Dear Abby,
Happy weekend to you too. Congratulations for successfully venturing where eagles dare not fly, where the lion dare not hunt. Apparently it is the exclusive preserve of psychology to delve into these issues and your treatment of the challenges could not have been more balanced if you placed them on a scale.

As usual, I would like to contribute to these debates from a personal standpoint. Unfortunately for me, in this case, I am biased. I am a black African, born in a Christian family, taught that the Christ was God and he died for my sins. My views in these matters are bound to reflect that of many people from my part of the world. But, and that is a very big BUT: before I was an African, black, Christian, or Muslim, I was intelligent and a sceptic and most of my belief system has come to be based on what I have figured out to be true based on my experience, the experience of others and empirical evidence.

Having said all that, I must begin by stating that I believe traits developed through thousands of years of evolution and natural selection to be largely responsible for the behaviour of both primates male and female offerings and human male and female offspring. Even before they are born, most mothers talk about how a male foetus kicked harder than the female. As they grow up, they naturally tend to take more rusks, leave home earlier, seek earlier independence from parents and so on. Some people would insist that it is nurturing and expectations that is responsible for this state of affairs, rather than argue with them, I prefer to agree with them and use the same argument to support something else: That some of these issues are prominent because of the information we have exposed children to.

There is no arguing it, the environment, expectations and the information a child is exposed to are not sufficient for Sebastian to think she is Camille. There must be some chemical or hormonal and perhaps psychological conditions that predates Camille's conviction that she is a girl and not a boy. But these also, are not enough for her to make the assertion. The supportive environment, the media, the community, the social environment are all things that enables her figure out what is going on with her and how to tell her loved ones about it. This my view of this issue comes from my life experience: I was born in a small town in South-east Nigeria. From when we were very little, we heard tales of the people that had been before us. We were told folk tales imbued with lessons. We heard mythology tales with their own lessons. There was no single tale of a boy that was born with male genitals but who has a right to say that she is a girl because she feels that way!

This is not to insist that in the entire history of the people, a situation such as the one described concerning Camille had never occurred, but it is to suggest that perhaps it had occurred but was swept under the rug as an abomination or worse, the individuals involved struggled through life to live a gender they did not feel they belonged to. They end up surviving and never really living.

I am convinced that this is the case because I have also lived in the major cities of my country. Not too surprisingly, it is easier to encounter teenagers acting out genders which differ from their nature. Of course due to religious and the "abomination" proclamation, these people cannot publicly say how they really feel and which gender they identify as. Here, people can't deal with anything other than the traditional, stereotypical, and narrow classification of gender so much so that identifying a gender that us perceived to be in disagreement your nature could easily earn a person 14 years in jail and this is by law!

In summary, I think there is need to balance societal and parental involvement in a child's identity with a particular gender especially when this is in disagreement with the child's body. In this case, we should not rush to "support" reassignment and other "help" that doctors and other professionals render on hearing the child proclaim their gender. The child should grow old enough to initiate some of the processes they need by themselves. On the other hand, we should not be too rigid in our believe of what is or what should be especially due to our religious beliefs and moral background.

Well, Abby, this is not my field so I may be completely wrong in my observations but this is how I see it. The things that made Camille feel like Camille are biological, psychological, environmental, political and societal and it is neither right nor wrong. The only thing that needs to be watched closely is the way the adults in his life interfere or support.

Thank you, Abby for such an important topic. Like wine, you get better (but I hope, not more expensive :)) with time!