What do transgenders really need?

Transgender students deserve special counselling to help them cope, but allowing them to wear opposite sex uniforms and use opposite sex toilets would not prevent other students from noticing and commenting on their real sex.

Some years ago the popular ABC1 Australian Story program featured Alan Finch, whose abusive father led to identity problems from an early age.  Alan tried homosexuality but was unsatisfied, so with encouragement from his mother and doctors he embarked on hormone treatment and surgery to make him appear an attractive woman.

But Alan remained unhappy – until he fell in love with a woman.  She encouraged him to return to the male sex he was born with.

“Anatomically, I was never a woman,” Alan told Australian Story.  [The surgery is] just rearranging flesh, but the tissue that’s used is still male tissue.  I was never able to have any sexual pleasure.  Everything was fake about it, from top to toe.”

The famous Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US used to do sexual reassignment surgery – but ceased after patient follow-up found that even though few regretted their operations, psychological problems remained.  Chief psychiatrist Dr Paul McHugh decided that he would do better to concentrate on fixing minds, not genitalia.

Transgender treatment, like anorexia treatment, may take many years.  It is best begun early.  Schools should not, by policies which reinforce body misperceptions, delay the process.