Transgender and coming out on Cape Breton

Six years ago Laurie Laderoute gave birth to twin girls. Today, if you ask her daughter Elin to describe herself, she says she has hair "that's blonde and kind of brown," brown eyes, and that she's a little girl.

Avan, her twin also has blonde hair, "except it's shorter because I got a haircut from my aunt." Avandescribes himself as a "little boy."

• Listen to Joan Weeks' Atlantic Voice documentary about shifting genders young people who feel they were born in the wrong body.

Laderoute, who lives in Sydney, says by the time the twins were toddlers it became clear that her daughter identified as a son.

"It probably wasn't until they were approximately 20 months to 24 months that we really started seeing noticeable differences while they were at their daycare facility, Laderoute says.

It would have been the time when they were being trained to use the washroom. They were in a mixed group of boys and girls, so as children do, they mimic one another, and while Elin wasn't interested, Avan was interested in (what)the boys were doing.

"And as we moved on he was very vocal even from two and a half ... about dressing in a masculine way."

Laderoute says at first they just watched and waited, handling issues as they came up. But by the time the twins were three and a half the differences were even more pronounced. She says people would refer to the twins as "the girls", something that didn't bother Elin.

"Avan was visibly frustrated. To an adult or to whomever, no matter who it was, he would kind of almost backlash at this individual if they were to address him as a girl."

Gender questioning

Dr. Suzanne Zinckteaches psychiatry at Dalhousie University and practices child and adolescent psychiatry at the IWK Health Centre. She also works with youth as part of the IWKtransgender health team.

She says it's becoming more common to see families coming in with very young children who are "gender questioning."Sometimes it's simply a case of children who likes things that are not traditionally associated with their gender.

But sometimes it's more than that.

"In other cases, even at a young age, some children do insist that they are their felt gender, and that can begin as early as two and three. I've heard stories of that several times, Zinck says.

And sometimes it's not until later, and that has to do more with everyone's individual path and also personality and whether or not the child's been allowed to explore their interests."

'I'd come to hate my body'

Gabe MacKinnon is from Catalone, Cape Breton. He is a 16-year old transboy who goes to Riverview Rural High School. He says his family has also been supportive of his decision to come out as a boy, even though they "could use more knowledge."

Growing up he says he didn't think much about his gender.

"But as I grew I'd come to hate my body more and more, I felt as if I didn't belong.I wasn't comfortable in my own skin and felt constantly as if I was suffocating. And I just felt as if I didn't fit inside the box of female."

MacKinnon says he has faced conflict and slurs, including former friends who would "grope" him in the bathroom.

"It's very hard, you're not even considered a person," he says.

People also express confusion because some days he looks more like a boy, other days more like a girl. But to those people he says: "I'm happy with myself, it's none of your business what I do. It's not your life and it's not your place to judge."

It's a sentiment that Madonna Doucette hopes to hear more often. Doucette is the LGBTQ education coordinator at the Ally Centre of Cape Breton. She facilitates a transgender support group in Cape Breton that has more than 80members.

"I can honestly say that there's something special happening here in Cape Breton," Doucette says. "We are galloping towards a momentum that's pushing room for people to come out and declare who they are, and the sheer number of trans-identified kids that are stepping out in schools, not just in high school but in junior high and elementary school is astounding."

Not an easy journey

But that doesn't make the journey easy. Doucette says the rates of depression and anxiety are extremely high in the trans-gender population.

"I've seen children rejected. I have teenagers crying on my shoulder just wanting their parents to accept them and to respect them. I've seen children failing out of school, couch surfing, drugs, self-harm, cutting. I see a lot of cutters. There does have to be some compassion and understanding from the people closest to the person going through this process."

Meanwhile, Laurie Laderoute says she believes that if she "normalizes" her child's decision to identify as male, despite being born female, more people will accept it.

"After we met with the school last spring we decided we were going to make a change in our family. We spoke with immediate family members, with his sibling and with his small community, being his teachers, that if we were going to embrace this and support our child that we would do it wholeheartedly. So we sat down with Avan and he more or less picked his name.

And based on that, based on small changes that we made such as pronouns, clothing,haircuts, bathing suits, we saw a child that went from being very frustrated to very liberated."