Childrens Books

Catherine Tuerk first noticed that her son was different from typical boys about 30 years ago. At age 4, he began to be oversensitive, to show disdain for roughhousing and to prefer girl playmates. She felt afraid that he might become gay or transsexual and that she might have done something to cause her son's "problem." Mental health professionals told her that her son could be "fixed," so she and her husband put him through years of psychotherapy to make him more "masculine."

It seemed to work. Tuerk's son began doing stereotypical boy things--pretending to like football, for example. Then he came out to her at age 20, noting that his parents' misguided efforts to make him straight had caused him years of self-doubt and denial. "That's when I realized that everything I had been told by professionals was wrong or harmful to him and our family," says Tuerk, a registered nurse and psychotherapist.

Tuerk learned that many gay men who had been "gentle and sensitive" boys had experienced painful childhoods because of their atypical gender behavior. They were stigmatized at an early age by the outside world and often by their families. Though Tuerk couldn't change the course she set for her son in the early 1970s, she could help parents of young gender-variant children learn to accept their children's atypical interests and possible homosexuality.

To do that, in 1999, she co-founded a support group for these parents, which includes a separate play group for their children, with child psychiatrist Edgardo Menvielle, MD, who counsels gender-variant children at Children's National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C.--the project's sponsor. They enlisted clinical psychologist Gregory Lehne, PhD, an expert on children's gender issues and an assistant professor of medical psychology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, as their adviser. Deborah Elliott, a psychology doctoral student at George Washington University, runs the children's group.

"These families are not likely to meet each other in real life," says Menvielle. "It's unlikely that they're going to have a friend or relative with a similar child. They feel very isolated. Like other people facing unusual and challenging situations, these parents feel truly understood when they finally can talk with another parent of a gender-variant child."

Understanding gender variance

In the 1970s and 1980s, parents of gender-variant children had even fewer chances to connect with other parents. They were more likely to try to change their children than to learn to accept them. Back then, some mental health professionals theorized that children with persistent and multiple