Vienna
— A boy believed to be the youngest sex change
patient in the world wants to bring forward the operation
two years.
The German youngster,
christened Tim and now called Kim, was allowed to start
hormone treatment at the age of 12.
Now aged 14, Kim told
Germany's Stern TV his dearest wish was to have the final
cosmetic surgery to remove male genitalia when he is
16.
Under German law the
operation can not take place until Kim is 18, which would
mean either a law change or travelling abroad.
Pictures of him on German
TV showed Kim looking like a typical teenage girl,
playing with strands of his long hair while seated in the
pink attic bedroom of his parents' house.
He keeps a piggybank
filled with change he has been saving for the operation -
since the age of five, even though all the costs so far
have been paid by the German National Health
Service.
When he was just two Tim
tried on his older sister's clothes and played with
Barbies. As soon as he could speak he told his parents
"I'm a girl" and later had a row where he declared he
wanted to "cut off my thing".
His father, named only as
Lutz P. for legal reasons, said they realised then it was
not just a phase and that the problem was
serious.
Kim's mother, who has not
been named, said: "If your child has a heart defect you
send him to a specialist, but when your child is
transsexual, everyone seems to have an
opinion."
Kim's family turned to
Dr. Bernd Meyenburg, head of a clinic for children with
identity disturbances at Frankfurt university. He has
studied transsexuality since the 1970s but said Kim was a
"real dilemma".
He said: "If we do
something about it, it's irreversible. And if we allow
nature to take its course, that too is irreversible." He
added however that: "it would have been a crime to let
Kim grow up as a man"
