Here’s a fine puzzle for you: What do you tell your child when he comes home confused by a classmate who went from 12-year-old boy to 12-year-old girl over the summer vacation? That you’re pretty confused, too?
A BOY aged 12 turned up at school as a GIRL – after changing sex during the summer holidays.
Teachers called an emergency assembly to order fellow pupils to treat him as female.
The lad, whose parents have changed his name to a girl’s by deed poll, arrived in a dress with long hair in ribboned pigtails. He is preparing for sex-swap surgery.
Angry parents told yesterday how their kids were left tearful and confused after school staff announced the boy pupil was now a girl.
They said the head teacher should have informed them in advance of the “sex change” so they could prepare their sons and daughters and inform them about gender issues.
Three things: 1) While I do not wish to diminish the pain that individuals caught in the wrong gender experience, isn’t 12 a bit early to go ahead with gender reassignment? 2) Why didn’t the school warn other parents? You can’t expect 12-year-olds to accept such concepts without some kind of preparation, and it’s not nice to surprise people that way. And 3) What a stupid thing to do! By not warning the other parents and giving them a chance to prepare their kids so they could deal with their sex-swapping classmate, they made it even harder on said classmate:
[Parents] added that the school’s failure to do so [give them a heads-up] had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.
One mum said: “They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents.
“Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we’d had a chance to be involved.”
So here’s the lesson: If you’re going to let children undergo sex-change operations, you must be prepared to do some work to ensure other children react reasonably well to the change. I do think 12 is way too early for this kind of operation, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to treat this kid and other children in his situation badly. Dressing up a 12-year-old boy as a girl and sending him to school with no preparation is dumb and stupid and cruel.
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What kind of counseling did this 12-year-old receive, would be my concern. As Brigitte says, 12 is very young to be having sex-change surgery.
Did anyone try working through some of these issues with this boy, rather than just setting in motion such a drastic reversal of identity?
As a Christian, I don’t have the secular humanist hang-up about appealing to divine revelation. Deuteronomy 22:5 says, “A woman shall not wear man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God.” This law was not one of the ceremonial laws that were fulfilled by the coming of the Messiah. Neither is it one of the Ten Commandments. It was a civil law for the people of Israel, but many of the civil laws contain principles and set forth morality still applicable today.
Almost everyone is born with anatomy which is easily identifiable as male or female. God intends that boys become men and girls become women. There may be the rare case of a mixed-up anatomy. (I don’t see how such cases can occur, but there’s all kinds of diseases and developmental problems, I suppose. I’m not a doctor.) We’re not talking about such a case in this story. In almost all the stories, we’re not. Such cases are more rare than the forced abortions of raped women.
I know forced abortion is never the solution for a pregnancy resulting from rape. And I think a sex change is never the answer for anything. And the problem in this story about the 12-year-old boy is not a mixed-up anatomy but a mixed-up mind.
There’s no way in heck s/he is having the surgery *soon*; they don’t do them until the person is eighteen. When they say “preparing,” preparing is a very long process in this case.
You made some good points here.Keep us posting. What template do you use in your blog