At eight years old, Josie is on the path to having a complete sex change.
Pretty Josie Romero adores the colour pink, braiding her hair and having her fingernails painted.
Life has not always been easy for this sweet, charming eight-year-old, though. She was born in the body of a boy.
The transgender youngster knew at the age of four she was the wrong sex and told her parents, “I am really a girl.”
By the time she reached six, Josie, who was born Joseph, had convinced everyone. She was diagnosed as transgender and is now beginning her transition to becoming female.
“Josie was born prematurely at 27 weeks and had a very difficult time as a baby,” her mother Venessia, 42, says.
“As a toddler, she was trying to turn her boy toys into girl toys. She would take her army figures, wrap them up and rock them like a baby. As she grew older, she always said, ‘I’m a girl.’ My husband Joseph and I would correct her and say, ‘No, you’re a boy.’ By the age of four, she was insisting, ‘No, I really am a girl.’”
Some families work hard to persuade their kids to conform to their biological gender, but Venessia and Joseph, 42, an engineer in the US air force, made the hard choice to say goodbye to their little boy and help their daughter live as the girl she wanted to be.
“We accepted Josie was a bit different from the time she was born,” Venessia says. “After about six months something clicked and I thought, ‘Oh, we have a gay boy.’ We were totally fine with that. We thought, ‘As long as our child is happy.’”
Meanwhile, Josie was trying to braid her short blond boy’s curls into plaits. By the time she was five, she refused to have her hair cut and had curls falling around her face. She would also insist on wearing colours like orange because
it was the nearest to pink.
Read the full story in Woman's Day (on sale November 16, 2009)
