My GAYXJW friend thinks I should post this story from today's Aussie news. (He dislikes Jws so much that he even refuses to post here). Actually he's suggested two stories, but I'll consider the other story later.
This is actually a nice story about the growing acceptance of the fact that sexuality and gender is not as fixed as the Genesis story pretends.
It is difficult to imagine a situation more fraught with emotion than parents discovering that their child is transgender, that is there is a dissonance between the mind's sexuality/gender and the body.
In Australia, however, such parents (I doubt that JW parents, with a mind-set made form concrete would consider this) now have a source of assistance.
So meet Ollie, birth name Molly, but now freed to solve the dissonance he once felt between his brain (mind) and his body.
Ollie, now 12, has been a patient at the Royal Children's Hospital's gender dysphoria clinic for the past two years.
The clinic, the only one in Australia, treats children between the ages of five and 18 and has experienced a huge growth in demand since it was established in 2003 by Associate Professor Campbell Paul, a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
From two patients in 2003, it has grown to 104 in 2014, with more expected this year.
The really wonderful thing (to me) is the acceptance that Ollie's change has met with at such important places of social interchange as his school. Humans often find it difficult to be the odd man out, as the saying goes.
How this works is explained by one of the clinic's staff:
"Sex" refers to a person's physical appearance, determined by their chromosomes and hormones, Dr Michelle Telfer, the clinical leader at the hospital's centre for adolescent health, explains.
"Gender" refers to their innate sense of being male, female, or somewhere in between. A transgender person's sex and gender do not match. When this causes severe distress it is called gender dysphoria.
When Ollie was younger he did not know what transgender meant. But he always felt like a boy.
He hated wearing dresses. At eight he got a short, short haircut. He became more distraught at going to school, and cried at night.
Oliver's parents, Peter and Sarah, decided it was important to get Oliver into the clinic and onto "puberty blockers".
These medications stop the procession of normal puberty and are totally reversible. They are used to decrease the distress a young person feels from bodily changes they do not want, Dr Telfer says.
As the patient matures and is able to make long-term decisions they can move onto cross hormone medication, which is not totally reversible.
More on this story at: