THE tragedy is complete. The Family Court has treated the troubled mind of a 17-year-old girl by letting her cut off her breasts.

Chief Justice Diana Bryant even added: "It wasn't a particularly difficult issue . . ."

But, by God, it should have been.

The girl, "Alex", was just 13 when the Family Court allowed her to go on hormone medication to stop her from turning into a woman - from menstruating and developing breasts.

That first decision was the worst - and made this latest, four years later, to seem one of mere process, which is why Bryant found it so easy.

Already on court-sanctioned hormone treatment after being diagnosed with "gender dysphoria" - feeling of one sex, trapped in the body of another - Alex was now merely asking for the court's permission for a double mastectomy at 17 than she could have done without its permission at 18.

She could then better make the friendships as a boy that she needed.

"So the issue was, 'Was there any likelihood (Alex) would change his mind in the meantime, or was it in his best interests to have it done at that time'," Bryant explained this week.

Already we can see the limp hand of modern parenting. The court, as Alex's guardian, was reluctant to stop a child doing what she said she'd do anyway.

Of course, the chief justice - whose reasons for judgment have not yet been published - is more likely than I to know what Alex needs most.

I have not spoken to Alex. Bryant has. I am not a psychiatrist. Bryant, I presume, has consulted those who are.

I certainly know the court has heard in the past from psychiatrist and refugee advocate Louise Newman, who claimed Alex felt she had "a body she should not have been born with".

But that, actually, is false, which is why this decision so disturbs me.

I read the Family Court's original judgment on Alex, and what screamed from every page was that she was not a girl merely born in a boy's body.

She was instead a girl who'd been so hideously betrayed by her parents and stepfather that she could almost literally not live in her own skin.

"Alex was born overseas and was the only child of his married parents," wrote then chief justice Alistair Nicholson, already referring to this girl as a boy.

But Alex had "felt rejected from an early age by his mother who he believes "was affectionless and harsh"'.

She claimed her father at first "protected" her, but he died when she was just five or six.

"The death was clearly devastating to Alex. He had spent almost all of his waking and sleeping time with his father. Alex said that they slept in the same bed and he would bathe and shower with his father."

Yet "none of the evidence suggests any sexual advances by the father". Alex accused an uncle instead of trying to molest her.

Her father, she insisted, was gentle "like a girl", even though he taught her how to punch "and be self-protective".

More significantly, she claimed her father "tried to make me a boy", even teaching her "to pee like a boy", and her mother had dressed her as one, too.

Alex said then she and her father had been "like best friends", and even now he seemed to communicate with her.

To make her loss even worse, her mother then married a man with two children, broke with her relatives, and moved the family to Australia, although her daughter spoke no English.

Nine months later, Alex's parents were reported for suspected child abuse, and social workers discovered a girl severely damaged.

Alex told them she was angry with her mother for remarrying, and to a man who'd turned her against her daughter. Her mother, in turn, claimed Alex was trying to kill the other children and was a "follower of the devil".

Said the judge: "The mother had said there is no love between her and Alex . . ."

NEITHER her mother nor stepfather wanted anything more to do with her, and so she was taken away, aged just 10.

"My heart is cold, like ice," she said several years later. "I love no one."

She said she now wanted a "new family", and a new sex to replace one that "disgusts" her. In fact, she might kill herself if she couldn't be a boy.

I think any good parent will know what Alex needed most, and will guess what she sought by becoming a boy.

But let a psychiatric report handed to the court say it in more official prose:

"Alex's cross-gender identification appears to have emerged in the context of an idealised, physically close relationship with her father, rejection and abandonment by her mother, and her father's desire for her to be a male . . .

"Her investment as male simultaneously expresses anger towards her mother and maintains closeness with her dead father."

This girl wants to be a boy not because she was born in the wrong body, but was tortured out of it.

It's true - from what little we know - that perhaps just one in 20 people who changes their sex later regrets it.

But will losing her breasts really give Alex the love whose absence made being a girl so intolerable? Can a knife give her heart what it's so long craved?

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