Teenage and Transgendered

Charley continues. "I look him dead in the eyes and I'm like, 'That is not gender-specific.' And Jay says, 'I'm a girl.' For some reason, that was a kick-starter for a great friendship."

When Charley met Jay, as Liz, she was incredibly shy. That began to change over the next couple of years. Well outside the realm of "popular" at the Academy of Irving, a non-traditional public high school that offers specialized career tracks, Charley, Liz, Amber and a few others formed a close group of friends. They were gay, straight and bisexual, fat and skinny, quiet and loud. Most of them attended SonRise Fellowship, a Baptist church in Irving, but began going less often when the youth pastor started referring to Sodom and Gomorrah and the horrors of homosexuality—particularly when Charley was there.

After Charley met Liz's mother, who had been divorced from Liz's father for almost a decade and came out when Liz was in the fourth grade, Charley asked his friend if she was a lesbian like her mother. "No, I don't think so," Liz told him.

"For a long time, we were like, 'Well, we don't know who Jay likes to bang—we'll just leave that alone,'" Charley says. Then, sophomore year, Liz started dating a girl. Everyone assumed Liz was a lesbian, and while she didn't claim to be gay, she didn't correct people, either.

The turning point came over winter break junior year. Liz and Charley were hanging out in Liz's backyard in Irving with a kid named Jure. Jure mentioned that he was transgendered, and Liz asked what that meant.

"Having been raised in the GLBT community, I never understood what the T stood for," Jay says. "You can always spot the gays and lesbians when you go down to Oak Lawn, but you can't really spot the transgenders. I hadn't really heard the word."

Liz listened, rapt, as this kid talked about why he chose to live as a boy. He could have been describing Liz herself—always a tomboy, never liked dresses, never felt like a little girl. As the boy spoke, Liz and Charley looked at each other.

"He said that and I thought, 'It's always been so awkward when people call me 'she,'" Jay says now. "I wouldn't mind people calling me 'he.'" Jure told Liz he planned to take hormones to acquire a deeper voice and facial hair. He talked about "top" and "bottom" surgery. "I was like, 'You can do that?'" Jay recalls. "Cool!"

For the past year, Jay James and Amber Burden have attended the support group at Youth First Texas together. The center, which operates with donations and money garnered from fund-raising events, offers counseling and after-school and summer activities. The nonprofit also gives recommendations for various services, including transgender therapy or physician contact information. Youth and mentors throughout the DFW area generally find the group through word of mouth or online. The mentors are screened through background checks and interviews and receive about 10 hours of training.

Several of the transgendered mentors didn't change sexes until later in life, in some cases interrupting established careers, marriages and families. On a Thursday evening in early August, three mentors and four teens gathered around a table in the organization's offices, which are housed in a brown strip mall off Maple Avenue. There was Renee, a 40-ish male-to-female engineer turned massage therapist; Diane, who began her sex change some 20 years ago at 19 and is married to a man; and Tori, a firearms expert at the Fort Worth Police Department who, last year, after decades of depression and feeling as if he were stuck in the wrong body, finally divorced his wife and began the transition from man to woman.

James began attending the group for support with his transition. But Burden has also found it helpful—the past year has posed challenges for her as well. On this particular Thursday, Burden had an announcement.

"So, I've been doing a lot of soul-searching lately," she said. "I've been researching androgyny. I'm trying to figure out who I am—sometimes I have my girly days, other days I have my full-on testosterone days."

James nodded. "I've seen it," he said.