Teenage and Transgendered

Feleshia Porter, a Dallas counselor who specializes in what the American Psychiatric Association calls gender identity disorder, says that in the past few years she's seen more female-to-male transitions and noticed more people coming out as teens or young adults. "There's more awareness and education. A lot of adults reflect back on how when they were young they just didn't have words for it," Porter says. "Now with the Internet it's easier to research and find people like you." Another reason more female-to-males are coming out is because of recent improvements in the surgical techniques used to turn women into men, which are far more complicated than the reverse, she adds.

As transgender girls and boys come out at younger ages, they're beginning to date and engage in relationships that further challenge the defined gender roles that most of us have grown up with, casting sexual identity as a broad spectrum with varying shades of gray. Not surprisingly, this process tends to complicate adolescence and coming of age. And at the same time, while teens like James who were born girls and want to be boys are a minority within a minority, their experiences in many ways mirror those of anyone who has ever endured puberty.

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On a fall day in 2001, James was still Liz, an eighth-grader at Bowie Middle School. She sat in math class, unable to focus on the problems on the board. She had to use the bathroom. She usually managed to avoid this by drinking only small amounts of water, but this time there was no helping it. She walked out of the classroom, down the hall and into the bathroom marked "girls." A half-dozen girls stood at the sink. "Hey, Elizabeth," one said. Liz returned the hello and tried to ignore the looks on the others' faces. She scurried into a stall, hoping they'd leave.

"Was that a girl or a boy?" she heard one girl ask.

"That's Elizabeth, she's cool," said the one Liz knew. This had little effect. The others ran out the door and began shrieking in the hallway: "There's a boy in the girls' bathroom! There's a boy in the girls' bathroom!"

Inside the stall, Liz berated herself for her mistake. It was lunch period for some students, a terrible time to go to the bathroom. You're an idiot. How could you have forgotten about the lunch crowd? It grew quieter. After another minute, Liz unhooked the latch and walked out of the stall to the sinks. When she stepped into the hallway, there were two female teachers waiting for her. Liz had seen them around the campus but had never met them—this was her first year at the school after moving from Richardson.

"What do you think you're doing in the girls' bathroom, young man?" one of the teachers asked. Liz's stomach flipped and her throat tightened. "I'm a girl," she said in a meek, quiet voice, doing her best to insist that what they saw—a boyish-looking kid in baggy clothes—was not what they thought.

"Are we going to have to go to the office and call your mom?" one of the teachers asked, not believing her.

"No, really. I'm a girl."

"What's your name?"

"Missouri Elizabeth Flowers."

The teacher paused. "Well, OK. Get back to class then."

Like most people who consider themselves transmen, Liz never really felt like a girl. She liked trucks and cars, Legos, Hot Wheels and GI Joe. Once, at a girls' slumber party with pink decorations and party favors, she escaped having her toenails painted by offering to paint everyone else's. Yet unlike your average tomboys, or lesbians who never considered themselves "fem," there were other things. Not only did Liz prefer to play tag with the boys, there was always an undefined yearning that she later identified as longing to be a boy. Or, rather, feeling that she already was one. Whenever she thought about growing up and having a family, for example, she imagined herself not as the mother, but as the father.

These peculiarities—and Liz's androgynous looks—didn't go unnoticed. In middle school, a girl named Princess began calling Liz "it." Other classmates said words she didn't know, like "hermaphrodite." When they called her a dyke, she understood, because her mother was gay. When teachers called her "he" in class, she corrected them. After all, Liz was supposed to be a girl—what other option was there? The day the teachers confronted her in the girls' bathroom, she told her mother, who said she wished the teachers had called her because they would have felt like fools. Liz also told her friend Charley Scarborough. "That's stupid," Charley told her. "You can't just assume things about people."

An expressive gay 19-year-old, Charley is skinny and fair, with longish light blond hair and an irreverent wit. Recalling the first time he met Liz/Jay, he manages to be as respectful as he was theatrical and profane.