For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

-- Jesus, from Matthew 19:12, King James Version.

However, the transsexuals I knew were all adults when they decided. A new and emerging (and controversial) treatment is changing that, by interrupting and shortcircuiting the process of sexual maturation:

The preferred drug for the controversial process is Lupron Depot. Slogan for the pediatric version: "Pause the child within." It's potent, yet reversible, and incredibly expensive, and for transgender kids backed by increasingly supportive parents, it's ushering in a new era. Boys who've always known they were girls won't get beards or deep voices. Girls who feel like boys will never have to grow breasts or tinker with a tampon.

Long prescribed to temporarily stave off puberty in kids who start developing too young, the drug blocks the brain's release of the compound that triggers the chain of hormonal reactions, body mutations, and moody angst. Now an unknown number of doctors in the Bay Area, the country, and across the globe are following the lead of a fledgling treatment pioneered at a Dutch clinic that's sparked debate in medical and ethical circles alike. The Dutch clinicians are suspending kids in physical childhood to buy them time to decide if they wish to begin the sexual reassignment process. If so, after a few years of continued psychological monitoring, they can start hormones to induce an "opposite-sex puberty." If not, the teen can stop taking the periodic Lupron injections and appear to develop normally, as kids treated with the drug for early puberty have for years.

While opponents of sex change surgery are generally stereotyped as religious, certain radical feminists oppose it too. And the high rate of dissatisfaction with the results confirms the anecdotal evidence with which I'm familiar.

Too many times, I think people feel pressured into accepting the premise that it is "wrong" for a man to be like a woman, or vice versa, and that they gravitate towards a surgical solution in order to be "normal." (And conforming.) Considering that this occurs in adults, how could anyone predict what might be happening with a child? Might this same "desire to be normal" be even more overwhelming in children? Back to SF Weekly:

Some doctors say kids need to experience puberty to truly know if they're misplaced in their bodies, and warn that the long-term side effects of diverting nature's route are still unknown. A few doctors believe medicine should never intervene to change a person's body to match gender identity, no matter the age -- what one transwoman doctor dubbed the "you should be what God made you regardless of how miserable you are" camp. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who spearheaded the closure of the sexual reassignment clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1970s, is an appointee to the President's Council on Bioethics. He calls the Lupron treatment "a modern form of child abuse."

Indeed, some U.S. doctors don't seem to be clamoring for attention. Norman Spack at Children's Hospital Boston, who has supported the treatment in a medical article and on ABC's 20/20, declined to comment for this story. A doctor at Kaiser Permanente identified by a Bay Area family as their son's provider of the Lupron treatment also would not speak. But Schreier of Children's Hospital Oakland says he's not worried: "What we're doing is based on data, not based on emotions or religious beliefs."

All seem to agree on one issue: No matter how reversible Lupron may be, when studies indicate that the vast majority of kids with some gender-variant behavior in childhood will grow out of it, how do you block puberty in the right kids?

When she saw an astronaut, politician, or athlete on the TV, she said, "I want to do that!" "Of course you can!" the mothers would answer. She ignored dolls, but loved trucks. Somewhere around age two and a half, Marty refused to raise her arms when her mother tried to put a dress on her, the first time she'd ever rejected an outfit. One day out of the blue, she looked her mother in the eye and asked, "When is it my turn to be a boy?"

With studies showing anywhere from 75 to nearly 90 percent of children with gender-variant behavior will eventually be comfortable with their biological sex, tight screening is key.

I'm skeptical about this, because it strikes me as the epitome of what many activists would condemn as "gender normative."

It begs the question of whose gender normativeness is to be considered normative. I'd like to think that there are parents out there who might be brave enough to defy the normal gender normative narrative, and simply reassure their children that there's no rule saying that just because you want to be a woman you should remove your dick, or that just because you want to be a man you should remove your breasts.

Of course, I'm not telling anyone what they should do.

This whole thing begs the question of what is conformity.

While it may sound politically counterintuitive, there's even an indication that some transgendered activists are uneasy about the possibility of such early treatments wiping out transgenderism!

After living 17 years as a male, followed by years of hormones to transition, Alexis Rivera of the Transgender Law Center says she decided to go off hormones and settle into a space somewhere between male and female, and now at 29, has proudly done so.

"If medical technology keeps advancing, are we going to eradicate transgenderism?" Rivera asks. "The younger the transition starts, the younger you start socializing a biological female as a boy, they're not going to have that transgender identity. They're not going to have to walk this earth as their genetic sex."

UPDATE: My thanks to Clayton Cramer for the link. His additional observations are also worth reading.