SFBayTimes.com – By Jacob Anderson-Minshall
With a growing number of trans children vocalizing their gender identities, there?s a growing need for outreach to and services for trans youth and their families. Fortunately, efforts are afoot to do just that. GenderPAC hosted a youth summit this summer; earlier this month, Seattle?s Gender Odyssey premiered the first family-centered conference for people raising gender variant and trans youth; and Oct. 19-21, the Midwest Trans Youth Conference will descend on Ferndale, Michigan.
Increasingly, it?s the parents themselves who are making changes, as is the case with a new national education and activist organization, Trans Youth Family Advocates (TYFA), founded last year by several mothers to provide support for all transgender and gender variant youth.
One of those mothers is Kim Pearson, the group?s executive director, whose 15-year-old trans son Shawn-Dedric Pearson, also works with TYFA (imatyfa.org), as a youth advocate. Together the Pearsons have appeared on CNN and traveled the country speaking on behalf of transgender and gender variant youth.