I am not Transgendered, Not That There's Anything Wrong With It

O&A goofed on a Paula Zahn segment about a family with a transgendered 7 year old son. The family decided to let their son live as a girl and transferred him to a new school where nobody knew he was anatomically male. Evidently, the little tyke is happier wearing girls’ clothing and acting like a girl and playing with girls’ toys. They haven’t castrated him or subjected him to hormones or done anything irreversible, and I reckon that humoring the child in his desire to live as a girl is pretty loving on the part of the parents. They tried to make him play with trucks and be more boyish, but that just made him miserable.

There was a period of a few weeks when a prepubescent Vache Folle fantasized about what it would be like if he were transformed into one of those beautiful lingerie models in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. He would wear only underwear and live in a colony with other 8 inch tall women in underwear. They would all luxuriate all day and night in their beautiful fancy unmentionables. I may have asked God to turn me into a tiny lingerie model, and I am thankful now that my prayer was not granted. There was nothing sexual about my fantasy. I hadn’t yet become sexual. I just thought the underwear was really special and that the models were so wonderful that I wanted to live in the catalogue world.

I didn’t mention my fantasy to my grandparents with whom I was living at the time. I didn’t think they would understand, and I didn’t want to lose access to the catalogue. The fantasy passed, and years later I began to think about the lingerie models very differently. I didn’t want to be a tiny underwear model in a colony; rather, I wanted to control a colony of tiny underwear models and use them for my sexual gratification. Then I put aside the tiny part and imagined full size lingerie models at my beck and call. I still have a thing for lingerie to this day, but I don’t have any obsession with smallness.

My grandparents couldn’t have fulfilled my stupid fantasy even if they had had a mind to. There’s no way to turn a seven year old into a tiny lingerie model, or at least the technology did not exist back in the 1960s. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being a boy or that I felt that I was really a tiny lingerie model trapped in a little boy’s body. I just thought for that brief period that tiny lingerie models had a much more interesting life than I had. Everybody would love them and want to be around them. I’m glad nobody found out and interpreted it as my being transgendered.

The parents in the Zahn piece have it on good authority that their child is transgendered, so I don’t think that they have misinterpreted their child’s desires. I don’t know what sex has to do with it in a 7 year old, but I don’t reckon that his wish to be a girl is necessarily related to sexual orientation. It would be interesting to see how this all plays out when the child develops secondary sex characteristics and experiences sexual attraction.