S/He
Parents of transgender children are faced with a difficult decision, and it's one they have to make sooner than they ever imagined.

    By Jesse Green
    Published May 27, 2012

http://nymag.com/news/features/transgender-children-2012-6/

Looking up from the changing table, the beautiful boy said to his mother, "I want to be a girl."

This was not a passing phase. At 3, Mark asked to dress for Halloween as Dora the Explorer; his parents bargained him down to Darth Vader, which at least featured a cape. At 5, he insisted on trick-or-treating as Gabriella Montez, the High School Musical sweetheart. By then, his birthday parties were girl-only, with girl-only themes. Any boy toys received were instantly re-gifted to a cousin.

At first, his mom was "all Free to Be You and Me about it," she says, willing to let Mark experiment within reason. But whose reason?

[...]

Through her reading on the subject, Mark's mother gradually came to feel that she and her husband had to be that "God" for their son. But it took Mark's implicit threats of self-harm to convince his dad. "I'm in a conservative business; I sell software," he says. "I want the normal life. And this was gonna be different, when my son is getting out of the car in a dress in front of everybody. But then you have to think about who are you protecting? Yourself or your kid? People would say, 'I can't believe you'd let your kid do that. That's abuse.' I'll tell you what's abuse: suicide. Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?"