A long time ago I wrote the book God Bless the Child. At the end of the book the parents, therapist, and doctors decide to perform SRS on a 4 year old child because they feared that she would do irreversible and potential fatal damage to herself. The negative response I seem to get the most is that this is child abuse and I'm wondering if it is?
Is it child abuse
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Dont answer if you haven't read the book
Seriously, in context, it was a reasonable and rational decision. Cutting off a child's leg would be child abuse unless it was the alternative to the child dying of gangrene.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I read it when you first posted it here
I agree ABSOLUTELY, Erin.
On its face, it (the SRS at such an early age) would be abuse but in the full context of the story it was necessary to save the GIRL'S life.
That she is so well adjusted as the years pass is proof they did the right and loving thing.
To those who have not read the tale and the sequels, it is important to keep the following important points in mind.
I'll try to say this without spoiling things too much.
From as far back as the child can remember, they were at best woefully ignored and far too often abused. On top of this and of the tragedy that led to the child's rescue, the child always felt wrong as a boy and right as a girl.
This is skipping a lot and skims over a great deal of other clues but IMHO the SRS saved her life.
Mind you hers is an extreme case, a horror tale that slowly, in fits and starts, ends up a near fairy princess ending. But it is one that would not have happened without the medical intervention.
There is far more to this tale than I can describe here. There are parts of the tale that may make you uncomfortable. I was. But I am referring to dark times in the child's life.
There are acts of great kindness/love and people who act out of prejudice, fears, even out of hate/evil.
Not a happy bunnies and kitties tale but a real world, edge of despair, coming to the light kind of tale.
I am all the richer for having stuck to *my guns* and read it though.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
ignoring the buildup
The key is the context of the story as you set it up to be a strong buildup and not something they undertook on a whim. She already tried to mutilate herself and made it clear she was going to continue doing the same. They had help from experienced psychiatrists and doctors who supported the action. They tried every other means of avoiding it but were left with doing nothing and potentially allowing her to kill herself through the mutilation or suicide. They chose to relieve her mental anguish and accepted the consequences of their decision, they wouldn't have done it if there was no other way of doing so.
The idiocy of the complaints is you wrote an entire book dealing with the aftermath of that decision, including how their friends and people they thought of as family reacted. But why would critics let that stand in the way of trying to make you feel bad about what you wrote?
I'm told STFU more times in a day than most people get told in a lifetime
Being self aware at age 4
I distinctly remember sitting with the family around a puffing, hopping, overheated wood stove in 1951 rural Oregon and looking at my stepfather and brothers and then looking at my mother and sister and deciding I was like the women after having almost stomach turning distaste for the men. I knew I was a woman then. I have heard similar stories many times over the years.
The sole issue with the story is that a 4 year old does not have sufficient pelvic development to make full SRS feasible. However, I can most certainly understand a radical castration if only because of my own sentiment. Prepubescent children start getting certain amounts of compounds from the pea sized Pituitary gland that prepare the gonads and ovaries to make testosterone and estradiol in their correct proportions. I have often wondered about preparation for SRS at very early ages. Though I have not heard of it, there are groups that begin to prepare children for gender change very early should they exhibit cross gender preferences. Perhaps they could eventually begin to administer those early compounds.
In my own childhood, I still remember being conditioned to be female while still in diapers, and having a female birth name. Most of the public might see it as child abuse, but I most certainly do not.
Khadijah Gwen
child abuse
NO, never this child would have mutilated himself. this was shown in the story. because srs was done the child went on to fulfilling life.
rj
I usually don't comment publicly
But I wanted to show my support. "God Bless the Child" is a beautiful story of redemption and triumph. Her parents loved her so much and were strong enough to do the right thing for her in the right ways. There is NO WAY that this was child abuse.
BitStream
ty
Thanks everyone for commenting.. I guess I have a thin skin and every anti-trans idiot rushes to call my work child abuse. I should've known it would happen, the ending was designed to be shocking.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
In the context of fiction all
In the context of fiction all things are plausible. However, I've yet to discover a case of self mutilation at a pre-pubescent age. Most self-mutilations in children occur with the onset of puberty. Indeed the reality is that no Western country allows SRS at such a young age under any circumstances. Intersexed surgeries were once fairly common in infancy. But even that has been abandoned as a method of treatment until at least the onset of puberty (between 8-12 years of age). If you know of such a case of SRS being performed at such a young age, I'd be most interested in the reference.
May You Know Peace...
Kelly
Just because...
Just because something ISN'T done doesn't necessarily mean it SHOULDN'T be done. Take same-sex marriage as a prime example. Still plenty of places that isn't done, right? But definitely something that SHOULD be done.
Katie's question here is not one of law, but of ethics. That's should, not is.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if that's what a person really truly feels they are, even at such a young age, and they really WOULD self-mutilate without it, then hell yeah, help that person be who they are. The story established a pattern of self-mutilation, established that the child really truly felt they ought to be a girl, and so, in my mind, the ethics are good. It would have caused her far more harm to do nothing than to provide her the SRS she clearly needed.
I have a feeling cases of self-mutilation probably happen in the real world but get covered up. Being transgender is still "wrong" after all, so no parent wants to admit they had a trans kid that killed themselves over it trying to "fix" themselves. As it is, we DO hear about some transgender children who commit suicide, even though it's still more common to only hear about the adult ones, and the ones who we do find out about, the parents still try to deny and cover it up, it's just getting harder for them to hide things with the information age.
Abigail Drew.
Premise for God Bless the Child
The idea behind GBTC started with a simple question. Under what set of circumstances would a young child be given SRS and the story revolved itself around that question even though people might not see it right away. There have been numerous cases where children have threatened to do bodily harm to themselves because they didn't like their anatomy. If you read a lot of the cases of the current crop of transgender children in public you will read about suicidal 6 year olds and 4 year olds threatening to change their anatomy on their own.
Now, I don't know of any case of SRS in a child. The point of the story was one of creating dialog about it. If it meant a child's life would you do the unthinkable?
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life