Last night on TV, Dancing With The Stars featured a young ballerina. Born in dire circumstances in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she was adopted and arrived in the US, diseased and scarred by her young life. But she wanted to become a dancer, her mother said. The girl has trained all of her life and eventually received a scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre and there she was, dancing on national television.

Did her parents tell her, “You’re too young to know that you want to be a dancer”?

You hear about children that only ever wanted to become astronauts and, sure enough, now they are NASA astronauts. Or doctors. Or chefs. Or movie stars that only wanted to be movie stars. And we praise them and encourage them and consider them special. Caring parents might have said something about having a backup career in case they can’t achieve their goal, or if life gets in the way–as with the gifted teen athlete whose career is cut short by injury–but by and large these special children are supported.

And yet when a child states that they are the wrong gender, that they’re not a boy but a girl, or plead to get them out of dresses and let them play with the other boys, the response is usually, “You’re too young to know”.

It’s probably safe to say that when that West African girl discovered there was such a thing as dancing, she knew–with every fiber of her being–that she was a dancer and would be a dancer. Anything else was secondary to her core identity.

I remember a long-ago Larry King interview of a hostage negotiator. Larry’s opening line was, “I knew a lot of kids growing up. Some wanted to be policemen or firemen; some wanted to be ballplayers. But not one kid said he wanted to grow up to be a hostage negotiator. How’d it happen?”

For the girl dancing on TV last night, there was no doubt how it happened. And as a child, even as damaged as her short life had been, she knew she was a dancer. She knew.

The majority of people don’t know. They may know they’re boys or girls; they may learn that they’re straight or gay, and those might be fixed poles in their lives but what are they going to become in their lives? They don’t know. They may want to be a fireman, then an archaeologist, then a race car driver; or a princess, then a fashion designer, and then a teacher. Or they may want to be a ballerina.

Those that know we consider special and praise–unless it’s about gender. Then, of course, comes the phrase, "You're too young to know." But let’s consider the word “special”. It means unusual, not ordinary, and by definition a minority. And gender-variant children (using the catchall term) are all of those things, and they are special. Certainly, gender-variant children should be questioned and tested; there are many cases of children that undergo evaluation and learn that “they thought they might be, but didn’t know for sure”, and discover options for their lives. But there are those who have no options, who know for sure, and by the very definition of “special”, the truly gender-variant child is rare and unique–and every bit as real and true and deserving of praise and support as any other child who knows who they are and what they will be.

Every bit as real and truthful and special as that ballerina.

Karin