One Arizona family is garnering national attention for a very unique reason — every member identifies as transgender.
All four of them.
“It feels like you’re getting to live for the first time,” Daniel Harrott told KJZZ. “And my children are getting to be who they’ve always wanted to be.”
Harrott is a transgender father to two transgender children, Mason and Joshua.
Harrott, who had lived as a woman most of her life, says she realized she could come out as trans after seeing her two children identify as such.
Mason, age 11, was born a girl but now lives as a boy. 13-year-old Joshua, who was born a boy and uses a wheelchair to get around, now identifies as a girl.
Joshua claims he knew he was a girl even at a much younger age than he is now. “I think I was only, like 6 or 7,” he explained.
Harrott believes trangenderism has been in her family for 100 years, recalling that her grandmother’s sister was a cross-dresser.
The behavior frightened her grandmother to such a point that she made sure when she had a daughter — Harrott’s mother — would dress in a feminine manner.
“Of course my mother just gave that same lesson: ‘This is not OK. You must be a girl. This is who you were born to be,” she explains of her upbringing as a young woman.
Harrott waited for a time when she would feel comfortable in women’s clothing and makeup, but that time never came — not even when she married a man and gave birth to two kids.
However, things changed when Joshua, still identifying as a boy then, expressed a desire to join the Girl Scouts.
Harrott says this was when she was finally introduced to the term “transgender.”
“And when I finally looked it up, and I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re trans, and I know it’s true — because I am, too, and it’s been my whole life,’” she said.
Not long after Joshua identified as a transgender girl, Mason came out as a transgender boy. Following in line after her kids, Harrott then began to cut her hair short and started shopping in the men’s clothing section.
“I opened my eyes, looked in that dressing room mirror and went, ‘Oh this is it. This is perfect. This is me,’” she stated.
The family grew larger after Harrott became engaged to Shirley Austin, a transgender woman who volunteered at a nonprofit organization that caters to parents of transgender youth.
Not long after meeting each other, Austin and Harrott became engaged.
“The whole family is in transition,” Austin said.
Harrott — now a transgender father to two transgender children and engaged to a transgender woman — describes the family as “very traditional.”
“I feel loved,” she explained. “I mean, I feel love for who I am, exactly how I am.”
However, many in the psychiatric community would agree this is a not healthy way to live, especially for young children.
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, a former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, is now the hospital’s Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, according to CNS News.
McHugh calls transgenderism a “mental disorder” that requires treatment, arguing sex change is “biologically impossible” and that those who promote sexual reassignment surgery are enabling those who suffer from this disorder.
“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects,” the doctor explained. “The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken — it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”
McHugh equates transgenderism to people who suffer from anorexia, believing they are overweight when in reality they are gravely thin. (For more from the author of “Every Member of an Arizona Family of Four Identifies as Transgender” please click HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
