When boys would rather not be boys
Kids are being diagnosed—and identifying themselves—as transgendered younger than ever before
by Roberta Staley on Friday, August 12, 2011 8:00am
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/12/when-boys-would-rather-not-be-boys/Cormac O'Dwyer entered Grade 8 in Vancouver as a girl named Amber. All traces of femininity stopped with the name; Amber looked, dressed and acted like a boy. "It was awkward," admits Cormac, sleeves rolled up to reveal downy, muscular arms, elbows resting on the kitchen table in the family's immaculate home in upscale Kitsilano. From the other end of the table, Cormac's mother, Julia, pipes up. "People would use the male pronoun," she recalls. Usually Julia felt obliged to correct the error, leaving new acquaintances flustered and confused.
But solecisms were the least of Cormac's worries during the transition from female to male. Becoming a boy involved wearing a breast-flattening binder, changing for phys. ed. in the teachers' change room, declining invitations to go swimming, and carrying a cellphone to call for help in case of bullying. And then there was the therapy: testosterone injections, counselling and surgery that removed his breasts and contoured what remained into the flat, square planes of a male chest.
