Around the age of three, it was apparent that either S was gender variant or trans. We just had to wait to see how it would emerge,” Jipala says as she and Nathan alternate addressing their five-year-old, A, and me on the back porch of Nathan’s house. Jipala and Nathan, both 30-something, live separately in Kingston, but they co-parent their two children. Nine-year-old S is in another room, working up the courage to come greet me. S knows I’m there to learn about her situation.
S was born with male anatomy, but as soon as she could talk, made it known that she was a girl. When she went to camp at the age of six, S transitioned, sporting a full girls’ wardrobe and switching to female pronouns. Everyone knows: her school, friends, and family. But Jipala and Nathan recognized that their story would need to enter the public sphere, too. “You make yourself available to advocate,” Jipala says. “I have to answer questions in a certain way. ‘I’m so happy you asked.'” While the impulse is to help educate, the necessity for explanation can be exhausting, too. S was unsure about being the subject of a magazine article, so the use of her first initial and just her parents’ first names is their compromise to provide some privacy.
Arlene Lev, LCSW-R, of Choices Counseling and Consulting in Albany, specializes in issues related to sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identity and expression. She says, “There’s a broad spectrum of children who are gender nonconforming.” Research points to differential fetal development of the sex organs and gender identity in the brain, but Lev questions the benefit of searching for the causes of being transgender. “We’re just beginning to understand how the brain works,” says Lev. “Personally, I find the research interesting, but understanding how to make use of it clinically is more complex. What we know is that people who cross gender rules have existed in every culture since the beginning of time. The fact that a small, stable portion of the human family has this experience is just who we are.”
She says parents worry about even subtle differences in gender expression that break societal rules. “We want to create a culture with greater acceptance of gender expression,” says Lev. “Then the world would be safer for kids who are trans or have gender dysphoria.”
Lev is a family therapist, with extensive training in how family systems work and how what happens to one member affects everyone. For the parents, the decisions surrounding transgender youth can cause distress. Sometimes when parents quell the feeling of gender discontent, children act out or become depressed, and transgender people suffer from an alarmingly high suicide rate. Same-sex couples face added judgment from a society that often doubts their capacity for parenting. For Jipala and Nathan, a big challenge is the common belief that it’s a phase. As proof, people say they didn’t let their kids be firemen or dinosaurs. “It’s not an argument you can compare to what’s happening with a trans kid,” Jipala says. “Trans is not self-expression; it’s primarily identity.” “And parents do let kids dress up as a fireman for a whole year,” Nathan points out.
“Most parents want to make their children’s lives as easy and healthy as possible,” Jipala says. “The cultural norms are so strong and so ingrained, maybe you’ll go against them for yourself, as an adult, but you wouldn’t electively choose to put your child through them. Unless it’s a necessity.”
Jipala and Nathan want what we all want for our kids: to support S as best they can, so she’s a healthy, productive adult. When S mentions that she doesn’t want facial hair, Nathan lets her know, without too much detail, that there are options. They’re researching hormone blockers, which S can take for two years with minimal side effects. When discontinued, puberty resumes naturally. “That’s manageable for me to think about, as a parent,” Jipala says. “The goal is to give the kid more time.”
As a child enters adolescence, the need to mitigate puberty for a potentially trans adulthood becomes important, because once sex characteristics develop, those features remain. In a system where counselors are needed for assessment before hormone treatment or surgery can be approved, Lev is, more than diagnosing, helping people to see if the challenges of transition are worth it for them.
What Nathan understood of being transgender was from pop references, where someone was usually the butt of a joke: a father who became a woman but still had a beard, or the character of Chandler’s dad in the TV show “Friends.” Unlike with LGBQ issues, where people can often balance what they hear with personal experience, only 8 percent of Americans say they know someone who is transgender, a statistic that’s probably area-specific. “When I realized that it was more than experimenting,” Nathan says, “there was a lot of emotion around it: projecting what the dangers might be; a little bit of a mourning period where you have to let go of the gender you thought your child was. All the projections you had about what your child’s life was going to be like.”
“There’s also A to consider, as far as being S’s sibling,” Jipala says. A’s awareness is particularly mature around the issue, and he’ll advocate for S in his own five-year-old way. As a younger child growing up with a trans sibling, it’s just the way it’s always been. “He did ask questions about it when he was three or four,” Jipala says. “‘Mom, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. I’m a boy, and I’m not upset about it.’ I explained that some people are just born like that.”
“It took him a year to get the pronouns right,” Nathan says. “And sometimes when he gets mad at her, he’ll use it against her.” “But he apologizes,” Jipala says.
When S enters the room, she goes straight for Jipala’s lap, and we talk about her summer camp, which is just for gender-nonconforming kids. With arts and sports activities, it’s a traditional summer camp experience. “There was karaoke,” S says, “and Kate the Great came. She’s trans. She made all her props.” They learned about it at the annual Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference—three days of workshops and activities each June, now in its 14th year.
