The boy says to his mom, “If you want girl parts, and you don’t have them, you can do special surgery where they turn your penis inside out and there is a vagina inside.”
The boy is six years old.
He also tells his mom that hormones can give you girl parts.
“Where did you hear this?”
“I saw it on a video.”
The boy is six years old. Someone told him these mythological tales from the place called Transland. There is a vagina hidden inside a penis. Hormones can give you girl parts.
This was one of the most chilling scenes in the new documentary Dead Name that tells three stories from this place of unremitting sadness and even madness.
The boy Jonas told someone in pre-school that he was a girl. The pre-school swung into ideological action.
They invited parents to come in and celebrate this new girl. The pre-school stopped calling him Jonas and began referring to him as Rosa. All of this was done without his mom’s permission. In fact, it was done without her knowledge. She went to the school and discovered that the new name Rosa was on everything belonging to her boy, including his cubby. Let this sink in. This happened in pre-school.
The mom went to a therapist who said, as these modern-day witchdoctors are wont to do, “you have to learn to accept this.”
What is revealed is that Jonas was also the center of a custody battle between his mom and her lesbian lover. At the lover’s house, Jonas was a girl named Rosa. At his mom’s house, he was a boy named Jonas. It is unlikely that this messed up homelife was ever discussed with the therapist. Two moms? Custody battle? This is a recipe for utterly confusing a six-year-old boy.
Even today, it appears the boy is called both Rosa and Jonas. His mother worries what will become of him. She worries he might become a psycho.
Dead Name also examines the life of a boy named Sean. He was a guitar player and a hockey player. His mom got the family a tea set for Christmas. Sean used one of the teacups as a tee to kick a football. All boy.
Stricken with cancer as a child, Sean had to suffer an amputation of one leg. Three years later, he came down with leukemia. Later he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. His older brother died of a heroin overdose. His mother died.
In the depths of these crises and this chaos, Sean decided he was a girl. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, he began living with a group of women who had drunk deeply from the draughts of trans. Sean became obsessed with cross-sex hormones. An endocrinologist said they could kill him.
In fact, Sean did die. His father is certain he died from the hormones. The school said he was an adult and could do what he wanted.
