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In the animated TV series The Legend of Korra, the lead character is a cross-cultural, arse-kicking heroine. Similarly, Korra Hewitson, 15, who took her moniker from the subversive show, is breaking ground herself. Korra was born as a boy. "People called me male, but I didn't feel like it," she says. "I started to realise when I was older that wasn't me, but I didn't know what to do." By the time Korra reached 10, she began to get worryingly depressed and it became clear to her family that continuing in the same way wasn't an option. One day, her mother, Rebecca Hewitson, sat down at her computer and Googled "gender-diverse children". It was a day that would change everyone's lives. At 13, Korra began to take puberty-blocking medication, known as stage one in the process to transition from one gender to another. "The difference for Korra was between night and day," Ms Hewitson says. "As soon as Korra was able to transition, everything became brighter. And as a parent, that's what we aim for. We aim for the happiness and welfare of our children." But two years later and with her adolescence essentially on hold, she is desperate to start stage two of her transition – the ingestion of oestrogen. The only problem is that in Australia – unlike other countries –Korra needs the approval of the Family Court of Australia, on top of the permission of her mother, her medical team at the Royal Children's Hospital, a pediatrician and two psychiatrists. While she has the support of experts and family, she is now seeking a date to get judicial approval. It is likely to take at least eight months to get her day in court. The process has made Korra feel even more judged by strangers, and has added stress and anxiety to what is already a life-changing process. Says her mother: "Transition is such a period of change for families, and often the care and support for parents to help teens is overshadowed by the fact that we have to go to court. "As parents, our focus should be on the health and wellbeing and happiness of our children and the court process adds so much stress to that." On Tuesday, legal service Justice Connect launched Stage 2 Access, a service dedicated to helping young trans and gender-diverse people receive free legal help to access vital hormone therapy. The organisation says demand for hormone therapy more than doubled in the last six months of 2016 alone. "There are an estimated 45,000 trans and gender-diverse kids out there who might need this service, and we want to help them," Justice Connect chief executive Fiona McLeay said. But supporters want the changes to go further. Georgie Stone, who won a landmark case in 2013 that meant stage one treatment would no longer require court orders, says young people should not be forced to go to court to access stage two treatments. She and her mother, Rebekah Robertson, will present a petition to politicians in Canberra in March calling for laws affecting transgender youth to be rewritten. "The court process is slow; biology is fast," Rebekah said. "No other cohort of children are required to endure this to access medical treatment and no other jurisdiction in the world requires trans kids to go through this onerous and unnecessary intrusion into their own private medical decisions. It has to end now," Ms Robertson says.

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