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Every few weeks, Aidan Key might get a call: a little boy in school is dressing as a girl — in frilly tops or pink skirts. A girl in first-grade will be returning from a holiday break as a boy.
Public- and private-school administrators and the parents of these kids want guidance navigating such sensitive terrain; they want to help children become comfortable calling a classmate by a new name, or know how and when to refer to another student as he or she.
There was a time when these calls were almost exclusively about middle- and high-school kids. But increasingly they involve children as young as kindergartners — 5- and 6-year-olds who don't believe their bodies match who they feel they are inside.Pioneering Gay Pakistani Muslim Poet Dies at 64.
Key turns to a simple — but familiar — narrative: "When I was your age," he tells them, "I was a girl.
"Everybody saw me as a girl and I looked like a girl. But inside that's not how I felt. I felt I was a boy, so when I got older I worked with a doctor. We call that being transgender."
Lisa Love, health-education specialist with Seattle Public Schools, said the district is seeing more children in elementary schools struggling with gender identity.
And over the last decade or so, the parents of a growing number of these kids have sought guidance from Seattle Children's hospital, the associate director of psychiatry there said.
Experts say young children have always had these feelings, but only in recent years as society has become more accepting of gender differences have they felt more free to express them."A lot of my adult clients had these feelings when they were quite young," said Jana Ekdahl, a Seattle psychotherapist who works with many transgender people.
"But 20, 30, 40 years ago, you didn't know why you were feeling that way, but you knew it was wrong to say anything. You just knew it."
So many parents have been seeking answers and guidance that four years ago Key began a monthly support group at Children's that now draws some 50 families.At the same time, he expanded a conference he'd started in 2001 for transgender people to include a concurrent conference for families.