I beg of you! Let’s hear it for basic human rights, shall we? I just received this in my inbox — written by a trans parent of a trans child in Georgia. The child – a self-aware trans male in elementary school – was denied usage of a safe unisex bathroom by the school. Not only that, but the school called CPS because of the parents request for his bathroom safety. The parents have since withdrawn the child out of the school, and are now getting the word out about this matter. Please read the story below, and sign the petition for McIntosh County Georgia schools to allow this transgender student usage of a safe bathroom at school.
– Amos
TRUE: Trans kids have to use the bathroom, too.
By Andy Run
Ridiculous, is the word I keep going back to. Ridiculous, when it’s not infuriating, or heart-breaking, or expected.
My child’s bag is still packed: neatly folded tissues wrapped in cellophane, unsharpened pencils, a blank blue notebook with his name written on the front sit in the shadows of a still-new schoolbag. As a short bus kid and drop out, my own school career was shaped more by frustration than hope; I can’t claim to understand the draw that school holds for him. But those mundane artifacts of school life represented to him a normalcy that he can’t find in our weirdo family.
My partner and I are many things considered strange: trans, poly, kinky, queer. We are both artists, tattooed, pierced, with weird haircuts and abnormal affinities for digging through dumpsters for art materials. At any given moment we may be found wearing tu-tus while painting the coffee table purple and singing bad 80’s songs via hand-puppet. We’re fun, sure, but most people would never confuse us for “normal”.
My son wears strictly khakis and striped polos. Over the last year he surreptitiously slipped anything that sparkles or retained some shade of pink under his dresser. His stuffed animals slowly rotated: unicorns to the dark crevices, dogs and dinosaurs to the front. His glitter heels were firmly relegated to the closet. He keeps his hair military short. He wants to move to Texas.
My child is trans, like me. His identity has been substantiated by time, verified by the gate-keepers: he’s got his papers. My child is more trans than me, according to Harry Benjamin– I want to be fabulous, he wants to be normal. “I just don’t like sparkly things as much as you do,” he said, sadly returning the faux fur glittery jacket we were thrilled to find at the thrift store for him. “We’re just too gay for him,” my partner said to me, and we both laughed– but it’s true.
We’re just too gay for where we live, too. We never meant to live here; a slow peeling away of already scant resources– a sudden illness, job loss, eviction– forced us into choosing between homelessness and here. Here is a boatshed in my mother’s yard, and here is a very rural, conservative coastal town in the southern part of Georgia. I came out in this town, god help me– now my child is. We don’t have the money to leave.
We warned D. of what he might encounter as a trans kid in a public elementary school. He wanted to go, anyway– refused to be afraid. We coached him on safety, spoke with the professionals, had a meeting with his teacher: everything seemed fine. There was no changing out for gym and we were told he’d have a pass to use the boy’s room alone.
His did great at his first day of school. We’d practiced walking on the right side of the hall, single file, no talking (“internalize your prison!,” I’d barked at him, as he snapped to attention, giggling into his hand)– he made special efforts to sit still, be neat, follow the rules. “I did everything right,” he told us later, dropping his still-full book bag onto our kitchen floor. “I even sat at the table better than everyone else. It went okay. But the teacher told me that I had to use the girl’s room.”
Ridiculous, infuriating, heart-breaking: the second day of school began with a short and pointless meeting with the superintendent. My requests for use of a unisex bathroom or a mediated conversation through Trans Youth Family Allies were virulently denied. Instead, the superintendent told me that he was calling CPS. I withdrew my son from school.
But we’re not done yet. We’re bringing a petition to the school board, a petition that already has over 3,000 signatures. I want them to know that our little queer, trans family doesn’t stand alone. Please stand with us.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
God Bless and Good Luck!!! Especially dealing with the closeminded and judgemental!!
Consider it signed! It makes me sick to have to read this…Good luck and I’ll be passing this along.
This is so bad. Consider this signed.
