October 26th, 1997

The dolls we gave were destroyed

Janet, 11, has changed her name to James.  Here her mother Maria tells their story.

My daughter announced herself to be male even when she was stringing her first words together.  We now call her James and refer to her as a boy.  At first, of course, we didn’t know what to think.  We bought him girls’ toys, but he destroyed every doll we gave him.  When he was four, we took him to a GP who had no idea what to do.  She told us to come back in six months “to see if anything had improved”.  It didn’t.

When James started school he detested his girl’s uniform, so I let him wear the school’s unisex option of a tracksuit.  He struggled along until he was seven and proper school uniforms had to be worn.  The teachers called me in, concerned that I was letting him wear boyish things.

They told me I was encouraging him, that he would end up depressed and might commit suicide when he was older.  They had no experience of what he would do if I attempted to put him back in girls’ clothes.

We went back to the GP and were referred to a psychiatrist, who told us he was one of a very few children who felt they were the wrong sex.  It was an awful time.  I remember Jim, my husband, saying he wanted to kill all cross-dressers — but it was only an outburst, an attempt to express the pain.  Now he is as supportive as I am.

I had always thought of cross-dressers as sexually perverted.  I thought ’Have I got some kind of freak here?’  Friends told me I was soft in allowing James to wear boys’ clothes, but I could hardly slap him every morning.

Now we attend counselling sessions and in summer he changed his name by deed poll so he would have a male name on the school register.  That’s when made the decision to call him ’He’ for the first time.  I thought, that’s it, I really have lost my girl.  But being called ’She’ upset him so much.

There have been sad times.  At one stage he had few friends, and stayed inside at break to avoid being on his own in the playground.  Things have slightly improved now, although he still uses the medical suite to change for sports and go to the lavatory.

I used to say to him, ’Why can’t you go along with it all, make less trouble for yourself?’, but he would look sad and say, “I don’t know Mum, but I can’t.’

Copyright © Express Newspapers, 1997

Youngsters trapped by turmoil