When Mimi and Joe Lemay’s baby was born in 2010, they heard the three words every parent waits to hear: “It’s a girl.” But by age two, their child Mia (now Jacob) was saying “I’m a boy.” Mimi hoped this “obsession with being a boy would go away,” but it only grew stronger.
Now, in a rare and candid interview, Joe and Mimi share in their own words why they decided to let their five-year-old transgender son Jacob transition and live publicly as a boy.
NBC News reports that Joe and Mimi reached that decision last year on the advise of a physician, when Jacob was four “to let him live as he has always identified – as a boy.”
According to NBC News, although some might think that is way too young an age to let a child transition, “many doctors who specialize in working with transgender children believe it’s right for certain kids — those who show a rock-solid and enduring belief in their gender identity.”
Dr. Michelle Forcier, an associate professor of pediatrics at Brown University School of Medicine, told NBC News that:
When kids are consistent, persistent, and insistent in a cross-gender identity — and wanting to be the other gender and wanting the other gender’s body parts or being very unhappy with the body parts they’re given — we consider those children very likely to go on and continue a transgender identity.
The biggest harm is to not do anything. When a kid is told, ‘I don’t see you,’ ‘I don’t hear you,’ ‘I don’t love you just the way you are,’ that’s a pretty powerful message about conditional love.
You can watch this amazing interview, below:
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