Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (13 page)
Jonathan would bring flamboyant boys home, and that would kill me too. Now I accept anyone who comes to my home. I love them because I know they don’t get enough love from their parents.
Jonathan was overweight, and he started going to the gym. Now he’s a body builder, and very good-looking.
Very
good-looking.
Don’t be like I was with Jonathan. Don’t say horrible things to your child. That will haunt me till the day I die. Hug your children. Hug them.
Christina’s mom cries softly. “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping away tears.
I learned through Christina. I didn’t read a book or call anyone for information. I listened to my daughter. And I learned by letting her be.
Place: The Moonstruck Diner, New York City
Time: Noon
On a sunny spring day in June, Mariah, nineteen, arrives at the diner exactly on time. Her close-cropped, curly black hair and olive-almond skin surrounds the bone structure of a model. Eyes, big and round, remind me of a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. I wish I had brought along my professional camera rather than the click-click sleeping somewhere in my bag.
This day Mariah is wearing a pale-pink man-tailored shirt and khaki pants. “I’m dressing gender neutral,” she tells me while we walk to a booth in the back of the restaurant, “because I’m not comfortable with my body. I don’t want my picture in the book. I’m telling the truth about my life because I think you should know about me and my community. But I’m not ready for people to see me.”
Oh, no! I say to myself, hoping against hope that she will change her mind. We find an empty booth and order lunch.
Mariah’s voice is like honey sliding down a spoon. “My social worker — we usually make jokes — she says, ‘You talk like woman, you act like woman, you look like woman, but you eat like man.’”
Mariah goes on to say that she is not in a good place. “I’m not a success story right now. I’m just starting to transition my name to Mariah. I want to go to college and live in the city. Anywhere but Long Island! I have too much bad history in Long Island. I want to go somewhere where nobody knows me.”
Although she is taking her hormone shots every two weeks, Mariah does not consider her transition effective. “I know I will never have a period, I will never have a uterus, I will never have fallopian tubes, and I will never have ovaries. I will never have those things, so technically I will never be a woman. What’s the point of having a vagina when I can’t have those things? I wanted to experience what real women like you experience. Inserting a tampon. Of course, I can insert a tampon when I get a vagina, but what’s the use of it?”
“Believe me, it’s not so great,” I reply.
“Everybody says that,” Mariah says softly, smiling. “But you know, when it comes to us, it doesn’t matter if it feels great. It makes us feel real. It makes us feel like the real deal.”
My story is a little bit different. You may hear transgender people say that when they were little, they felt different; they were born a boy but felt like a girl. When I was little, I believed I actually
was
a girl. I really did. I didn’t know the difference between a boy and a girl. I noticed that kids dressed different and played different games. I didn’t think it was a gender thing, because I was a girl.
I’m biracial. My mother is black and Cherokee Indian, and my father is an immigrated Italian. My mother passed away when I was ten, but I’ll tell you more about that later. I never knew my father. I believe he’s still alive; he’s not in my life.
I lived with my mother and my grandmother, but I can’t say they raised me. Placement raised me. I’ve been in the system all my life. When I turned eighteen, I signed myself out. I’ll be twenty next month.
Let’s start when I was a kid.
When I was four or five, I wore girl clothes. My grandmother took a lot of heat for it. It wasn’t her fault. It was my way of expressing who I was, because that’s who I thought I was.
Around the time I turned five, some guy on the street said, “Yo! You’re not supposed to be wearing those clothes.”
“Why not?” I always got defensive about this ’cause everyone was always telling me this.
“Because you have a dick.”
“What’s a dick?” I didn’t know what that was.
“Boys have dicks and girls have pussies.”
“Well, what’s a pussy?”
“A vagina.”
“Bagina?” I didn’t even know how to say the word.
“No.
Vuh
gina.”
“Oh, okay.”
Then he said, “So you’re not a girl. You have dick.”
“Well, what is a dick?”
