Six-year-old Sophie says she has always known she's a girl. "I used to be Yoshi," she says. "But I didn't like being called Yoshi." And she didn't like being called a boy.
Sophie lives with her family in Bellingham, Wash. Her mother, Jena Lopez, says she started seeing the signs before Sophie turned 2.
"She'd say things like, 'I'm a she, not a he,' " Lopez says. "She would cry if we misgendered her. She'd become angry."
Sophie's parents didn't know what to do. They didn't know if this was just a phase, and they knew the statistics for transgender people are grim. Nearly all the research into transgender mental health shows poorer outcomes. Attempted suicide rates are nine times higher than for people overall, and rates of depression and anxiety are higher, too. But Sophie convinced them. "I proved it," she says.
There's very little data on children who have fully socially transitioned, says Kristina Olson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Olson got interested in the subject when a friend's 10-year-old was transitioning from male to female. Olson knew attitudes about transgender people were changing, both in society and in science.
[For more of this story, written by Gabriel Spitzer, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...ldrens-mental-health]
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