PBS explores 'Growing Up Trans'

FRONTLINE: GROWING UP TRANS. 10 p.m. Tuesday, WHYY12.

Nine-year-old Daniel is worried about his changing body. "I've been feeling a little weird," he tells an interviewer.

Propped up in bed, clutching one of several stuffed animals, he adds, "I stay up a lot of nights talking with my parents about it."

"To develop breasts would be horrifying for him," says his father.

But as PBS' "Frontline" reports tomorrow in the thoughtful and provocative "Growing Up Trans," there are options for children like Daniel that mean they don't have to go through the puberty of a gender they don't consider their own.

As long as they move fast.

Puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones for people still in their teens: It's a brave new world, and one not without risks, filmmakers Karen O'Connor and Miri Navasky discovered as they followed eight transgender children and teens where no generation before them has gone before.

"Frontline" isn't known for quick-hit documentaries, and the pair started their research a year and a half ago, long before Caitlyn Jenner was a trending topic.

Navasky "has small kids, and she was seeing kind of more gender nonconforming kids," said O'Connor in a phone interview last week. "It kind of started to bubble up" as a potential topic for the pair, whose previous films include explorations of assisted suicide, end-of-life choices and the funeral business.

They were both also reading about "these new possibilities that opened with medication that became available," she said.

It's not all about the medicine. Sites like YouTube have given kids, who once might not even have had a name for their feelings, both information and support. (One online star, a teenage transgender activist named Jazz Jennings, will star in her own TLC docuseries, "I Am Jazz," starting July 15.)

"It's probably a generational shift, parenting, a growing realization of what it is" that's also made it easier for children who identify as the opposite sex get taken seriously, O'Connor said.

"They're living as the opposite sex at 6 or 7 . . . long before puberty, so that's a new piece of it that didn't exist before as well. It's not just wearing [certain clothes], it's actually living as the opposite sex," she said.

Lia, a 9-year-old who describes herself as a "girl stuck in a boy's body," reports that she's changed "my name, my clothes, my room and my pronouns," and now just needs "surgery and medicine to help me look like a girl."

Thirteen-year-old Ariel was still Ian until age 11, and says her life has gotten easier since she went from being a "gender nonconforming" boy to a girl.

"Me turning into a man is just probably the most horrifying thing ever," she says. For now, she won't have to, thanks to the hormone-blockers she calls a "life saver."

The medication means that Ariel "won't be a Bruce Jenner because she'll never go through male puberty, so she won't ever have an Adam's apple . . . or wide shoulders and all those things," said O'Connor, adding that Ariel's being able to "pass" as a girl could bring its own complications.

Complications are very much on the minds of the adults - parents, doctors and therapists - and the film is as much about what we don't know as about what we do.

There's a nuanced statement of something approaching regret from a 19-year-old named Isaac, who transitioned in middle school, and now thinks of taking a break from testosterone.

"It's comfortable," he says of what he calls his "manufactured" body, "but also, not really my body."

Not every parent in the film is as accepting as Daniel's father and mother.

"I feel in a sense like something's been robbed . . . my daughter's gone," says one father who still hopes that the child he can't yet call "John" will return to being a girl.

"Miri and I would go back and forth," debating some of the issues, O'Connor said.

"It's also kind of easy . . . to sit back and kind of quarterback it. We all do it, instinctively. And then I found these parents relatable in ways, and I understood their struggle," she said.

"What would you do outside of this issue - it is about transgender, but what would you do as a parent when you see your child in pain?"

Phone: 215-854-5950

On Twitter: @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray