DonnaT
04-28-2005, 02:39 PM
That was very nice of you to go over and talk to the family while you were dressed enfemme.
Here's a copy of an article from The Ogonean you might consider printing for your friend to read.
A family begins to emerge from years of secrecy and embark with
their 14-year-old on a journey to reveal the transgendered
child's true identity
Sunday, April 24, 2005
STEVE WOODWARD
The Oregonian
In a quiet suburban home atop a picturesque hill in Washington
County, a family is beginning to reveal its heartbreaking
14-year secret.
To the unknowing eye, they look like a prototypical suburban
family: a hardworking, devout Christian couple with two
clean-cut, well-mannered sons, one a college graduate, the other
a high school freshman.
But behind closed doors, the younger son, Sander, is not who he
seems to be on the outside.
For 14 years, this seemingly all-American family has been forced
to confront the nearly unfathomable fact that the boy they
nurtured through baseball and Cub Scouts is, at her core, not
really a boy at all.
He is a girl in a boy's body.
During the family's long and emotional journey toward
acceptance, they have lived a life of deception. They have
hidden dresses and dolls, quit attending church, fled their old
neighborhood and canceled birthday parties. They have battled
confusion, shame and their religious beliefs.
Now, as Sander blossoms into an outwardly typical teen-age girl,
her family has come a long way toward confronting the truth
about its youngest member:
Sander is transgender, a nearly invisible minority among sexual
minorities.
Sander herself has fought depression, anger and frustration at
having to be someone she is not. As early as age 7, she
contemplated suicide.
"I would say, 'Mommy, are you sure I'm not a girl?' " Sander
recalls.
Some might mistake her for a gay male. But in the transgender
world, she is actually a heterosexual female. Sander, like many
other transgender youths, is convinced she was born into the
wrong body and wants to correct the mistake with hormones and
surgery. Other transgender people forgo part or all of the
surgery, but dress and act like the gender they identify with.
Many feel genderless -- or both male and female. The variations
are legion.
Today, Sander awaits adulthood, when an operation is expected to
transform her male sex organs into a female's. She takes a drug
that hinders testosterone production, blocking the growth of
facial hair. She dreams of one day marrying a kind husband with
a good job, while she stays at home to raise three adopted
children.
"It took four separate doctors to tell me, 'Look, you've got a
daughter. Live with it,' " says Sander's mother, Rhonda, a
51-year-old teacher in the Beaverton School District.
Based on a Swedish study from the mid-1960s, the American
Psychiatric Association's figures indicate that fewer than 3,000
U.S. men between 18 and 60 years old have undergone surgery to
become women. But more recent studies from other countries point
to at least 8,000 men who are post-operative women in the United
States. In a widely cited analysis, Lynn Conway, a transsexual
electrical-engineering professor at the University of Michigan,
used studies, estimates and reported numbers of actual surgeries
to conclude that at least 32,000 American men have undergone
sexual-reassignment surgery. No estimate is available for the
number of transsexuals who do not undergo operations.
The family agreed to tell its story to The Oregonian, hoping
that their painful journey could help others understand about
being transgender. The Oregonian agreed not to use the family's
last name to reduce the possibility of hate crimes against
Sander.
For hours, they pour out their story and their emotions in the
living room of their comfortable home.
Sander curls up in an armchair, looking like any 14-year-old
girl, dressed in a pink blouse, floral-print clam diggers and
platform shoes. Her long, glittered hair is pulled back in a
ponytail fastened with blue ribbon. A polish called Pink
Alternative coats her fingernails. Her wrists and fingers are
sparkly with rings and green and silver bracelets. King's Ransom
eye shadow frames her eyes. Spangly earrings dangle from her
pierced ears.
Her mother has no patience for those who call a transgender
state a lifestyle.
"This is not a lifestyle," Rhonda says, tearing up. "Who would
choose this life? I just can't imagine anyone choosing this
life."
Child was always different
For as long as the family can remember, Sander was different
from other boys. He liked to watch his mother cook, vacuum and
put on makeup. He wanted to play with dolls. He cried when he
first realized that his genitalia were male.
When Sander was a toddler, his father, Mike, says he didn't
think much about his son's desire to wear Rhonda's shoes and
clothes. But when Sander reached preschool and made a beeline
for the dress-up box with its white wedding dress, Mike says, "I
was embarrassed."
"It was a little hard for me to adapt to Sander," admits Mike, a
63-year-old utility worker who grew up in a blue-collar family
led by a father in the construction business.
Rhonda blamed herself.
"I thought, 'What am I doing wrong?' " she says.
By the time Sander was 21/2, his parents reluctantly assumed
they were raising a gay child.
"We're Christians," Rhonda says. "We were just praying that he
would be straight."
But at age 9, when a psychiatrist arrived at a diagnosis of
gender dysphoria, Rhonda says, half-joking, "we prayed that he
would be gay."
Suicidal thought prompts action
The family had begun seeking medical and psychological help two
years earlier, after Sander uttered his first suicidal thought.
"At 7," Rhonda recalls, "he said one day, 'Mommy, I no longer
wish to live in this world.' "
They signed him up for Scouting and baseball, thinking those
activities would transform him into the kind of boy they
considered normal. But the attempts only made matters worse.
"He'd get all excited like a girl," Mike says. "It was
embarrassing. It was sad the way they treated him."
They tried to make him act more manly, telling him to keep his
pinky finger down while drinking hot chocolate and to shake
hands firmly, not as though he's expecting his hand to be
kissed.
