Dexter Jones stands 4 ft 1 in tall, lithe and skinny as a whippet, with a mischievous smile and an appetite seemingly unsated by the entire punnet of blackberries he has just polished off.
He adores Harry Potter — he knows all the wizards and spells — and would love to run in the Olympics one day. Dressed in a smart blue polo shirt and jeans, he looks and acts much like any other six-year-old boy. Nobody would suspect that Dexter was actually born a girl.
Three years ago — without prompting from his mother, Mienna says — pretty, tomboyish Talia announced that she was a boy. Not that she wanted to be one, but that she actually was one. Now. And always had been.
Mienna, a 44-year-old childminder from St Albans, Hertfordshire, wasn’t shocked. Talia, she says, then three, had railed against her assigned gender since she was a toddler, shunning dresses and dolls and behaving entirely like a little boy. Talia was just being Talia, she thought, and she’d grow out of it. Her elder daughter had played with cars for a while, after all.
By age five, however, Talia was gone. She declared one day that she was actually a boy called Dexter — a name she admired from a boy at school — and that this was who she was going to be from now on.
Backed by his family, teachers and GP, Dexter was referred to the Tavistock Centre in London, an NHS clinic for transgender children, and became one of its youngest patients.
Mienna was eventually told that Dexter had gender dysphoria — a condition where sufferers experience distress at their sex. Should he still feel this way as he approached puberty, he could be given drugs to block the changes and ease the transition to becoming a man in adulthood.
This would, undoubtedly, be a long, and possibly painful, journey — and it is starting strikingly early.
Many will be disturbed at what is happening to this child. Isn’t Dexter far too young to be questioning his gender, let alone taking preliminary steps to alter it?
How can Mienna be sure, at such a tender age, that this isn’t just a phase the child is going through? And doesn’t she worry that psychological harm could be inflicted on the child by validating what could be temporary as a biological certainty?
She admits she can’t be sure. ‘But, for me, it would be fundamentally wrong to force Dexter to live as Talia, because he was so unhappy,’ says Mienna, who is married to Ollie, 54, a painter, and who also has a 13-year-old daughter. ‘We’re a long way off any treatment or an operation, but being under the umbrella of the Tavistock makes us feel that we’re in safe hands.
‘As horrible a road as this is, I am thankful that we are dealing with it now. It must be an absolute torment to discover you are transgender during the tricky teenage years.’
The subject of gender identity in childhood has become one of the most contentious of our times.
Last week, Nigel Rowe, 44, and his wife Sally, 42, announced plans to sue their sons’ Church of England school on the Isle of Wight for discriminating against their Christian beliefs by allowing boys to wear dresses.
They said it was deeply unsettling for their sons to see other children affecting a different gender, and that children are too emotionally immature to decide they want to change sex. In an age where gender is increasingly seen as fluid, the Rowes were vilified for their beliefs. Unsurprisingly, Mienna is angered.
‘If the Rowes are acting in the name of religion, surely they should be more accepting of others? My son has shown more emotional maturity than they have.’
The number of children seeking help for gender issues has grown dramatically recently, despite — or perhaps because of — increasing attempts to identify and integrate those who might be transgender. Demand at the Tavistock Centre, the only NHS clinic of its kind, has soared in recent years. In 2009, just 97 children aged between three and 18 were referred. But by last year, there were 2,016 referrals, with the number of children aged five or under rising from six to 32.
Meanwhile, the gender-neutral movement gathers pace. Earlier this month, John Lewis stopped labelling its children’s clothing by gender, while Priory School in Lewes, East Sussex, banned girls from wearing skirts in order to accommodate the growing number of transgender pupils.
This week, The Good Schools Guide is to examine the extent to which schools are ‘transgender friendly’, after claims some children are being bullied.
Yet others believe, like the Rowes, that there is a politically correct agenda driving the issue in schools, and that transgenderism has morphed from a serious condition affecting a small minority to a fashionable ideology spearheaded by fanatics who bully those who don’t subscribe to it.
The family have now had three of their allocated six NHS-funded counselling sessions at the Tavistock, with the next in November. ‘As Dexter isn’t about to hit puberty, we have a while before we need to go more regularly,’ says Mienna. ‘They told us gender is very fluid at Dexter’s age and some children do revert back.’
Can she see this happening? ‘Never. I’d gladly be proved wrong — it would be far easier if Dexter did decide to be a girl. But there has been no suggestion he will.’
She seems in favour of him taking drugs to stop the onset of puberty. ‘I can imagine it would be horrific to grow breasts and get periods if he feels the way he does now.’
In the past, it has been more common for boys to seek treatment than girls, but there has been a marked reversal recently, with 1,400 females doing so last year, compared with 616 males.
Some have ascribed this rise to the growing pressure girls are under, but Mienna says: ‘It’s never crossed Dexter’s mind that life will be easier as a boy. Nor is this about feminism or being gay.’
In fact, she says, Dexter talks of having a wife and children when he is grown up. ‘He’ll probably have to adopt, unless he doesn’t transition and lives as a man with female organs,’ says Mienna.
While she admits that Dexter still ‘struggles’ to fit into his peer group, she says he is not lacking in playdates and party invitations.
‘Like any mum, I just want my child to be happy,’ she says. ‘And really, as long as he is comfortable in what he’s wearing, I can’t see what difference it makes to anyone else.’
Cc:Dailym
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