Body check
Nick was at his third birthday party when he realised he was a boy in a girl’s body. “I had a butterfly cake. I vividly remember looking at the cake and thinking, ‘I don’t like the look of this. It’s all pink and girlie.”
His certainty about his gender identity has never wavered. Now 13, Nick is one of a burgeoning number of adolescents being prescribed medication to prevent the onset of puberty in a gender they don’t see as their own.
“If I wasn’t on puberty blockers, I’d see myself as somebody who is trying so hard to be a man but is stuck in a woman. Sometimes, I’d think, ‘What if I just stopped blockers and lived as a woman?’ I don’t think I’d have a happy life. I’d be sad and I’d be stressed. I wouldn’t be happy.”
Nick is looking forward to starting treatment with male hormones when he is 16. Until then, he will receive injections every three months to keep puberty at bay. He finds the injections painful, and before each one, there’s a period of reckoning, says his mother, journalist Sharon Fergusson. “It always comes back to the choice that we stop the blockers because the needles are painful and Nick continues living as a boy but has to deal with breasts and periods and hips.” At that point, she says, Nick always says no.
“I’d do anything to be a boy,” he says. “I get injections to be a boy, but I hate injections. I’m going to go this far just to be me. Some people think that being LGBTQ+ is a choice, that one day we wake up and say, ‘I think I’m trans, I think I’m a boy and I’m just going to become a boy.’ They think one day people can just decide they are this or that. But it’s a feeling you feel deep down, that this is what I am. It is not a choice.”
For some gender specialists, cases such as Nick’s are straightforward because his gender identity appears to have been set from an early age. For others, though, the realisation can dawn suddenly at puberty or later, leading some transgender critics to suggest it can result from peer-group pressure and social-media trawling, rather than anything innate, and that puberty blockers and hormone treatment are ill-advised.
BUYING TIME
The issue of adolescent gender transition was thrust into the legal and political spotlight in December when the
