So what is this this blog then?

First of all welcome! Thanks for reading and please do leave a comment.

My name is Clair and I am mum to Boodle age 6, Baloo age 5 and Bug age 2. We live in London, UK with my partner Sarah, 2 dogs Bailey and Roxie, a cat Eric, a hamster Charlie and a goldfish called Ryan!!

Baloo has Gender Identity Disorder. This blog is intended to be a diary of our jouney through this, plus other more random stuff about our family.

Some background to our story: Baloo has always been somewhat 'different'. He never engaged in what would be considered to be normal play for a young boy such as cars and trains, and has never been a very physical child. Insteasd he prefered to play with traditionally female toys, to engage in quiet role play and his favourite thing: dressing up! He has always prefered the company of adults, and more recently since starting school has made friends with some lovely girls. He has never enjoyed playing with boys, often finding them too boisterous, loud and physically active.

All of this we considered to be within the realms of normality especially as he has a dominant older sister. However, in March he expressed a desire to wear female clothes all the time, not just costumes saying that 'i don't want to pretend to be a girl, I want to BE a girl'. After much thought and discussion we decided to let Baloo wear girls clothes as much or as little as he wanted and from that point on he has lived as a girl while with us.

I was in a relationship with the father of my three children 'D' for almost 5 years. We split up when I came out as gay and since then we have shared custody of the children. We split the week from Thursday afternoon till Sunday morning and this now is where we find some problems occuring. D is finding Baloo's issues hard to deal with. He has gone from denying that that there is an issue at all, to accepting that Baloo is unusual and wanting to seek some help with that. However he is very unhappy with the idea that his gender issues might be real gender issues, prefering to believe that there must be a psychological explanation for his behaviour.

My GP was fantastic and refered us to the local CAMH's team and to the Gender Identity Development Unit at the Portman and Tavistock NHS Trust. This unit is the ONLY specialist childrens gender unit in the entire UK. But more about them later!

So this is our story.....