Is a 16-year-old too young for a sex change?
San Francisco Chronicle
Posted By: Amy Graff
26 January, 2010


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=56022


The British press are spreading the news of a 16-year-old boy who is hoping to become the country's youngest sex change patient.

Bradley Cooper, who goes by Ria, has been applying his mother's lipstick and dressing up in her clothes since he was 12 years old. He's now training to be a hair stylist.

A psychologist says Cooper would benefit from a sex change, and the teen believes he's ready to undergo the life-changing procedure.

This bit is a red herring.

QuoteThe TaxPayer's Alliance is saying that the expense can't be justified when the NHS is turning down requests for expensive cancer treatments that could potentially save dying children's lives.

There is no evidence at all that cancer treatments are compromised by financial constraints.

The major costs in the NHS are an enormous army of managers and secretaries, and an ever expanding maternity service which is increasingly treating child birth as a major medical emergency rather than the natural act that women have been doing, without much assistance, for 6 million years!

I can't say if this is right or wrong for such a young person. But the tone of the article is an anti-government rant rather than a meaningful contribution to public debate.

The Daily Mail is a well known Tory rag, known as the Daily Wail, the News of the World is also a sort of Tory type rag, known for salacious stories of randy vicars, lesbians and making fun of heavy people.

the natural act that women have been doing, without much assistance,

Until quite recently, it was a leading cause of death in women.

As the article you cited said, his theory was not even really thought to be valid until the 'germ theory of disease' which didn't even occur till after he was dead.  It was still pretty risky business, in fact many anthropologists would say that the reason men hunted (very dangerous) was to keep the population levels equal to women dying in childbirth.  It matters less what killed them, then that they were dead (and you can't get better from dead as it turns out).  I love old funerary stuff, and as any walk around a graveyard from pre-1850 will show, lots of mothers died with the child buried next to them.

Quote from: Leslie on January 26, 2010, 05:17:11 PM
Is a 16-year-old too young for a sex change?

Nope, but I don't think that anybody who willingly goes in wanting a sex change should sue because they changed their minds.

There's the argument that people can screw up their lives at that age with a life-changing permanent surgery. But really, teenagers do these things all the time, making permanent decisions and regretting them later. Hey, if they're foolish enough to make the wrong decision then it's just chlorine in the gene pool.