12-Year-Old Boy Becomes 14-Year-Old Girl, World's Youngest Sex Change Patient

Even at the age of two, Tim insisted he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body.

And when puberty began to approach at the age of 12, he convinced his parents that something had to be done.

With their agreement, he became the youngest sex-change patient in the world, receiving hormone injections which arrested his male development.

Now, at 14, Tim has become Kim – a blue-eyed blonde with a growing bust line who is allowed to wear make-up at weekends.

She has no boyfriends at present but her parents say she is interested in what, now, is the opposite sex.

Her treatment, which has cost £18,000 so far, is being funded by the German taxpayer.

Psychiatrists treating her say she was an ‘exceptional case – a person clearly in the wrong body’, even though the decision to grant her wishes when she was so young is still the subject of intense debate.

Her identity and medical insurance cards have been changed to her new name and sex.

But she has not been placed at a different school in case of taunting from children who knew her as him in days gone by because, according to her parents, ‘her friends fully accept her as she is’.

She dresses in trendy clothes and told Germany’s Stern magazine that she ‘dreams of moving to Paris to become a fashion designer’.

The family’s full identity has not been made public. But Kim’s father, known as Lutz P, told Stern that as a child, Tim liked to play with Barbie dolls, enjoyed wearing dresses and, from the age of two, insisted that he was a girl.

‘We saw Kim as a girl, but not as a problem. Our life was surprisingly normal.’

Kim reacted badly to the first signs of puberty, he said.

‘At that stage we realised that she was terrified of growing facial hair and her voice breaking.’

Kim’s parents consulted psychiatrists across Germany.

Some condemned their support of their child’s desire to undergo a sex change, or suggested that she be kept under observation in a closed psychiatric ward.

But others agreed that the child should receive therapy, because growing up to be a man would have damaged her personality.

Dr Bern Meyenburg, the head of a clinic for children and adolescents with identity disturbances at Frankfurt University, concluded that the child was serious.

He wrote in his diagnosis: ‘Kim is a mentally well-developed child who appears happy and balanced.

‘There is no doubt of the determined wish, which was already detectable since early childhood. It would have been very wrong to let Kim grow up to be a man.

‘It is rare to have such a clear-cut case.’

The sex change will not become complete for another four years because while German law does not forbid hormone treatment for minors, they must be 18 before gender-transforming surgery can be carried out.

Dr Achim Wuesthof, who is treating Kim at a clinic in Hamburg, said: ‘To the best of my knowledge, Kim is the youngest sex-change patient in the world.

‘Imagine a man who suddenly starts growing breasts or a woman who starts growing a beard against their will – that is how Kim and people like her experience puberty.’

The UK’s youngest sex-change patient was Oliver Wheadon, from Wigton, Cumbria. He was 17 when he was granted the operation on the NHS four years ago and is now known as Angel Paris- Jordan.

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]