“That thing that you have between your legs.”
And I’m, like, “I thought everybody has that.”
“No, not everybody has that.”
I thought,
This man is crazy.
A lot of people didn’t approve of me. My neighbors cursed out my family. “You’re raising a fucking boy! He’s supposed to be wearing fucking boy clothes, not fucking girl clothes. You should go to jail for this shit.” That’s what they were saying.
None of my friends teased me when I wore girls’ clothes. They were cool. There were things I liked doing as a boy, and there were things I like doing as a girl. As a boy, I liked to play outside, ride my bike, and get a little dirty. I liked cars. I was hyperactive. I liked to throw things. I never really liked action figures; I never liked to pretend with G.I. Joe, and this and that.
On the girls’ side, I liked Barbie dolls. I liked brushing their hair, braiding it. I liked to have pretend tea parties, being pretty, trying on makeup.
I grew up in a bad neighborhood. There was a lot of violence — not guns — knives. There was a lot of alcohol and drugs, but only when my mother and her friends were home. You learn what you see, so I used to fight a lot. I wasn’t a punk.
“Who’s a punk in kindergarten?” I ask, and we laugh at the notion.
My grandma’s short and fat and passive. She’s not the kind of person who will argue. She never spoke her mind. Like an old-fashioned woman, she kept her thoughts to herself. Don’t argue. Whatever is said is done. I don’t like that about her — it would make me mad.
She was a teacher for twenty years, and then she worked for the county for ten years. She has a master’s degree. It’s very weird. I don’t understand how she could be educated and end up in the ’hood, the ghetto, a poor neighborhood.
She was married once, long before I was born, but her husband died in a car crash. I think she was traumatized. Years later she adopted my mother.
About the time when most children started talking, Mariah did not talk at all. Social workers thought that she might be underdeveloped. Instead of going to public school, Mariah was sent to a special ed. school, Variety Child Learning Center, in Syosset, Long Island.
I didn’t like the school. I was trying to be myself, dressing the way I felt, and I was getting punished for it. The first day of school, my teacher looked at me, surprised, and I thought, “What is going on?”
She said, “You’re a boy. You’re not supposed to go to school like this. Don’t put on these clothes again! You’re not supposed to do this.”
She had a look, like, “What’s up with the parents?” I was thinking,
Why is she looking at me like that?
I didn’t say nothing, but I continued to go to school the way I wanted. I used to like wearing these jellies. They looked like princess shoes, and I loved them.
I remember one day the teacher took me out of the classroom and pinched me hard. I didn’t like that. She said, “What’s going on with you? You’re a guy! Are your parents abusing you? Are you being raped? Are you being molested?”
As a five-year-old, I didn’t know what those words meant. She wouldn’t stop. “This is not right. You’re not supposed to be doing this. I can’t believe you’re doing this.” And she looked very sad, like I was her child.
She took me to another room and tried to force me to tell her what was going on. And she would pinch me more, trying to find answers. That was her way of interrogating me. I thought,
Stop! Stop! Please stop! This is what I do. This is who I am.
Mariah says that her teachers could not control her, so they brought in psychologists and the social services department.
The teacher reported me to DSS (the Department of Social Services). We were under investigation. My grandma was charged with abuse and neglect for me wearing girl clothes, and I was placed in CPS (Child Protective Services).
Thinking back about it now, I can’t believe how something so simple as my clothes led to people thinking that I was being abused, that I was being molested. No one was forcing me to do nothing. My mother and grandmother also bought me boys’ clothes. And I would wear them. I mean, I liked being a boy, but I liked being a girl too.
You know, I think a lot of this was my fault. I wasn’t a kid who listened. I didn’t listen to nobody. And my grandma wasn’t the kind of person who would put her foot down and say, “No!” If I yelled and cried because I wanted something, she’d give it to me. That was my little secret — yelling. I would go into a temper tantrum, and eventually I got what I wanted.
