You see, Ben’s 15-year-old son is transgender. I’m not using Ben’s last name because I don’t want his family subjected to hateful attacks.
“A long time ago, he tried to embrace the gender that he was born in and it didn’t suit him, it didn’t work. It didn’t feel right,” Ben said.
Ben lives in another state, but his concerns are the same as those expressed here in the Miami Valley. After the election, at least one local LGBTQ+ advocacy group distributed a “to-do” list of items to accomplish before Trump took office.
Ben and his son went to work on three items that happened to be on the list. Working with sympathetic local officials, Ben’s son now has a driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport that identify him as male. The family rushed this through, Ben said, because of fears the federal government might pass a law only recognizing gender at birth.
This is just the first step of a long journey for Ben’s son. While much of the transgender debate focuses on a transgender woman, males don’t get that much attention. I guess society doesn’t see them as threatening.
Students at his high school know him as a transgender male. He has support from teachers who help him through the complications he faces. For example, when using the boy’s bathroom, a teacher may ensure he’s the only one using the facility because he uses a binder to present more male. They’re also available to him on overnight school trips, during which he sleeps with the boys.
Ben’s son takes testosterone and wants gender-affirming surgery — top and bottom — but Ben and his wife won’t allow it, at least not yet. They’re aware of the tricky balance of helping their child while ensuring he doesn’t have an irreversible procedure too soon.
“I dug up everything I could find about reversibility, about different procedures, risk factors and everything else, and we went through an exhaustive process of deciding where to stop or where things were okay to go through,” Ben said. The family rigors make sense because he and his wife are detail-oriented psychologists.
He’s not someone who supports unfettered access to surgery. “I think in most cases, it’s about whether there’s a net positive. If the kid is going through torture because of some kind of mismatch, okay, if there’s a physiological issue, then great. I don’t know that kids, in general, are capable of deciding.”
Even if Ben’s son goes through the procedures, he’ll be one of the few that have surgery. A study published in the JAMA Network Open followed 48,000 adults who underwent gender-affirming surgery between 2016 and 2019. Breast and chest implants were the most common procedures (56.6%) followed by genital reconstruction (35%).
Moreover, it’s rare and difficult for minors to have gender-affirming surgeries, in part because some doctors won’t perform it until the child is an adult. Additionally, some 26 states, including Ohio, have already banned the surgery for minors.
In three years from 2021 to 2024, there were an estimated 776 mastectomies performed on children 13 to 17 and 56 genital surgeries among the same group, a Reuters investigation found. All had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a diagnosis which has nearly tripled since 2017, from 15,172 cases then to 42,167 cases in 2021.
Ohio is at the forefront of the issue as its transgender population grows. The Williams Institute estimates 300,000 youth ages 13 to 17, including 8,500 in the Buckeye state, identify as transgender. Ohio’s estimated transgender population of 46,500 ranks eighth in the country.
In other words, this won’t go away, and as Ben notes, transgender people have been around for thousands of years.
“We’ve seen countless examples in Western culture, eastern culture, and indigenous cultures. These are tremendously small minorities getting blasted with blame or an inordinate amount of it. It makes no damn sense. There’s no threat there.
“No one wants to convince your kid to be trans.”
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday.
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