clinic, about the treatment, and about why the clinic exists.

IDEAS: At what age should children be allowed to take hormones, like estrogen and testosterone, that will forever change the way their bodies develop?

SPACK: Well, the Dutch would say 16. But I think more flexible guidelines will be coming out. For some kids, 16 might be appropriate. For others {hellip} you loseWeight Exercise opportunities if you wait. [One of my patients, a] transgendered girl from the UK, was destined to be a 6-foot-4 male. With treatment, she’s going to end up 5-foot-10.

Dr. Spack isn’t providing for or arranging for minors to receive genital reassignement surgery as minors.

How the story has been told and emphasized — from being about the quality of children’s lives and suicide prevention to one emphasizing conservative Christian beliefs and theology; from focusing on these children to focusing on the statements of Dr. Paul McHugh — the John Hopkins professor who advised the Catholic Church regarding sex abuse and transsexuals — and whether or not Dr. Norman Spack is a “nutjob”, or whether treatments offered to transgender children at Dr. Spack’s clinic are “barbaric,” “a rejection of the lawfulness of nature.” , and “cooperating with psychosis.”

Although treatment of transsexual youth (or even adults) is not always couched in terms of faith-based, conversion therapy, often it is.

The National Association For Research & Therapy Of Homosexuality‘s (NARTH’s) Dr. Richard P. Fitzgibbons mixes the treatment of transsexual adults with his Catholic faith — and the treatment of youth diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) — in his NARTH piece The Desire For A Sex Change:

[After the fold, NARTH, the Liberty Council, and the Catholic Medical Association weigh in.]
Read the rest of this entry »

Before I begin this, let me by saying I’ve been trying to write this piece for days. As Pam warned me — but I didn’t want to believe — it’s taking a long time for me to recover from my gastric bypass surgery. So my apologies to all for not getting this piece out as soon as I would have liked to, but I do have a good excuse.

So to begin, in recent months I started working with TransYouth Family Advocates (TYFA) — now TransYouth Family Allies. The reasons are pretty simple: with regards to transgender youth, the organization has been filling a void that no other LGBT organization has been filling. They’ve been helping the parents of children that may or may not be transgender find psychological help; they’ve been talking to school districts about their policies towards transgender youth; and, they’ve been talking to the press about the issues surrounding transgender youth as required.

Basically, TYFA is working to take care of the next generation of transgender youth.

So, let’s back up a few decades. I’ve read the average coming out age of gay males back in the early seventies was between approximately seventeen and twenty-one years of age (pg. 241). The last report I read states that that the average coming out age for LGBT youth is now thirteen.

And, with the coming out age dropping, the parents of transgender youth now have the real world issues of accepting or rejecting their children, as well as school bullying issues to deal with:

[S]tudies have also found that one out of every four teens who comes out faces family rejection. The Safe Schools Coalition Web site notes that research done for the FBI in 1998 found that these LGBT teenagers make up 30 percent to 40 percent of the nation’s homeless youths and that usually the gay youths’ coming-out conflicts with their families’ moral and religious beliefs.

Even LGBT youths who don’t face rejection at home usually face some at school. According to the National Mental Health Institute, the average secondary school student hears an anti-gay slur 26 times a day. And 31 percent of kids who are gay or are perceived as gay were physically harassed or assaulted last year at school.

And let’s not forget transgender youth suicide:

The Amethyst Ribbon Campaign was established as part of the Ian Benson Project. Ian was a 16-year old affirmed male who took his own life in October 2007. Ian’s mother, TYFA’s secretary/treasurer, hopes to help other children and families avoid the pain and struggles that can lead to suicide among trans youth.

As mentioned earlier, TYFA has this past week has changed the “A” in their acronym from Advocates to Allies (Press release: here.). Their new mission and vision, which they’ve updated on their website, is as follows:

Mission: TYFA empowers children and families by partnering with educators, service providers and communities, to develop supportive environments in which gender may be expressed and respected.

Vision: A society free of suicide and violence in which ALL children are respected and celebrated.

Earlier this week mentioned an organization that doesn’t receive my support or charitable donations. Well, TYFA is on my short list of organizations that I do send charitable donations to, specifically because I wholly support their mission and vision. It’s because the organization was founded by parents of the next generation of transgender youth, and these children’s allies, that I care about this organization so much.