Indulge me please, as I need to have a rather serious conversation here. I’ve thought about this topic since last fall in Provincetown and it’s been increasingly on my mind ever since I began watching the Logo network. If you don’t now have the incredible luxury of watching Gay-TV 24/7 on Logo, I wish you all access to this cable channel in the near future. It’s a blast.

Among Logo’s pleasures, guilty and otherwise, is the show TransGeneration. It’s a documentary about several college students who, leaving the physical and emotional confines of home, become ensconced on campus, find others like them, and begin transitioning from their natal gender to the one which they feel they rightly deserve.

I get their struggle. Really understand it. And no, it’s not because I think I was born in the wrong body. Although one with a faster metabolism would have been nice.

For my part, I was a total tomboy kid, a barely passable excuse for a straight woman through my twenties, and a liberated lesbian as I crept out of the closet wearing my current identity. I like women, I like being a woman, and I like being married to a woman.

And despite wishing I could have been blessed with smaller pores, I feel right in MY skin. I cannot speak for others.

Those others include the leading lady in the movie TransAmerica starring Felicity Huffman, who, without a doubt, should have won the Oscar for her dead-on portrayal of a pre-op transsexual. There was not one single moment during the movie when I didn’t believe that this warm, funny, needy, determined person was becoming the woman she felt she was born to be.

I get it. If a person is absolutely sure they have been born the wrong gender I applaud the courageous decision to make things right, and I am thankful modern medicine can assist them.

These brave men or women choose to leave the "otherness" of gay life (although not all transsexuals identify as gay before their journey) in exchange for a life as the gender they believe they truly are—although, even with a more comfortable gender, the chance of facing a life of "otherness" anyway is still pretty high—but at least it’s "otherness" that feels more truthful to them.

Which brings me to thoughts of a night at the Provincetown theatre last fall. Before the curtain went up, I noticed dozens of young people, looking very much like young boys, in ultra-masculine outfits, crew cut hair, with various stages of hairy upper lips and chins. They had been very obviously taking male hormones. I mean no woman can grow a beard like that until she’s at least 60. Seriously, though, who is prescribing hormones to these youngsters?

Many of these kids held hands with very feminine dates. Several of these youngsters paired off together. It was quite clear that these were teenagers or early twenty-somethings living as, or transitioning to become, the opposite gender.

So here’s my problem. Neither the gang at the theatre nor the guys and gals on Logo’s TransGeneration were women transitioning to become men or men transitioning to become women. They were girls journeying toward boyhood and vice versa.

Have they really lived enough life to know they are making the right decision? Okay, before you start excoriating me for being insensitive and/or clueless, let me say that I know that for many people there is no "decision" about it. There are cases of children as young as three years old clearly demonstrating that they have been born the wrong gender. So, too are there teens and adults for whom the path to transition seems like the right answer from the very first.

But what if the recently uncloseted discussions, television shows, movies, magazine articles and books about transgenderism shine an overly bright spotlight on this subject? What if the 18-year old effeminate guy can’t imagine a future as a handsome gay man who can comfortably camp it up socially?

What if the dearth of role models for butch lesbians has left some of them thinking that changing gender is the only answer? Would you want to be living with the consequences of some of the decisions you made as a teen or twenty-year-old? Not I.

When I was 18, I was determined to follow a high school boyfriend to college in a tiny, wintery, conservative town. What a bad idea that would have been. Thankfully, the school rejected me.

When I was 23, I smugly said to my boss, "Give me the duties you hired me for or fire me!"

Guess what happened.

Hell, at age 24 I married an accordion player. What if I had to live with that the rest of my life?

Take the skinny white kid with the goofy clothes and dreadlocks standing in front of me at Staples yesterday. He probably sees himself that way permanently. In ten years he will probably be in a three-piece suit hawking mutual funds. Or not. But his choice probably shouldn’t be etched in stone right now.

I just think that for almost every path we take in life there’s an opportunity to veer off or turn around onto another road. I’m worried about these youngsters who are jumping on the Transgender Express, full speed ahead, toward a pretty irrevocable destination—without stopping at a lot of stations to experience options along the way.

Am I alone here? Is my worry politically incorrect?

I know that much counseling is required before hormones are prescribed and a great deal of time is spent evaluating and educating pre-op transsexuals before many of the required surgeries take place.

But these transgender kids are getting their hormones from somewhere. In many cases, I bet counseling and safeguards don’t come with the drugs. All I’m saying is that I wish our strong young butch girls and our adorable nelly boys wouldn’t shoot themselves up, cut anything off or make any permanent changes until they have explored the richness of life’s choices.

I don’t go to work these days wearing my Roy Rogers holster and I don’t come home to an accordion player.