“It looks like we just found our new pint-size hero,” an article posted on Huffington Post’s Gay Voices section stated. “Alex hasn’t even left elementary school but he already has a firm grasp on his identity and what it means to be transgender.”
“So I was just a little kid about 7 or 8 and I had something to say that could no longer wait,” the child sings or raps in the video. “So I went to my mom that hot day in July with a hope in my heart and a tear in my eye.
“Basically I said this girl is your son,” the child sings.
“We’re absolutely in love with this kid,” the Post article states, giving a “hat tip” to Queerty, the website with the tag line “free of an agenda except that gay one,” which first posted the story and video.
The Queerty article called the video “just plain perfect” and credited the child’s declaration of being transgender to “good parenting.”
“Alex can’t be more than eight years old, but he seems armed with all the confidence in the world as he raps his story of coming out as transgender,” the article stated.
“But it’s obvious he wasn’t always so bold and fearless,” the article stated. “Through some clearly good parenting and the help of Camp Aranu’tiq, a brilliant summer camp that serves transgender and variant gender youth, Alex has gained far more than a ‘normal’ childhood.
“The level of real understanding and maturity he shows through in his poem (OK, even if Mom helped write it) and the very act of performing it speak volumes to the kind of person he’ll grow up to be,” the article stated.
One expert, however, warned against seeing transgender people as normal in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in June.
“Policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention,” Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, wrote. “This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects.
“The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality,” McHugh wrote. “The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.
“The transgendered suffer a disorder of ‘assumption’ like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists,” McHugh wrote. “With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness.”
McHugh’s commentary also addresses the transgender issue and young children “who notice distinct sex roles in the culture and, exploring how they fit in, begin imitating the opposite sex.”
McHugh notes the growing practice at Boston’s Children’s Hospital of “administering puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous” as “misguided.”
“Given that close to 80% of such children would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated, these medical interventions come close to child abuse,” McHugh wrote. “A better way to help these children: with devoted parenting.”
