This article was downloaded by: [Montclair State University]On: 26 September 2013, At: 11:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UKJournal of LGBT YouthPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjly20“Look, Mom, I’m a Boy—Don't TellAnyone I Was a Girl”Diane Ehrensaft aa Child and Adolescent Gender Center, San Francisco, California, USAPublished online: 28 Feb 2013.To cite this article: Diane Ehrensaft (2013) “Look, Mom, I’m a Boy—Don't Tell Anyone I Was a Girl”,Journal of LGBT Youth, 10:1-2, 9-28, DOI: 10.1080/19361653.2012.717474To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2012.717474PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLETaylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionsJournal of LGBT Youth, 10:9–28, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1936-1653 print / 1936-1661 onlineDOI: 10.1080/19361653.2012.717474“Look, Mom, I’m a Boy—Don’t Tell AnyoneI Was a Girl”DIANE EHRENSAFTChild and Adolescent Gender Center, San Francisco, California, USAInterventions with a school-aged youth are presented to demon-strate a child’s gender transition from female to male withthe support of a single mother, grandmother, therapist, pedi-atric endocrinologist, gender education and advocacy group, andgender-affirming school. This single case study illustrates both thepositive psychological effects of resilience-building therapy andfamily/community supports in facilitating a transition to an af-firmed gender and the dilemmas confronted when introducinghormone blockers to a child, removing a child from a familiar en-vironment to allow a fresh gender start, and respecting a child’swishes to stay private about the child’s gender past.KEYWORDS Affirmed gender, gender-nonconforming youth, go-ing stealth, puberty blockers, transgender, true gender selfI and other mental health professionals who work with children have takennote of what appears to be “a gender swell.” More and more families havebeen coming to our offices to talk about their young children who seem tobe defying binary gender norms. Twenty-five years ago, this seemed a rarity.Now it seems a growing trend (Meyer, 2012; Spack et al., 2012). Yet a recentlarge-scale study of transgender and gender-nonconforming adults indicatesthat gender-nonconforming and transgender children have been around fora long time: The majority of the subjects interviewed knew from a very earlyage that they did not fit the gender assigned to them at birth and/or thesocial expectations for that gender (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011). The biggestdifference between those adults and increasing numbers of children today isthat, throughout their childhoods, the overwhelming majority of the adultsReceived 6 March 2012; revised 27 March 2012; accepted 27 March 2012.Address correspondence to Diane Ehrensaft, 445 Bellevue Avenue, Suite #302, Oakland,CA 94610. E-mail: [email protected] by [Montclair State University] at 11:26 26 September 201310 D. Ehrensafthid their experience, deep in their closets or deep in their psyches. Sadly,these adults were seldom afforded the opportunity in childhood to let theworld know who they were, and if they did, it was rarely received with awarm welcome. Take Andre, a transgender man, “who, as a young child,went to bed each night hoping to wake up a boy.” He “remembers havinga nightmare in which his siblings rolled a boulder on him and buried himalive. Being forced to bury his gender identity underneath a ‘little girl shell’was like that nightmare to him, and he had ‘waves of feeling suicidal’ duringhis childhood” (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011, p. 44).Andre and his cohort rarely had a chance to emerge as their affirmedauthentic gender selves in childhood—and that is truly unfortunate, for theirown well-being and for the gender health of our society. Yet that situation ofnecessary and imposed suppression and repression is beginning to change.A new model of childhood gender affirmation is emerging, which operatesfrom the premise that young children are very aware of their evolving gen-der identities and desired gender expressions and that the role of the family,community, and society is to allow these children’s authentic genders tounfold (Brill & Pepper, 2008; Ehrensaft, 2011a, 2011b). This article presentsan example of that model in practice, documenting the experiences of aCaucasian youth who evolved from girl to boy, with the support of her/hismother, her/his extended family, a therapist, an endocrinologist, a gendereducation and advocacy program, and a school committed to gender ac-ceptance and affirmation. Special attention is given to the therapeutic workwith the child and family, as that is the particular position I had in our inter-disciplinary team. I chose this child and this parent as the work poignantlydemonstrates the complications, conundrums, and accomplishments of in-terventions within this gender-affirming model and touches on two sensitiveintervention areas with gender-nonconforming youth: (a) the administrationof hormone blockers to delay a potentially unwanted puberty and allow achild and