A ten-year-old boy has been allowed to return to school after the summer holidays as a girl because he believes he was born the wrong sex.
The boy’s mother is supporting his decision and has allowed him to dress as a girl and says he will start hormone blocker therapy, the first step to a full sex change, when he is twelve.
The headteacher at the boy’s primary school put on a special assembly, attended by his parents and a police officer, to explain the boy’s change.
Outraged
But some parents were taken aback that they had not been consulted before an announcement was made to the children on their first day back.
One parent with a child at the school said: “The headteacher told all the kids that there was a kid at the school who was a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
“The parents we spoke to are absolutely outraged that they weren’t consulted about this.”
Harm
Critics of sex change operations say that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric problem, not a physical one, and radical physical surgery does more harm than good.
In 2002 doctors from the NHS Portman Clinic – an internationally acclaimed centre – stated, “what many patients find is that they are left with a mutilated body, but the internal conflicts remain”.
Many transsexuals regret their decision to live in the opposite sex. A Home Office report on transsexualism said: “Many people revert to their biological sex after living for some time in the opposite sex”.
Mistake
Last year a man who underwent sex change surgery to look like a woman – then changed back – said the NHS should halt all sex change operations.
Charles Kane, who spent £100,000 on operations to make him look like a woman, says he needed counselling, not surgery.
Last November the BBC documented the tragic story of a baby boy in Canada whose parents were persuaded by an academic, Dr John Money, to raise him as a girl.
Dr Money believed that gender was a result of social constructions rather than nature so baby Bruce became ‘Brenda’.
But when he reached puberty he discovered his true sex. He became deeply depressed and later committed suicide.
