An Australian Child who will start kindergarten schooling next year, “has identified as transgender” said Gregory Prior, an education department official in Australia.
Government records in Australia’s New South Wales have also revealed “hundreds” of other children are reporting gender dysphoria – a condition of feeling that their emotional and psychological identity is the opposite of their biological sex.
Some of these children are as young as three years old.
The state education department will support the four-year-old throughout the transition as part of a ‘Safe Schools’ program.
Officials, family and even media are ensuring that the child’s privacy protected by not identifying the patient’s name or gender.
And this case of the four-year-old has sparked a debate among psychologists and gender dysphoria experts. Experts say many children who identify with a gender opposite to their biological one tend to grow out of it as they age.
On the four-year-old, some therapists argued the patient was “simply too young” to change gender, but a transgender advocate told the Daily Telegraph that children were “usually right” when they identified themselves as cross-gender.
Early research shows children develop stability in their gender identity between ages 3 to 4, but gender consistency (recognition that gender remains the same across situations) often does not occur until ages 4 to 7.
