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11-Year-Old Girl to be Institutionalized Because TRAAAAANS!

Posted by on Jan 31, 2012 in World | 12 comments

A desperate plea from an 11-year-old transgender girl in Germany has lit up the interwebs today. Her father, backed by an anti-gay organization, intend to commit her to a mental institution in the impossible hope of changing her gender identity through internationally denounced quack medicine.

A Change.org petition, while hardly legally binding, may be this young girl’s only shot at avoiding horribly destructive psychiatric “therapy” for the next seven years of her life.

Pink News reports:

According to a statement released by IGLYO yesterday, the girl, elsewhere identified only as “Alex” (Alexandra) lives with her mother, who supports her gender expression. However, the girl’s father, divorced and separated from her mother, strongly rejects this view of his daughter’s gender identity and wants to force her to grow up as a boy.

If all else fails, there is a real and present possibility that pressure from her father, supported by the Youth Welfare Office in Berlin, means that Alex will shortly be confined in a closed ward of a psychiatric institution to ensure that “he” returns to “normality”.

This is despite the fact that Alex claims, in an interview published earlier this month in online lifestyle magazine taz.de, that she has identified as female for as long as she can remember. She is accepted as female at school, and has been registered as such from her earliest days there.

Pretty, pretty please take twenty seconds to lend your support to Alex and sign the petition to keep her out of a psychiatric ward for the foreseeable future. While we lack the ability to swoop in and rescue her ourselves, we possess the power to shame her father and the inaptly named Youth Welfare Office into changing their minds.

(via UB reader Nick)