Signed. This school has deliberately compromised the safety of this child by forcefully outing him in front of his peers!
Man, am I glad I live in Europe. We have the Convention on Human rights which we can use in situations like this. When I hear of stuff like this, I just want to climb to the top of a tall building and shout FUCK YOU repeatedly at the world.
I’m going to sit down with the american constitution and go through it word for word for ‘Freedom to live a private life’ or words to that effect.
Even the Republicans think that people should be free to live their lives and make their own choices without interference from the state – this is state interference at it’s worst.
Signed and posted to my facebook
Good luck guys. *hugs from the UK*
I know this game all too well they might find the sf gender non conforming/trans student safety policies a bit of help although I never worked on that issue with georgia I spent years here in cali trying to get districts to implement it working with thecalifornia education department and other education facilities and schools where able to adapt it fairly easy I know its a struggle and different state but might shed some light. Feel free to conact me I have the original and revised versions. As for this petition I’ll def repost and best of luck this is seen way too often but I’m glad something is being done about it. Hope things go better.
Can you send me the versions of the safe schools policies that y’all came up with in CA? We have some here in GA that I am trying to track down, but I would definitely appreciate looking at those as well. If you have a FB, can you find me there and request to be friended, and we can go from there?
Really?! You don’t think it’s at all possible that this female born child is simply following in it’s parents footsteps?! Oh look, she hates all “girly” things, therefore she must be a boy like us…. Come on. What really needs to happen is to teach our children, that they can still be girls without loving pink and dresses. That you can still be a girl and not look like every over the top femme in the media vomit.
When did being a non-conforming girl/woman become such a bad thing?!!
Here’s a more explanatory article about this family’s situation from the GA Voice. About 12 breaks down, the paragraph titled “A transgender child” tells more about the young child’s trans experience.
http://www.thegavoice.com/index.php/news/georgia-news/3170-parent-wants-rural-ga-school-to-let-trans-elementary-student-use-boys-restroom
I went to great lengths to insure that my child understood that the normative concepts of gender are nearly 100% constructed bullshit, and founded primarily in misogyny. My child has grown up in a community of people with diverse gender identities and expressions, and frankly would laugh at anyone who claimed that girls can’t do/should do [ ], and boys can’t do/should do [ ].
I am not trans because I failed to consider that women can be gender non-conforming. My child is not trans because he’s following in the foot steps of my misogynist ignorance. I don’t know why we’re both trans. I do know that my child is asking me to support the identity and expression that feels most right and true for him, and that my job as his parent is to in whatever way possible support, empower, protect, and educate him.
I don’t appreciate your assumptions and judgments of my family, nor do I see how you possibly extrapolated your objections from the story that was posted. I suggest your revisit your ideas as to why people are trans; typically, being too stupid to realize that girls can like dinosaurs and dogs isn’t among them.
First of all there are many adults that still don’t understand the difference bet. sex & gender. Much less a 18 month old child that you claim is displaying gender identity then. Shoot I’m trans myself, but in retrospect, one of the factors that COULD of led to me being so was lack of a good and positive woman role model who was accepting of herself. Nevermind the fact that society puts women as second class citizens and sex objects… Lord knows that I didn’t want to be either of those things as a child or as a adult.
I mean really, I wanted to be a horse at 18 months! And a superhero at 3 years, and a alien at 5…
A suggestion: check out this website, http://www.imatyfa.org/. Attend the Philly Health Conference. Of course, I understand your concerns– I think all of us as trans people have considered why we are the way we are, and a great deal of doubt and shame gets filtered through there. But the issues and presentations of trans children are predictable and real, and frankly different from the issues and concerns of trans adults.
One of the hardest jobs of a parent is to accept our children as they are, without trying to make them how we’d like them to be. Do you think that I, as a trans person myself, would wish this kind of ridiculous discrimination on my baby? I cried, and hard, when he insisted that he was a boy, that he was trans. I, like many parents of trans children, and like many of our own parents, had to do a lot of inner work to make room to accept my child.
