Transgender children: what’s behind the spike in numbers?

Oliver Geoghegan sips hot chocolate as he strives to explain the confounding question of his gender.
 

“I’m not 100 per cent a boy. I’m not 100 per cent a girl and I’m not 50-50,” the 10-year-old says, enjoying the slipperiness of his answer. He draws an imaginary line down the middle of the table where we sit on the deck of his Canberra home. “If there are girls here,” he gestures to the left hand side, “and boys there,” he sweeps across to the right, “then I’d be here.” He stops just short of the far edge, deep inside the realm of masculinity. “I would count myself 85 per cent a boy and the other,” he pauses to calculate, “15 per cent is more like, different, not a girl, just different.”