Anna Quindlen and Andrew Solomon Join Discussion about Media and Transgender Children

My blog post last week - about Coy Mathis, the 6-year-old transgender Colorado child - drew some strong responses from readers. On Twitter, I immediately heard from those who sharply questioned my suggestion that “the willingness of the child” be considered, along with parental approval, in deciding to name her and use photographs of her. As many of these critics (some of whom were parents) noted, young children are willing to do many things they might regret later; they don’t have the maturity to know how their actions will play out.

More thoughtful reasoning than mine came from Anna Quindlen, the author and former Times columnist whose work I have long admired. She wrote in an e-mail:

I was intrigued by your journal entry today because it raises a question that is so beautifully and intelligently explored in the new book “Far From the Tree,” by Andrew Solomon. If you haven’t read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is about children who are essentially different than their parents â€" there is a chapter on transsexual children and their families-but an overarching question he raises is when and whether parents have a moral right to make certain choices for their minor children. Can hearing parents really make a dispassionate decision for a toddler about a cochlear implant What about the average-sized parents of a dwarf, who, if she is to receive painful and extensive limb-lengthening surgery, must begin at 7 or 8 And do parents make such decisions based on what is best for their child or what is best for their self-image

It’s a fascinating question, and I thought of it when you noted that Coy’s parents had agreed to let her be photographed and interviewed. They have the legal right to do that, I’m sure-but do they have the moral right to do so I don’t know the answer. I only know that, as Solomon suggests over and over again in his exceptional book, parents frequently make decisions based on a complex calculus that has as much to do with them as their kids. I know I did that even as I tried not to do so.

Ms. Quindlen’s e-mail prompted me to get in touch with Mr. Solomon, who had appeared on Katie Couric’s ABC program with Coy Mathis and her parents last month. In a phone interview, he agreed that young children can’t be allowed to make important decisions for themselves, joking that he won’t let his own four-year-old son decide what to have for dinner, much less make choices that could change his life forever. Parents’ accepting and loving guidance is a necessity, he said.

But, on balance, he sees “an enormous greater good” coming from children such as Coy Mathis and her parents taking their stories public and in articles like the one in The Times. He spoke of another transgender girl, 11-year-old Jazz, who became well-known through a January interview with Barbara Walters.

“The presence of these children has a huge impact” in making other transgender children feel that they are not alone and that their lives are not a cause for shame, Mr. Solomon said, noting the high rate of suicide and despair among transgender children.

Stories like these can “spare families enormous suffering.”

In addition to that greater good, there is potential for personal benefit to the child as well: being able to live openly and honestly, and in some cases, even to feel a sense of mission in helping other children accept themselves.

“There is a tendency to see this as shameful and best kept secret,” he said. “That is tremendously burdensome.”

I talked at length, after the post appeared, with the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, who described making decisions involving a child’s privacy as “a very difficult issue, made more difficult because of the Google factor.” By that, he means that references to the child in news stories “live on forever and are instantly accessible.”

“That doesn’t change our fundamental approach of weighing what we need to tell our readers against privacy concerns,” he said, “but it is a complicating factor.”

But, Mr. Corbett added, “Our default setting is to inform readers, not to withhold information.”

The Times article, sensitively told by Dan Frosch, “certainly had more impact because of the pictures, the details, the name,” Mr. Corbett said. Without those elements, he said, “We would have lost something.”

It is, of course, a tricky balance. “We need to be reluctant to say we know better than a child’s parents what’s good for the child,” Mr. Corbett said.

Reporters do need to be sensitive to parents whose motivations are questionable. “That doesn’t seem to be the case here,” he said.

Many readers also questioned the thinking that, because Coy Mathis had already appeared on a network talk show and elsewhere, The Times had a less difficult choice to make.

Mr. Corbett responded to this point: “When something is so widely known that there’s no privacy left to protect, that does weigh into our consideration,” he said. “We need to think it through every time and be prepared to pull back.”

In this case, he said: “We did a thoughtful, difficult story on an important subject. It’s a decision we’re comfortable with but not an easy one.”

Without a doubt, Mr. Solomon said, “It’s murky territory.” News organizations should evaluate the motives of parents who are willing to make their child’s story public and to actively advocate, as the Mathises have done.

“There’s a lot of self-aggrandizement that can creep in, but I don’t think that’s so in this case.”

The media “has to assess the balance of harm and good,” Mr. Solomon said. There are risks but “the positives count, too.”