Parents support 11-year-old gender confused daughter to go back to school as a boy
EDMONTON, Alberta, September 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An 11-year-old girl is going back to school this week in the persona of a boy with the help of her parents and a homosexual activist from the University of Alberta.
When Wrenna Kauffman, who now calls herself Wren, began showing signs of gender confusion, her parents contacted Kristopher Wells, a homosexual activist from the University of Alberta's Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, who advised them that their daughter should be allowed to start living life at home as a boy.
Wrenna's parents allowed her to be interviewed by CTV News, where she said she always wanted to be a boy and that her body caused her to feel "like you're trapped inside someone else's body that you don't want to be in."
According to a Canadian Press report, Wells told the parents that "more students these days are not just coming out in school as gay but also as transgender or transsexual, and they’re doing it at younger ages."
The report notes that Wells once "helped a child swap sex roles while in Grade 2 at a Catholic school in rural Alberta."
Wrenna's parents, Wendy and Greg Kauffman, said they have begun giving their daughter female-puberty-delaying injections. They have indicated she will receive these until she is 16. She will then be allowed to decide if she wants to begin male hormone injections and, ultimately, gender reassignment surgery when she is 18.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) considers gender confusion to be a mental disorder.
Although the DSM-V, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders now calls gender identity disorder “gender dysphoria," the reclassification maintains gender identity disorder as a mental illness.
The new guidelines say patients will be diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” if they display “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.”
Stories of children, some of them as young a six years old, coming out as “transgender” with the support of their parents, are increasing in the media.
In 2011, when Coy Mathis started elementary school, his family and school agreed to treat Coy as a girl and let him use the girls’ restroom. Mathis’s parents say they trace back their son’s female self-identification to an incident in which he, as a 5-month-old, grabbed his sister’s pink blanket.
In July LifeSiteNews reported on a summer camp for gender confused boys that drew praise from homosexual activists, and criticism from pro-family leaders.
The camp for “gender variant” boys from 6 to 16 and their families is held in an undisclosed location in New England.
Photographer Lindsay Morris, who published a photoessay on the camp, describes it as "a temporary safe haven where gender-variant boys can freely express their interpretations of femininity alongside their parents and siblings.”
But Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council in Washington D.C., told the Christian Post that he fears well-meaning parents may be doing more harm than good by bringing their boys into an environment that reinforces and celebrates their gender confusion.
“There is a risk of locking children into a life course, which, if they had been left to develop naturally, they would have outgrown,” Sprigg told the Christian Post. “You'll have children who are going through natural periods of confusion and experimentation with their sexuality and all of a sudden you have adults telling them, this means you're gay, you were born gay, you will never change.”
He warned that parents who encourage their child's gender confusion “run the risk of putting them on a path, and locking them in a transgender identity when that may not have been the natural course of their life at all.”
