The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [115]
But such understanding remains all too rare. “Parents with resources large or small will spend their last penny trying to help their young son or daughter conform to their concept of what is ‘normal,’” according to these researchers. When a family is coping with other Stressors, such as alcoholism, separation and divorce, or financial problems, the gender-variant child is very often scapegoated as the source of the family’s difficulties. The same thing happens in families devoted to maintaining the appearance of perfection. “Because gender-identity conflicts are still perceived as a mental health disorder by uninformed care providers, today’s transgender youth still are at risk of being treated in the same manner gays and lesbians encountered years ago. Sadly, these treatment approaches are little more than abuse, professional victimization, and profiteering under the guise of support for parents’ goals.”
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