Meghan* was four years old when she took a pair of scissors to her long blonde ringlets and hacked off half her hair. When Diane asked her daughter why she would do such a thing, Meghan said she wanted to be a boy. Diane, who is a home care nurse, didn’t think much of the incident at the time. Meghan was a tomboy, and most of her friends were male. “I just thought she wanted to look like her friends,” she says.

On the first day of junior kindergarten, Meghan refused to go to school. Diane had dressed her in a flowery purple jumpsuit, and Meghan said everyone would laugh at her. Again, Diane shrugged it off. “I guess, looking back, those were warning signals,” she says, “but I just let it go. I’m a feminist. I thought, More power to you. No dolls. No stereotypical roles.”

Meghan loved sports, and until Grade 2, she played baseball with the boys. Then the teams were divided by sex. She went to her first practice, took one look around, and refused to play. “But you’ll be the best kid on the team,” said Diane. “I’m not playing,” said Meghan. “Girls can’t play baseball.”

Despite these isolated incidents, Diane considered her first-born child happy and well adjusted. Meghan had friends in the east-end apartment building where they lived at the time. She had good grades, and her teachers reported that her peers looked up to her. Nothing worried Diane enough to seek professional help. The year Meghan turned seven, however, she became sullen and withdrawn. When Diane asked her what was wrong, she replied frustratedly that she didn’t know. Diane attributed her daughter’s moody silence to the fact that she and Meghan’s father had split up that fall. He’d left town soon after, and had little contact with Meghan or her sister, Amy, who was four years younger. Diane’s relationship with her husband had been verbally and emotionally abusive. Some nights, he had come home in a drunken rage, screaming and breaking dishes, and Meghan had awakened sobbing, begging her father to stop, desperate to help her mom. The turmoil at home, and her father’s departure, seemed a plausible explanation for Meghan’s behaviour.

Diane assumed Meghan’s anger would subside; instead, it went nuclear. If Diane simply asked her to turn off the TV and go to bed, Meghan would erupt in rage. She began threatening Amy. The spring of her Grade 7 year, when she was 12 years old, Meghan locked herself in her basement bedroom and refused to go to school.

*Some names have been changed