This is super interesting. Eli's super crazy medical doctor mother basically forced troonery onto him. Mom also admits that he is autistic.
Erlick, Eli & Longchamp, Dr. Carla — Transgender Youth: One Family’s Experience Part One
From a transcript of part 1:
"Unfortunately, I still had to go through the ceremony, but I mean, I was so miserable there and so visibly miserable that they were willing to accept that this wasn't right for me and that I was, I needed to transition. And what happened, Carla, from your perspective? Well, from my perspective, when Eli was in 7th grade, I went to a conference on transgender health and I basically had my world turned upside down. I met physicians and lawyers and social workers and all kinds of wonderful people who were transgender who were married and successful and happy. And I also learned a lot of things. I heard stories from parents and from children about how their lives, how difficult their lives were until they were allowed to be who they were. I heard the statistic of the fact that transgender adults report a 41% rate of suicide attempts during their youth. I heard about medical treatment that if started early would delay the onset of puberty, very safe medical treatment so that children could be given some time to figure out where they lie in the gender spectrum and how they want to deal with it. So when Eli was in 7th grade, I came home, I literally had to corner her in a shower while she was taking a shower because she just didn't want to talk about transgender anything. And she would not listen to me.
She was clearly, completely embarrassed and ashamed to talk about her being transgender. So my perspective at that time was that I wanted to, I was going to accept her no matter what and I just wanted her to open up to me. And she was not able to open up at that time."
"But unfortunately, she got a message loud and clear that we were not going to allow her to transition. And so she refused to talk to the therapist about her gender identity, which was very difficult for all of us. It was also a time when we saw her go from a relatively happy-go-lucky child to an extremely withdrawn child. She stopped talking to us. She stopped talking to her teachers and her classmates. She lost all of her friends. She stopped going out to the playground during recess. She did not want to participate in anything, gymnastics and some of the other activities that she had been doing she withdrew from. And after about a year, she stopped correcting us.
And that was a time when she also started to refuse to go out with us, go to restaurants or shopping. Traveling with her became an absolute nightmare. She basically walked around with her hair over her head, with her hand over her face, and wouldn't talk to anybody. My dad, who lives back east, used to call her the shadow child, because if she, whenever we brought her back east, or when he was visiting us, she would stand in a corner of a room and not talk to anybody. If I had walked into a household with a child behaving like that,
I would have thought the child maybe was autistic. And this behavior continued, really, until ninth grade. Something happened that brought you together. So, yes, something shifted. And she had a little bit of a shift after eighth grade when she started to present a little bit more feminine, but still would not talk to us about her being transgender."
Mom used her status as a medical doctor to bypass proper diagnosis and medical safeguarding. Mom and Eli BOTH dmit that he did not meet the current standard of care:
"What that was like for you? Well, after years of being told that I wasn't able to present this way and that I wasn't a girl, I became very scared of discussing it because I knew that people
weren't very open to it. At some point, was there hormonal treatments that you, Carla, authorized and you, Eli, accepted or desired? Yes. After going to a gender spectrum conference
in Berkeley, I was able to finally talk to my parents about that and got on hormones, luckily,
right after turning 15. What did they do for you? Well, they certainly made me a lot more confident. I'm happy with the results. I don't really have much to say that pertains to them.
At the time, it was unfortunately not within the standards of care for a 15-year-old to be on hormones, so it was a bit difficult to find a doctor who was willing to prescribe them to me. Luckily, and coincidentally, one of my mom's old colleagues was actually very involved in trans health and was able to get them to me, which was really great. And a year or two afterward, the limitation on age for administering hormones to trans youth was actually overturned, which is really great.
His whole family sounds crazy.
"And for transgender students or transgender children, it's actually 41 percent. So that's a pretty important piece of information. And secondly, as a personal... My personal experience with family acceptance is that I was not at all sure how my father, who was a very conservative Christian, was going to respond when he learned that my daughter was transgender. And what he did when we told him that she was transgender is that he came right back at us and said, can I send her a welcome granddaughter card? And what we learned was that he obviously and very clearly knew how distressed my child was. And to suddenly understand that yes, there was a reason and yes, it was treatable and she was going to be happy and it was such a huge relief to him. And he is still a very conservative Christian. And my daughter has changed his life and his perspective."