Gender Transition in Children: A Dialogue Continued

[Natasha]

Gender Transition in Children: A Dialogue Continued

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-beyer/gender-transition-in-children_b_3530335.html
7/1/13
Dana Beyer

I had a very poignant experience in May when I taught Penn Med students during their first course on trans health, touching because 38 years earlier I had sat where they were sitting in the John Morgan building and had been lectured that I was mentally ill due to a sexual perversion. Now I was the one doing the lecturing, transmitting the science and lived reality of the trans experience of the past 38 years.

Since my medical school years, not only have the numbers of successful social and medical transitions skyrocketed in America and around the globe, but our understanding of human sexual development has exploded as well. Today all our medical associations, from the broad-based American Medical Association (AMA) to the brain-related mental health organizations, such as the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), recognize the trans experience as a normal human variation and no longer characterize it in pathologizing terms.