I Am Tired Of Hearing How Easy The Kids Have It Today…

I hear many trans-people my age say that the kids have it so easy transitioning now in elementary school or junior high school before puberty set in, but that could not be further from the truth. We didn’t have to put up with the harassment and discrimination that they face coming out.

Sure we now have laws that are supposed to protect the students from those things, but many schools ignore or do not comply with the laws. They are more or less daring the students to take legal action because they know that most will not because they fear the exposure that the judicial system imposes and also that it is long and expensive.

There is an article in the Kansas City Star by Eric Adler about the difficulties that the students face, “‘I am a girl’: Transgender children face a society slow to accept them”

She is only 6 years old. Already the child who sits, legs tucked, on a canopied bed near a closet filled with princess dresses has lost her best friends.

Kids who used to ask A.J. to birthday parties stopped calling.

Parents back in preschool avoided making eye contact.

Once, at a ballet open house, A.J. and her mom ran into a family with whom they had always been close.

“They looked at us,” the Kansas City mother recalls, “crossed the sidewalk and didn’t say anything.”

“For a while it made me hate humanity,” she conceded. “‘You just proved yourselves to be the lowest human beings on the planet. You know my kid. You know my child is a happy, kind, sweet, considerate kid and nothing has changed, except …’”

For many us older trans-people we never had to go through that, we learned at an early how to mask our feels, we suffered in silence. For some of us we transitioned after college or even in our 50s, 60s, or even our 70s. Now we have to go through a lot of work to make ourselves more feminine or masculine. That is one aspect that the students have easier, but the discrimination that they face is overwhelming. For us by the time we transitioned we had developed coping skill but the students are more vulnerable to peer pressure. 

As the article said many lose their friends, family and their family becomes shunned,

“There is huge judgment in society,” said her father. “Not only on her, but on us.”

Many times their brothers and sisters are also picked on in school. The family of the trans-girl in Maine was forced to move to another town to start over fresh in another school system.

Society is more accepting now of gays and lesbians but is still coming to grips with trans-students and thanks to the right-wing conservatives; there is a lot of hate out there.

If they had a son or daughter who was gay or lesbian or bisexual, they are convinced that people would view it as no major matter, no reason for anonymity. But they have come to realize many in the public still don’t accept transgender people, considering them inscrutable oddities.

So please do not say that they have it easier.

Living a Transgender Childhood
Josie is 9 years old and was born as Joey. This is her incredible story.