What a desperately sad and alternately positive film this was. Part of Channel 4’s Bodyshock series, this documentary featured, as per the title, children as young as 8 years old who were suffering from gender dysphoria.

This condition means that the children featured were/are convinced they were born in the “wrong” bodies and their parents have taken the decision to take on board their child’s deep-seated longing to be the opposite sex.

And in the case of Joseph, he is now referred to as Josie and to all intents and purposes – aside from having male genitalia – lives as a girl.

Josie’s mother said, “She looks at her penis as a birth defect that she wants to get fixed” Read more & comment »

This Bodyshock Special follows 19-year-old Billy Robbins from Houston, Texas. Weighing 60 stone, and reported to be the world’s heaviest teenager, Billy has spent the past three years living in a chair as his mother cooks for, cleans and feeds him. But Billy has now made the decision to turn his life around in the hope that one day he may be able to move out of his mother’s home. And after being fed up to 8,000 calories a day, Billy has to change his diet not only in order to gain his independence from his mother, but if he is to live into his twenties…

Monday 12 January 2009
10:00pm, Channel 4