The 6-Year-Old Who Changed Legal Sex
By Genspect
Much has been written about the transgender movement being on the rise in the anglosphere and in wealthy, industrialised countries. When legislation was passed by the Scottish parliament, making it easier for people to change their legally recognised sex and subsequently blocked from becoming law by the UK government, there was a wealth of media attention. The same happened when Spain passed their self-id law, most commonly known as “trans law”. Given the location of most of the people writing about this issue and the language barrier, we could be forgiven for thinking that this is only happening in English-speaking countries and in what is broadly understood as the West. But there is more to this story.
Those who have been following this topic for a while will know that back in 2012, Argentina was the first country in the world to pass a law—called The Gender Identity Law—that allows people to change their legally recognised sex without undergoing any procedures, without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and without the involvement of the courts. Since the law was passed, Argentine citizens can go to a Civil Registry office and request that their name and legal sex be changed in their official identification documents. The process is merely bureaucratic and “confidential”, meaning that once the paperwork is done, others will not know the person’s previous name or legal sex. In 2021, then-president Alberto Fernández approved by decree a national identity card that includes non-binary as an option—it was the first country in Latin America to do so, joining countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A few weeks after the decree was signed, Alberto Fernández’s 26-year-old son applied for a national identity card with the non-binary legal sex marker.
The First “Trans Child” to be Recognised by Law
Luana Mansilla (born in 2007 as Manuel), who is now a teenager, has a (fraternal) twin brother. When the Mansilla boys were toddlers, their mother noticed gender non-conforming behaviour in Luana. This created tension in the family, with Luana’s father reportedly not agreeing with Luana’s “girly” interests and wanting Luana to show more interest in boyish things. Gabriela Mansilla, the boys’ mother, took Luana to many doctors and psychologists until she was introduced to the concept of the “transgender child”. Following this discovery, Luana’s mother found a psychologist who offered that Luana might actually be a “trans girl” as an explanation for the behaviours and interests the family had witnessed. Luana was 5 years old when Argentina’s Gender Identity Law passed. The Mansilla family wanted a new document with a female sex marker for Luana but their case was referred to a court which told the family that the child was too young and that they needed to wait until Luana’s 8th birthday. Luana’s mother, however, did not take this decision to be final and appealed to then-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who revoked the court’s decision and granted Luana new identification documents with a female sex marker in 2013. At 6 years old, Luana was the youngest child worldwide to have been granted a legal name and sex marker change. Gabriela Mansilla has since become a transgender rights activist. She went on to found an organisation called Infancias Libres (Free Childhoods) and to write a book called Yo Nena, Yo Princesa (Me Girl, Me Princess)* which was turned into a film in 2021. The film tells Luana’s story from birth until 2013 when Manuel became Luana as a new identity document was issued.
The film depicts Manuel/Luana’s story in soft pastels, it casts the mother as the kid’s defender, the father as the villain, Manuel/Luana as the victim, and trans identity (via a National Geographic documentary and later a big-city therapist) as the saviour. If the film (and the podcast where I first found out about this story) is to be believed, Luana’s dad hated that his little boy played with dolls and wasn’t interested in typical boys’ things. Luana’s behaviour concerns the family so much that they take him to a therapist who recommends “corrective” behaviour therapy, i.e. trying to get Luana to be interested in boys’ things and prohibiting the kid’s interaction with the things he liked, such as dressing up “like a girl”. While Argentina boasts of being the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage back in 2010, it appears that casual hostility towards homosexuality is still pervasive in Argentina and the region. The data are difficult to interpret because studies tend to lump together LGB people and transgender people. Suffice it to say that it is not far-fetched to think that Luana’s dad might have found his son’s behaviour strange and even repulsive—there is a moment in the film where he explicitly tells Luana’s mother that he does not want a gay son, he does this by employing a slur that has been hurled at gender non-conforming boys for a long time. Luana’s dad embodies the hyper-masculine authoritarian, while his mother is cast as the child’s defender. Gabriela Mansilla simply wants her child to be happy and that is why she seeks a solution to Luana’s gender non-conformity high and low until she finds a documentary that confirms the existence of “trans kids”, a lot of information online and then a therapist who thoughtfully poses the question of whether Luana might actually be a “trans girl”. With that, the family have found a solution: our child is not weird or gay, but trans! The trans movement does not tolerate gender non-conformity in children that doesn’t involve putting them on a pathway to hormonal and/or surgical interventions: you want an operation to have a “non-binary body”? Sure! But if you’re just a garden-variety gender non-conforming kid who maybe just wants to wear interesting clothing, they want nothing to do with you. And this extends to kids like Luana—his story encompasses the trans movement’s greatest hits: a hero parent, a villainous parent, a saviour identity. All of this is permeated by a tacit agreement that nobody wants to let this kid grow into a gay man. In a podcast in 2019, Gabriela Mansilla would tell the story as though it was her child who led the way the entire time. The title of the book and the movie are references to something that Manuel/Luana supposedly said when he was just learning to talk. He would point to a little girl who lived across the street and say “girl”, and then one day—at 20 months of age: “Me. Girl. Me. Princess”. It wasn’t until Gabriela learned about “trans kids” that she realised what Manuel had been trying to tell her when he was just learning to speak. Gabriela then made it her mission to find help—to make sure that Luana could “be a princess”—and this set her on a path that would culminate in a direct appeal to the Presidential Palace and be followed by years of activism.
Luana’s Story in Context
Argentina’s Gender Identity Law is among the most progressive laws worldwide. The Argentine government has a website where they explain the law in simple language: the law takes for granted that humans can change sex, defines gender identity as entirely self-perceived and explains that the State will fund hormonal and surgical interventions. Under-18s are allowed to change their legal sex marker in official documentation but need a judge’s authorisation to undergo surgical procedures. Hormonal interventions, however, are dependent on the young person’s “degree of maturity” and parental consent is needed. Parents also need to consent to the use of puberty blockers, which is something that Argentine children can opt for from the age of 10. This is all happening in a country where the political and economic situation is far from stable. I spoke to a member of Manada Argentina—an association of mothers of children with ROGD—who said that the people in her country don’t understand the impact of these laws, “only those of us who are suffering the consequences know”. But she is hopeful that the recent change in government will bring with it politicians who are willing to listen.
The trans movement benefits from stories like Luana’s—an emotive story of a kid “born in the wrong body” and a hero mother who just wants her child to be happy and accepted. With its successful tangling up of LGB and transgender, the movement is also able to evade accusations of homophobia, which is fairly blatant in this story and many others. Another thing the trans movement is banking on is that those of us who oppose it do not consider how truly international, multi-cultural and multi-lingual it is. Under the guise of human rights, the trans lobby has been able to smuggle radical self-id legislation into many countries around the world, reaching far beyond Western countries.
The arc of trans narratives alerts us to what author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to as the danger of a single story. This is why we must open up the conversation to stories that disrupt the narrative—we must listen to the voices of detransitioners and understand that many people arrive at a trans identity through many different experiences. Likewise, we must examine the narratives we create as we fight gender identity ideology. At the time of writing, gender self-id exists in one form or another in a majority of Mexican states, much of South America and Pakistan. India and Nepal introduced third categories, effectively a “third gender”. The trans movement is not only a problem in wealthy, industrialised nations. To paraphrase Indian filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar, long after Western countries have figured out how to defeat the trans movement, other countries will be living with the consequences of it.
*A note on translation: I decided not to translate this as “I’m a girl, I’m a princess” since the original contains grammatical errors that are meant to be reflective of the speech of a 20-month-old child; hence “me girl, me princess”.
Image credit: DALL-E