I believe the topic of gender change in children has been mentioned quite a few times since the start of class, but I don't think we've really looked into a real life scenario yet.
The article's pretty longwinded so here's basically what's important.
This 3 year old kid who has a speech impediment can finally communicate with sign language, and the first things he says is that he's a girl. His parents say that he always acts depressed until they let him put on a dress/act like a girl. They've put him on hormone blockers and allowed him to be called Tammy.
To this, CNN says that the parents have "been accused by family, friends and others of being reckless, causing their youngest child permanent damage by allowing her to live as a girl."
Note the media spin of "allowing _her_ to live as a girl." Interesting take by CNN, and possibly a direction that media wants to take?
I personally am against what they've done. He's simply too young, just as the CNN blog discussion title says: "Too young to know your gender." There was a study conducted "following 109 boys who had gender identity disorder between the ages of 3 and 12. Researchers followed up at the mean age of 20 and found 12% of these boys continued to want to change genders." 12% is close to one in ten. That means if everyone took hormone blockers, then 9 people would regret it. Furthermore, who's to say that it's not the hormone blockers that are influencing one's personal gender views?
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