A five-year-old who felt he was a girl trapped in a boy's body has become one of the youngest-ever children to be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder.
From the age of three Zach Avery, from Purfleet, Essex, refused to live as a boy, instead choosing to wear pink dresses and ribbons in his long, blonde hair. He also became obsessed with the girly children’s TV character Dora the Explorer.
Parents Theresa and Darren Avery, 41, became worried by Zach's behaviour and took him to the doctors.
After numerous consultations and observations, he was last year officially diagnosed by NHS specialists with Gender Identity Disorder, making Zach – then aged four - one of the youngest affected children in the UK.
The primary school he attends in Essex has even changed the kids' toilets to gender-neutral Unisex in support of Zach since his diagnosis.
His mother, Theresa Avery, 32, said Zach used to be a 'normal' little boy who loved Thomas the Tank Engine, but suddenly at the end of 2010, he started behaving like a girl.
The mother -of-four said: 'He just turned round to me one day when he was three and said, "Mummy, I'm a girl". I assumed he was just going through a phase and just left it at that.
'But then it got serious and he would become upset if anyone referred to him as a boy.
'He used to cry and try to cut off his willy out of frustration.'
His parents took him to a specialist at Tavistock and Patman NHS Foundation Trust in London, a specialist mental health trust committed to providing mental health services to all who need them.
At first his parents thought he may be autistic, but after several months a child psychologist diagnosed Zach with GID, otherwise called gender dysphoria, a disorder that makes a person unhappy with the gender they were born with.
Source
p/s: Gender Identity Disorder in children (GIDC) is the formal diagnosis used by psychologists and physicians to describe children who experience severe unhappiness brought on by their sex, known as gender dysphoria
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