Tommy Lobel is an 11 year old boy who wants to be a girl – and his adoptive lesbian parents are giving him hormones to help.

The “two mums” Pauline Moreno and Debra Lobel live in California. They adopted Tommy at age 2, and say he declared he was a girl when he was 3. He now calls himself “Tammy”. His adoptive mums are giving him hormones to delay puberty so he has more time to think about changing his gender (Herald Sun, 18/10/11).

However critics say 11-year-olds are not old enough to make life-altering decisions about gender, and parents should not encourage them. “This is child abuse. It’s like performing liposuction on an anorexic child,” said Dr Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

“It is a disorder of the mind, not a disorder of the body. Dealing with it in this way is not dealing with the problem that truly exists. We shouldn’t be mucking around with nature. We can’t assume what the outcome will be.”

Dr Sotirios Sarantakos of Charles Stuart University studied children brought up in same-sex couple families, comparing them with children raised by two natural unmarried parents. The parents were carefully matched for education and socio-economic status. [see ref. 1.]

Dr Sarantakos found that children raised by their natural married parents did better than the others on almost every measure. Children raised by same-sex couples generally did worse.

Teachers noted that sexual identity was a problem area for some children raised in same-sex couple families. They were more effeminate and “more confused about their gender” than other children. [Read more…]