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By Root 2061 0

social thrashing of genderqueer kids is bound to attract them.” Scholinksi’s “social thrashing” attracted numerous sharks. Even before entering psychiatric facilities, Scholinski was molested by an adolescent babysitter named Gloria; a burly neighbor of her mother’s named Frank, “who took me out for dinner and gave me money and Ziploc baggies of green marijuana;” and a married couple who invited her to hang out in their apartment to listen to music and drink beer. “The second time I was over, the man kept his hand on my shoulder a long time. His wife started rubbing my back and my mind emptied out and I was a shell being rubbed. The wife spoke in a quiet voice and said she and her husband liked my body because it was so boyish. Their hands went further and further and my mouth couldn’t speak any words.” While incarcerated, Scholinski was raped on two occasions by fellow patients, boys whom she knew and trusted, and groped by another while in restraints.

In an informal survey taken at Camp Trans, a protest held outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival after organizers of the festival decreed that only “women born women” could attend, the activist Riki Wilchins discovered that of twelve “mostly white, mostly middle and working class” transgendered participants at the protest, ioo percent of them (twelve of twelve) had been physically abused or beaten as children and 75 percent (nine of twelve) had been sexually abused, with 40 percent of those (five of twelve) victims of incest. Fifty percent (six of twelve) had been raped at some point in their lives. This is, as Wilchins admits, a very small and unscientific sample; however, on the basis of the stories I’ve heard since beginning research on this book, I don’t believe that a more formal testing instrument would find those numbers hugely inflated. Gender-variant kids are often brutally mistreated. Riki Wilchins says that such abuse “appears not as an anomaly but as a cultural norm: the means by which gender-queer kids are instructed in the limits and consequences of gender difference.”

One of my sources, a transman who requested a pseudonym (“Brad”) because his daughter and in-laws don’t know about his past, said that his father beat him regularly throughout his childhood. “I was being physically abused at home all the time…. Whether I was being sexually abused, I don’t know, because everything is blacked out. I have like a minute here, a minute there. Years and years of nothing. But I know that I was physically abused. My whole family knows, and it all came out finally when my dad died and they were all like, ‘We’re really sorry, we should have stepped in.’ But they didn’t.”

Brad’s father was “a military guy, Navy for twenty-three years,” and “a white-knuckle alcoholic, a non-drinking alcoholic,” enraged by his “daughter’s” masculinity. “I think that my dad’s biggest problem was that I looked like him and I acted like him. He didn’t perceive me as male, but he saw me doing male things all the time, and that went against the grain. He would stay stuff like, ‘If you’re gonna be a girl, you need to wear dresses and you need to wear this and that.’ I would refuse to wear dresses. I always wore jeans.” When Brad’s father became angry at his three children for various infractions, he would “line us up and scream at us and then beat the shit out of me. Or he’d start beating all of us, and I would say that I did it ‘cause I couldn’t deal with my sister and brother crying. And I was like, ‘Go ahead, beat the crap out of me. I can deal with your shit.’ Because I was so mad at him,” Brad says.

Daphne Scholinski describes a similar dynamic with her father. Touchy and violent, he would become angry at minor infractions, and he and Daphne would get into shoving matches. “I’d walk up to him close enough so that his angry face was all I could see of the world, and he’d push me away, so I’d push back, and we were off…. He poked me on the chest, thud, thud, until I cried. Go ahead, hit me. I know you want to, I taunted. This was thrilling. If he hit me, I’d won— I’d cracked him open