I would love for my child to be the ass kicking feminist little girl that I raised him to be. But he isn’t– he is actually so gender normative that we can’t relate to each other in a lot of ways. He and I have had to agree to disagree on many issues related to gender.
If I thought that I somehow “made” my child trans, that I’d somehow alienated him from his womanness, my heart would break. If I genuinely thought that I had hurt him like that, I would find some other place for him to live, some other environment for him to be raised in.
But you know what would happen? If someone tried to force him to live as a girl, he would be crushed. I imagine that is familiar to you, at least. By the time he finally was like, no really, I’m a boy and I need to look like one, he was extremely anxious and acting out, just from the pressure of pretending to be a gender-nonconforming girl. And you know why he was trying to pretend to be that? Me. That was my fault. He didn’t want to disappoint me.
If he ever chooses to express and understand himself in a different way, I will have his back, just as I have it now. My job as a parent is not to force him to be how I’d like him to be, but to nurture and support him to be himself. I will never claim to do this precarious job of parenting without fears, doubts, and concerns about my fitness for such a significant role, and no parent can.
But I do know that I love my child more than anything or anyone else on this earth, and he is asking something from me, and as I hope will always be true, I am stepping up and listening.
This part made me cry:
“…he was extremely anxious and acting out, just from the pressure of pretending to be a gender-nonconforming girl. And you know why he was trying to pretend to be that? Me. That was my fault. He didn’t want to disappoint me. ”
I admire your honesty, integrity and humility. Your child is lucky to have such a supportive, loving, attentive parent. I wish you and your family the best in this process. I hope your son is able to return to school and feel safe and accepted as soon as possible.
What does it MEAN when someone claims they are male despite the fact that they have a female body — it must logically mean that they are assigning more meaning to ‘being male’ than just having a male body and XY chromosomes — and THAT is what feminists have been banging on about for ages, that ‘being male’ in that sense is just a social construct. So, if you BELIEVE there is more to being male than being XY, then you are playing along with the very thing that has been used all along to subjugate women.
It’s sad seeing so many people fall victim to the society norm, which ironically most claim to also hate. This all just reminds me of a child who grows up in a strict Chistain Conservative family. Of course they consider themselves good christains as kids, until they grow up and learn about themselves on their own WITHOUT the pressure from the parents/family. The parents of this child should be ashamed.
I am not ashamed to be trans.
I am not ashamed that I have raised my child with honesty, open communication, and deep love.
I am not ashamed that my child has the courage to explore himself, the language to speak his experience, and the trust to ask me to be here for him.
I am not ashamed to be here for him now, when he needs me the most.
I am not ashamed at all. I’m proud of my family and of my child, and I am grateful to be here with and for him.
I think it’s interesting that objections about child-rearing often begin with the assumption that the parents are putting their “issues” on the children, and not an assumption that the person critiquing is. To each their own, of course, and healthy discussion is important. Gender non-conforming people get the shit end of the stick, that’s for sure. But there’s also a privilege placed on “making it work” in the body you’re born with–which is essentialist and, for some, impossible. It’s important to give children a sense of the full range of what’s out there, agreed. And it sounds like that’s what these parents are doing. That’s not anti-feminist or women-hating, and it’s sad to me to see those things associated in a transphobic way. Hopefully someday we can all just respect each other’s fluid, beautiful, diverse sense of ourselves–including, and especially, when it comes to our children.
I don’t see that the issue is if this child is trans or not. The issue is that he believes he is at this point in his life and he needs the support of the adults around him. His parents are being those supportive adults. I think it is very brave of these parents to stand up for their child. If I had a child with a similar issue or any other of hundreds of other issues you could argue w/ a school about I would hope that I could stand up for them like these people are doing. Good for you and I wish you the best of luck!!
Good luck,
I wish my parents were as supportive as you guys. Its amazing and i wish you the best of luck