ABCNews.go.com – By Alan B. Goldberg
This past Christmas, Riley Grant received a present that can be described as bittersweet — a video game that allowed her to morph a digital body into anything she wanted. Almost immediately, Riley, a 10-year-old transgender girl who is biologically a boy, adopted a virtual female persona. If only life were so easy, that she could punch a button and turn into a girl.
“She has a birth defect, and we call it that. I can’t think of a worse birth defect, as a woman to have, than to have a penis,” Riley’s mother, Stephanie, told Barbara Walters. “She talks about the day she’ll have a baby. That’s not in her future. But she sees herself as growing up to be a woman.”
Ten years ago, the struggle the couple faced was simply to have a child. It took Stephanie and her husband, Neil, eleven attempts at invitro fertilization and five miscarriages before Stephanie finally gave birth to fraternal twins — a girl, Allie, and a boy, Richard. (“Grant” is an alias being used to protect the family’s privacy).