Though people have mostly been accepting of their family, the bathroom at S’s private school was a hot issue for a few. “Adults tend to sexualize everything,” Nathan points out. Most trans kids don’t want to draw attention to themselves in the bathroom, generally afraid of anyone seeing their genitals. The school figured out and implemented within a month of S’s enrollment that having one bathroom be gender neutral for everybody was a quick and simple solution.
Gender Fluidity
When James Rios walks confidently away from the camera at the end of the short film Passing Ellenville he says, “I don’t care what everybody else sees. This transition is about no more acting, just being myself, and not worrying about anybody else.” The film documents two transgender youths from Ellenville: Rios, who is female-to-male, and Ashlee, who is male-to-female. It had its New York premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival in October.
Coming from an unstable home, Rios couldn’t give any energy to figuring out his situation. “Once safety wasn’t a issue, I could realize patterns from early childhood.” It was an eye opener to meet Ashlee. Rios was a client of Family of Woodstock’s MidWay Program, a live-in option for high-risk youth ages 16 to 21. Ashlee wasn’t transitioned yet either, and they both struggled with gay and lesbian labels. Ashlee revealed to Rios, “I’m a gay man, but I don’t feel like that fits me, but that’s all I can figure out.”
“When Ashlee started transitioning,” says Rios, “I remember feeling very jealous and confused because I didn’t want to be a girl.” It was a counselor at MidWay who first asked Rios if he might be trans.
“If families support their young person in figuring out who they are, how they’ll live, how they identify themselves, without redirecting or setting a different course for them,” says Vanessa Shelmandine, program director for the Kingston-based Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center, “they might avert some of the high-risk factors prevalent in those who aren’t able to express their gender identity: anxiety, depression, suicide attempts, self-harm, and substance abuse.”
Rios says it’s easier to pass as female-to-male than male-to-female, and that passing is more about moving on and being the person you are now. “If you’re born with a birth defect and have surgery to correct it,” Rios points out, “it’s not like every time you meet someone new you ‘insert embarrassing birth defect here.'” Corrective surgery is also not performed in every transgender case. “It’s on a need-to-know basis,” he says. “I want them to meet me, not my history.”
It’s curious to consider why our attitudes might change toward someone based on their personal medical history and the details of their biological genitalia. Shelmandine tells of an 80-year-old mom who came to a PFLAG meeting because her 50-year-old child had come out as trans. “She wanted to know how to support her child,” she says, and smiles. She also tells of trans people coming in after being assaulted by family members or by strangers.
Trans women are the majority of LGBTQ homicide victims. “That’s why a lot of us make a big deal about being misgendered publicly,” Amelia Diamond says. She’s sitting with her wife, Clara, while their two children, seven-year-old Lizzie and four-year-old Leo, play in the next room. “If I’ve been outed by a bunch of strangers, that’s dangerous.”
Diamond was working at a temporary job for a grant-funded nonprofit when she transitioned in 2012. “My plan was that my last day of work would be my last day of presenting as male.” She prepared Lizzie, who was five at the time, by telling original stories: female heroes who rescue female princesses; characters who would change into animals. She hoped to provide a mythological framework for transformation. When Lizzie began asking questions about the possibilities, Diamond revealed that, in her heart, she’d always been a lady and it hurt her to pretend to be a boy. “I was afraid to do anything, but now I’m not,” she said. “That made total sense to her,” Clara says. “Other people are so stuck in the binary. You are your gender. There’s no fluidity there.” Ultimately, it was Lizzie who explained the situation to other family members.
“A lot of people question our relationship,” Clara says. “‘You thought you were married to a man, and now you’re married to a woman.” Lev says counseling couples so families can remain intact, if they want, was a radical idea about 10 to 15 years ago. “The thinking was, ‘Why would a couple stay together?'” “I actually prefer it this way,” Clara says, but it’s a humbling process to support someone through transition. “You make a lot of mistakes while having the best intentions.”
Diamond says transitioning is what she had to do to be able to live. “I had the hope that having the kids close to me would lead them to have saner ideas about gender. If people say they’re this, then they are. That’s it.”
When Lizzie really accepted that Diamond was trans, she repeated the facts: Diamond used to look like a boy, but she wasn’t; now she’s a lady, but that’s not possible. “So you must be a fairy,” Lizzie said, “but you’re also very fierce. So you must be half fairy, half dragon.”
RESOURCES
Choices Counseling & Consulting
Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference
Family of Woodstock’s MidWay Program
Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center
PFLAG (support group for transgender people) meets at the Center the last Wednesday of every month at 7pm.
TAQ (Transgender and Queer Network) meets at the Center the first and third Mondays of every month at 7pm
Mid-Hudson Valley Transgender Association
This article appears in November 2014.
