The Danish Girl

David Ebershoff's book, "The Danish Girl" was quite the read and now I hear it might become a movie.

As the project manager of several LGBT direct service programs in New York City for five years I found reading books like Ebershoff's, and others a responsibility and part of my ongoing education.

However, as much as I was enthralled with the story, several TG friends and acquaintances felt it was unrealistic. Whether they are correct or not about the value of the Wegener story, Ebershoff's book and the movement does appear to be gaining positive traction. While still not a mainstream topic recognizing transgender behavior as normative may be blessed by the DSM-V in the coming year.

The Atlantic had a lengthy article about gender and children, a subject covered last year I believe in a two part interview on NPR.

Some important questions that persist when discussing social norms is nurture and nature, the medical community's proof positive and neurology.

Nurture and nature are too variant to qualify or quantify, in my humble opinion. The medical community has been wrong as much as it has been right, and neurology or brain function studies are in their infancy and thus premature to use as benchmarks.

Take the work of John Money, a respected scientist and practitioner who helped destroy the lives of male twins, and then attempted to justify his actions and theories rather than revisit the possibility of error in judgment, diagnosis and approach to treatment. The Money research is well documented.

The Reimer twins case was brought to public attention first in the Rolling Stone, and later in "As Nature Man him " a troubling yet brilliantly presented book on nurture and nature written by John Colapinto. Today both twins are dead.

Direct experience I had with a young adolescent seeking recognition as a female born male mirrors the patterning described in The Atlantic piece--tears, distress, isolation, confusion and insistence about being born in the wrong body. While I was able to find a sympathetic physician, I was not able to ameliorate the pain or sign off on hormone therapy and after some time the youth got lost in a system unable to cope.
I rank that loss as among my greatest failures.

Will we find a way to work through the psycho-physical dilemma faced by a growing number of our own?