![]() The business owner, Den Kirkwood-Tucker, explains via email that he operates a “community-based shop” and works carefully with each family to take into account the child’s “age and where they are in their transition.” It stocks underpants, packers and stand-to-pees for female to male transgender children aged three upwards. The company Ellie and Jake ended up purchasing from is TranZwear, based in San Francisco, California. ![]() “The problem I hit almost immediately is that you can’t get anything realistic in a kids’ size in Australia at all,” Ellie continues. He asked me repeatedly to do something about it and I didn’t know what to do about it at all. Ellie became aware that he was packing socks into his underwear. Jake’s problem gradually arose after he socially transitioned into a boy. “I’m an adult, married heterosexual woman who doesn’t have a child with a penis,” she says, “I don’t really know what children’s penises look like and yet I’ve had really explicit conversations with strangers about children’s penises.” Reflecting on her search to find her son appropriate products, Ellie describes her situation as “tragicomic.” This issue does have a lighthearted side, though. It prevents trans kids from participating in a lot of sport,” she says. “There’s a serious issue behind all of this. School bathrooms and sports activities can be hard to navigate for transgender kids, as these parents are painfully aware.Įllie points to the difficulty of female to male transgender children participating in sports like ballet, gym and swimming without a packer in their underwear. “It’s desperately important for him in order to feel comfortable and pass all the time,” Ellie says. The second type of item in the parcel will be a soft, washable “packer,” that gets sewn into underwear to create the outward appearance of male genitalia. “It was distressing him to point where he wasn’t going to the toilet at school,” she says. When Jake goes into a stall to urinate in the boys’ toilets at school, Ellie explains that he feels “very self conscious about the fact that he always has to sit down.” ![]() One is a so-called “stand-to-pee,” a silicone device that allows someone with female genitalia to stand up while urinating. The box from America that Ellie and Jake are expecting contains two types of items. Jake is a transgender boy who came out nearly a year ago. “That’s something else that just makes me aware of how weird and how covert this could seem to others.”Įven though Ellie desperately wants to help her son, she is the first to admit that it has been an emotional and mental challenge to “try to imagine what it may be like to need this so much.” “It appears perhaps that our order has been held up in customs,” Ellie says. Of course these days you can order anything online, but this isn’t like any other purchase his mum, Ellie, has ever made. For four weeks he’s been waiting for a parcel that seems as if it will never come. EVERY day, 11-year-old Jake* runs to the letterbox to check if the postman has been. ![]()
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