Just a Girl...

I met a girl who used to be a boy and she changed the way I see the world. Kim Petras reminded me in the best possible way that Life still has a few ambushes left.

An old fellow traveller of mine – Mark Llewellyn – is running a new television magazine program for the Seven Network Australia called “Sunday Night” (a title so spectacularly bereft of originality that it actually manages to sound hip.)  Llewellyn decides a German sex-change teenager – “Kim who used to be Tim” from Cologne – is worth a story.  Personally I’m dubious, but with two teens of my own draining my wallet faster than George Bush drained America’s moral authority, I say yes. Joining me on the road is top-notch Aussie investigative reporter, Ross Coulthardt. An odd couple on what seems nothing more than an oddity of a yarn.

Kim Petras is sixteen. She made the full surgical transformation from he to she nearly a year ago. She’s gorgeous, blonde, wilful and wildly self-assured. Right now she’s a pop-star in waiting … with a million hits on her MySpace site and self-made music videos attracting hundreds of thousands on YouTube.

But none of that really matters. What takes your breath away is Kim’s strength of character and how early that strength was evident - and necessary. She has never (hear me, never) lived as a boy – although that is how she was born. She tried to take scissors to herself when she was four. As a first-grader she smuggled dresses to school. By the age of ten she’d suffered more bullying and condemnation than most of us endure in a lifetime. She tried to explain to her teachers and her school classes that ‘Tim” was a mistake and “Kim” wanted nothing more than to be the girl she was. Her parents were convinced … her sisters were convinced … her girlfriends stood with her against the playground mob. And Kim triumphed.

At twelve she persuaded a battery of psychiatrists to let her take ‘puberty blocking’ hormones. At fourteen she won over the German medical authorities, and was permitted to begin female hormone treatment. And at barely sixteen she became probably the youngest person in the world to (legally) undergo a full sex-change operation. We interviewed the experts … and her family … but mainly, we met Kim. She’s just a girl – all she ever wanted to be … but I have little doubt that as a woman she’ll take on the world again, and win. 

http://kimpetrasonline.com/