'Transgendered' Child Set to Enter Florida School System
by Jim Brown
July 14, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The country's youngest "transgender" child is reportedly set to attend school in Broward County, Florida. The young boy's family is enrolling him as a girl in kindergarten this fall.
Some South Florida newspapers have recently published stories featuring a family that has been allowing their five-year-old son to dress, act, and live as a girl. The kindergartner-to-be is said to rejecting his physical characteristics as a boy. According to the Miami Herald, mental health professionals have diagnosed the cross-dressing boy with "gender dysphoria," or gender identity disorder. The newspaper says the school plans to address the youngster by a unisex name.
Dr. Warren Throckmorton is a prominent mental health counselor who teaches at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He says the school district is caught in a very difficult situation.
"They're trying to respect the wishes of the parents," Throckmorton notes, "and, given that school professionals are not medical professionals or mental health professionals, they have to rely on recommendations they receive from those people. The school people may not want to do this; maybe it would violate their own belief or what they think would be best."
In this case, Throckmorton believes the parents are getting poor advice and are being bullied by their five-year-old son. "It represents a kind of extreme situation when a boy's entire life is in a way mapped out because of his feelings and behavior at age five," he comments. "So I think that there are multiple points of view on this, and parents in this position should seek them all out."
The mental health counselor has his own perspective on the matter. "This would be one of the youngest children to be intentionally socialized as a transgendered child that I have ever seen," he offers. "Courts in other jurisdictions have required children to be much older. In fact, accepted standards of care for gender dysphoria cautions against this approach."
Throckmorton says he has counseled several children who have exhibited similar thoughts and feelings to those of the Broward County boy. Most, but not all, he says, have come from broken homes.
According to the Miami Herald report, pro-homosexual groups like Equality Florida and PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) feel the Broward County school system is well prepared for the situation. A spokesman for Equality Florida says "when it comes to the rights of transgendered people," the districts in both Broward and Miami-Dade counties are exemplary because of their "progressive policies."
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