"It really worked wonders," Sander says now, her voice dripping
with sarcasm.
As Sander grew up, the family retreated into a secret life. At
home, in private, Sander played with his mother's makeup, shoes
and jewelry and his growing collection of Barbie dolls. He began
to accumulate a closet full of girls' clothes, which he wore
around the house.
Whenever visitors arrived, they hid everything.
"I felt like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis," Sander says.
Sander fell into continual brooding about his life.
"It was like having a board placed on top of you and having
rocks placed on top of it," Sander says. "There was no benefit
for life."
Family makes changes
Sander gave up boys' clothes for gender-neutral clothing during
school and visits from friends. The family stayed tight-lipped
around relatives. They stopped going to St. Andrew Lutheran
Church in Beaverton. They moved to a new neighborhood partly to
preserve their privacy and to spare neighbors the discomfort of
watching Sander undergo the inexorable transition from boy to
girl. To forestall any questions from the real estate agent
during the move, Rhonda covered up Sander's girls' clothes and
labeled them "Drama Department."
"We went through a period of years where we didn't even have
birthday parties for Sander, because we didn't have anyone to
invite," Rhonda says.
Randell, Sander's now-24-year-old brother, would ask, "Why's he
always wearing girls' clothes?" Rhonda says.
"It was something I didn't really want to accept," says Randell,
who felt frustrated at his brother's propensity for dressing up
like a girl, cleaning house and playing with Barbies.
But Randell, a fraternity man during his years at Oregon State
University, happened to take a human sexuality course, in which
he learned about the whole spectrum of sexuality, including
transgender people. He brought the book home with him one
weekend and showed it to his parents.
"He said, 'There's nothing wrong with him,' " Rhonda recalls.
Parade marks transition
The real turning point for the family came on a June afternoon
in 2000. Rhonda and Mike were in downtown Portland when they
happened upon the annual Gay Pride Parade. Rhonda recalls
watching a group of "lovely ladies" marching by. They were
representatives of the Northwest Gender Alliance, a support
organization for cross-dressers and transsexuals. She was
astonished.
"That's like what I live with," Rhonda recalls thinking. "I
said, 'We're bringing Sander to this next year.' "
And they did.
"That was the first time we ever took Sander out dressed as a
girl," Rhonda says.
They were nervous boarding the MAX train for downtown. Sander,
then a sixth-grader, wore a wig and animal-print pants. They
fretted about running into people they knew.
"I was nervous," Sander says. "I knew I wasn't going to be beat
up. It was just scary in general. It was kind of like the
opening up of my true self."
But meeting only with kindness, they felt empowered by the
experience.
"All these little things gave us confidence to venture out more
and more," Rhonda says.
Little by little, the family began to face reality. On their
shopping trips, Rhonda and Sander shopped only for girls'
clothes. By seventh grade, Sander began growing her hair out,
after years of despondency over having to get boys' haircuts. At
age 12, her father took her to Washington Square to get her ears
pierced, a long-awaited event that left her too excited to eat
that day.
The last time Rhonda saw Sander dressed unmistakably as a boy
was for her mother's funeral.
"I just knew I couldn't bring Sander in a dress," Rhonda says.
"I knew it was the last time I'd see Sander in a starched white
shirt."
Finding acceptance
They began to tell a few people that Sander was a transgender
female. Rhonda told her colleagues at work. Sander told
schoolteachers and administrators, who arranged for her to use
the private faculty restroom.
"I was amazed," Rhonda says, "one, how little anyone knew about
it, and two, how well they accepted it once it was explained to
them."
Though the subject has not come up directly with some relatives,
Sander says they've told her, "We'll always accept you, no
matter what."
About six months ago, Sander began to tell her friends. They
weren't fazed.
"I told Rachel recently," Sander says. "She's a really, really
good friend of mine. I told her, 'Can I tell you something?' She
said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'I'm transgender.' She said, 'Oh,' and
went on."
Today, Sander and her girlfriends watch movies, talk, try on
makeup, play board games and go to the zoo.
"I have crushes," Sander says, referring to boys, "but I don't
follow through."
Dressed as a girl, Sander often goes with Randell and his high
school and fraternity friends to movies and other public
outings. Randell was uncomfortable at first, but soon discovered
that people didn't realize Sander was transgender or didn't
care.
When Sander was born, Randell says he looked forward to having a
brother -- "going to baseball games, having beers, doing guy
stuff."
"Now," he says, "I'm discovering there are new things to look
forward to."
Since Sander opened up to friends, her depression has lifted.
"Sander is really happy recently," Randell says. "I'm seeing the
change. She's really happy and carefree."
Ready to move forward
Sander and her family finally are ready to take the ultimate
step in shedding the secrecy that has shrouded their lives: an
unencumbered life in which Sander openly dresses, acts, feels
and acknowledges to everyone -- family, friends, classmates and
neighbors -- that she is transgender.
"If there's one thing I would say to people," Rhonda says, "it
would be that there's nothing to be afraid of."
Rhonda worries about all the transgendered children whose
parents can't accept them, sometimes driving them out of homes
and into the streets. She expresses relief that Sander was born
into their family rather than another.
"If I had a mission, it would be to raise the status of
transgender people in society," says Rhonda, who is writing an
advice book for parents of transgender children.
"It doesn't matter whether you're conservative or liberal,"
Rhonda says. "When this baby is left on your doorstep, it's
there to stay."
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