When an 11-year-old Canadian girl goes back to school this week it will be the first time many of her classmates will have seen her as a boy. “It's like you're trapped inside someone else's body that you don't want to be in,” she told CTV News. The Canadian child was born a girl but, because of her family, she is ready to start life as the gender she believes she should have been born as. Teachers and fellow pupils are aware of her transformation and when she starts at her Edmonton school she will use the boy's locker rooms and toilets.
While in the US, a mother candidly details her family's experience of “raising a boy who is a girl at heart” in a new book titled, “Raising My Rainbow.” The author from Orange County, California, tells how her six-year-old son, loves dressing in girls' clothes, practicing his “fashion walk” in front of the mirror and prefers sewing to playing soccer. In an interview with “Today,” to mark the release of her book, she said her biggest fear for her son “is his safety outside of the home because I know people can be rude and have really negative reactions to him.”
Back in Canada, a weepy mom tells how her son: “…never acted like a boy, playing with dolls and dressing up as a fairy princess instead of rambunctiously crashing toy cars into each other.” She goes on to warn: “A child who is transgender is already going through trauma, being forced to live a role that is not them.” The mother is currently involved in a law suit against the private religious school her son attended. She contends that the school did little to accommodate her son’s gender identity.
All of these cases are eerily similar to the symptoms of childhood onset schizophrenia. “Schizophrenia is characterized by profound disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self. The array of symptoms, while wide ranging, frequently includes psychotic manifestations, such as hearing internal voices…” In some cases, the parents of these children also exhibit some indications of schizophrenia, including: “Paranoid delusions, or delusions of persecution, for example believing that people are ‘out to get’ you, or the thought that people are doing things when there is no external evidence that such things are taking place.”
According to Fr. Jose Antonio Fortea, a world renowned expert on demonology, many forms of mental illness, including schizophrenia, can mimic the symptoms of demonic possession. “Demons can tempt us, and they sometimes do so in a continuous way with great intensity. As such, a demon could provoke an obsession, phobia, depression, or another type of mental illness in a person. This can seriously disturb a person’s ordinary life to the point of making him unbalanced,” said Fr. Fortea. In fact, as reported in a survey (2010) conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: 41% of transgender people in the US have attempted suicide.