When the parents’ goal of having a “normal” child conflicts with the child’s goal of self-understanding and self-realization, the child may wind up either in a coercive therapeutic relationship focused on transforming him or her into a socially acceptable boy or girl, or, when the child refuses to conform, out on the streets. Even when parents are supportive, other adults and peers can be vicious. “Children with gender issues frequently are regarded as unruly or disruptive in the classroom and more often than not are punished, expelled or otherwise made an example by school administrators,” note Israel and Tarver. Official disapproval, combined with the teasing, harassment, and general ostracism that many gender-variant children and adolescents suffer at the hands of peers, can make school such a hostile environment that many transgendered kids drop out. The mother of Gwen (born Eddie) Araujo—the seventeen-year-old murdered in Newark, California, in October 2002—told reporters that her child had dropped out of high school because of unending harassment. “People were really mean to him at school. He really tried, but no one accepted him,” said Sylvia Guerrero.
In March 2003, I spoke to Alyn Liebeman, an eighteen-year-old self-described trannyboy activist, who comes from an Orthodox/ Conservative Jewish family in Los Angeles. Liebeman’s background—Jewish, upper-middle class—could not be more different from that of Gwen Araujo’s, and yet he suffered many of the same indignities perpetrated on Araujo. At the time that I spoke to Liebeman, he was waiting to hear from the Ivy League schools to which he had applied for college admission—Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and others. Liebeman is highly gifted and has been enrolled in programs for gifted students since the second grade. He has always been one of the brightest kids in his class. Yet from the start of his school career, Liebeman says, he was harassed, isolated, and singled out for punishment not only by his peers, but also by school administrators, who often blamed him for the abuse other kids heaped upon him. “I had no friends,” he says simply. “I was a loner. I didn’t fit in.” When he was verbally and sometimes physically assaulted by other students, “I was blamed by administrators for being different. They would tell me that if I would just conform, this wouldn’t happen.”
On one occasion, when he was in sixth grade, “I got beaten up by two eighth-graders while doing pull-ups at the pull-up bar in the gym. They chased me, pummeled me. I went to the security guard, who said, ‘What did you do to start this?’” The principal at the school to whom Liebeman and his mother appealed after the incident occurred said, “If you had long hair and wore nail polish, this wouldn’t have happened.” After this incident, the principal suspended Liebeman, not the perpetrators. Liebeman and his parents considered filing a lawsuit against the school, but, Liebeman says, his mother didn’t want to “put me in the limelight” and make him any more of a target than he already was. So the harassment continued. In eighth grade, “eight kids surrounded me and beat me up. We filed a police report on all eight, but nothing happened.”
Even worse than the physical abuse, Liebeman says, was the constant harassment. “I was called ‘Pat’ a lot in middle school,” he says, referring to the ambiguously gendered character on Saturday Night Live. “I’ve been called butch, dyke, queer, homo, fag, and she-he-it (shit).” Students who knew him from middle school spread the word about Liebeman on the first day of high school, thus ensuring that he would be isolated and harassed there as well. “I had no friends,” he said. “No one would talk to me. I got really depressed. Normally I’m an outgoing person, but I got very withdrawn.” When he did find a friend in the high school gifted program, a boy who thought that he himself might be gay or bisexual, the two of them were together targeted by other students. “We wrote notes back and forth, and the kids I knew from middle school wrote stuff from the notes on the board.” Liebeman describes himself as “suicidal” during ninth grade.
His family became concerned when his report card came back with five Ds and an F, Liebeman says. At that point, he came out as a lesbian to his family and “built some allies” in the high school administration. He eventually founded a gay/straight alliance at his school. “We had five members in our first year,” he recalls, “and we literally met in a closet—ironic!” As a result of his leadership in the school group, Liebeman attended a queer student conference in Los Angeles. The conference proved to be a turning point for him. “It was the first time I ever met a transgendered person,” he says. “I already knew that I was trans, but I was confused and afraid to admit it. I talked to this guy at the meeting and went to a session called ‘Trans 101.’ On the way home, my mom asked me what sessions I attended, and when I told her about that one, she pulled the car over on the side of the road and basically freaked out.” After overcoming her denial, Liebeman’s mother and other family members, including his uncle and grandparents, eventually came around and supported him. “The only ones who don’t know about me now” are his ultra-Orthodox relatives in Israel, he says. This family support helped Liebeman get through the last years of high school. “In eleventh grade, socially it got better, though the emotional and verbal abuse was still pretty bad,” he says. On one occasion, the school’s gay/straight alliance created a display case during Pride Week. The case was vandalized, with swastikas scratched into the glass. Liebeman and other members of the alliance received intimidating notes from students and teachers. “Some of the right-wing born-again teachers actually signed their notes,” he marvels. “We got a lot of negative feedback from the faculty, but the administration was somewhat supportive. Their attitude is ‘We’re allowing you to be here, but we ‘re not going to do anything to protect you,’” he says.
A survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization that works to end harassment of LGBT kids in schools, found that 69 percent of LGBT youth (ages twelve to nineteen) reported having been victims of harassment or violence in their schools. Half of them said that they were subject to some form of harassment every day. Constant harassment and rejection put transgendered kids, like gay and lesbian youth, at high risk for depression, substance abuse, and other self-destructive activities. “Because isolation and ostracism are key components of transgender youth experience, it would be irresponsible to overlook the associated mental health concerns of substance abuse, self-abuse, depression, and suicide or suicidal ideation,” say Israel and Tarver. They note that “the difficulty these individuals face is evident when we consider that approximately 50 percent to 88 percent have seriously considered or attempted suicide.”
One of the most devastating accounts of the brutal challenges of a transgender adolescence was published by Daphne (now Dylan) Scholinksi in 1997. In The Last Time I Wore a Dress, Scholinski describes a lonely, fearful childhood that spiraled into an angry, rebellious adolescence. She skipped school, stole, hung out with gang members, and experimented with drugs and alcohol. Scholinski was fourteen years old when she was incarcerated in the first of the three psychiatric facilities where she would spend her adolescence. When, at her second psychiatric facility, she was given a list of feelings and asked to circle the ones that applied to her, she “skipped over hope, joy, love and anything else positive. The ones I circled were: lonely, angry, unloved, pulled, disgusted, defeated, rejected—I wrote in hopeless since it wasn’t on the list.”