Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (14 page)

My family found a way to edge me off girls’ clothes. They said, “Okay, if you go to school with boys’ clothes on, you can wear a little dress under it.”

“Okay.”

So basically I had boys’ clothes on and a V-cut dress under it. Or I’d completely wear guy clothes and then little heels. I remember wearing my jellies with shorts.

When I turned six, my behavior became really bizarre. I began threatening people to get what I wanted. I would tell my grandmother, “If you don’t buy me this or that, I’ll run away!” I yelled and screamed and even threatened her with a knife. Can you believe that? She sent me to a doctor, who diagnosed me with ADD.

My mother had nothing to do with me. She was not in the picture. She was living in the house, but she’d go in and out. She didn’t pay attention to me. I thought she didn’t care about me.

I think the reason why I wore girls clothes, my mother’s clothes, was to have a bond with her. My mother was an alcoholic, she was on drugs, she was a prostitute, and she also had lupus. She taught me some things, but basically she left me with my grandmother. I wanted to have a bond with her, and I also wanted to be a girl. I loved the idea of being pretty, of being a princess. I loved the idea of Barbie and beauty. I just liked dresses! But a lot of people didn’t approve of it.

My grandmother thought I needed help. Help! Help! I was not being cared for. A person who isn’t cared for? Come on. Of course they’re going to act out.

There had to be an excuse to get help from the government. First they put me in a hospital. I was in my hospital clothes all day, a gown with an opening in the back. I liked that.

There was this girl there. I thought about that guy in my neighborhood telling me that girls have vaginas. I looked at her and thought,
This must be a girl.
So I went up to her and told her I liked her and she said she liked me. We started kissing. I picked up her skirt and looked in her underwear. “Where’s your dick?”

“What’s a dick?”

“You don’t have what I have.”

“Well, what do I have?”

And I put my hand down there and felt this little hole-kind-of-thing. I got really scared and ran away. At the time, I thought girls must have had their dicks cut off. That’s what makes them a girl.

I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. I sure didn’t hang around her no more. Then one day, when I was with my mother or my grandmother or maybe it was the social worker — I don’t remember — I said, “I want to have my dick cut off, because I want to be a girl.”

But then I got over that phase and thought,
Nah, I don’t really want that. I want boy clothes.
So I stayed with the gender I was born into, but I still had urges for girl clothes.

Still, I grew out my hair and had girl hairstyles. I would see a dress or a purse at the mall and force my grandmother to buy it. “You can put them on, but don’t go outside in them,” my grandmother would say. But I looked so pretty. I wanted to show people what I was doing.

The first or second grade is when things started getting pretty weird. I was seven at the time, living at home, and going to a new school in a black community. I’m not a racist, but when it comes to queer people, black people are very ghetto, as I would say. In my low-income community, people had no education and no jobs. They were grown-ups acting like children. The adults, not the children, made fun of me when I wore my wigs.

And I wore girl boots with heels too. Sometimes I wore stilettos that I took from my mother. I acted like I was beautiful. The kids wouldn’t say nothing ’cause I was a fighter and they was scared of me.

“You’re a little boy! What’s going on wit’ you? You’re not supposed to be wearing girl clothes. Take that shit off, boy.” And they’d laugh. Or when they’d see me, they were, like, “Come here, girl. See this!” and they’d start laughing.

I guess I had more courage than I have now. When I’m home now, I only wear boy clothes.

I was sexually mature. What I mean by sexually mature is that I knew about sex. From six up, I used to kiss other guys in my neighborhood, make out with them, and perform oral sex on them. I liked it. I used to love oral. And I touched their you-know-whats. We were really young, but that’s what we did.

I was making out with girls too. I used to love making out with girls ’cause everybody thought I was cool. Everybody was encouraging me. “Look, Frank’s not gay — he’s making out with a girl!” They wanted to know how the hell I learned to kiss like that. I didn’t know how I learned. It was pretty weird.

Guys used to hit on me — perverts — pedophiles. I’d see guys giving me a look, and it kinda creeped me out. They would touch themselves, saying, “Come here, sweetie.” Something told me not to go. I ran away. I ran to where there was a lot of people.

By then, I hated being a kid. I had a grown-up’s mind and thought I was an adult. I acted like I was an adult. I got into adult conversations. I wasn’t hanging around children no more; I was hanging around adults, people on the streets, neighbors, and my mom’s friends. I used to sing and dance for them. I danced like a girl and like a boy. I just loved performing. But it was very, very strange. Why would a child hang around with adults so much? Why would adults hang around me? DSS was concerned about that too.

When I was about eight, I was put in placement. I went there ’cause there was a lot of allegations. The social workers reported that my behavior was getting really bizarre. They didn’t tell me this at the time. They only said it was because my mother or my grandma couldn’t take care of me. They said that my mother was neglectful. I didn’t think so. But they just took me away. It was horrible, really traumatizing.

This placement place was called ANDRUS Children’s Center, in Yonkers, New York. It used to be an orphanage, and then some rich man spent millions of dollars to turn it into a placement center. I forgot the whole story. It was an old English-style mansion that was built in the eighteen hundreds. It was beautiful. There were over twenty rooms. I had never seen anything so lavish.

There were fourteen or fifteen kids living in separate cottages, or units. A staff watched over us, but it wasn’t like prison. It was like a boarding school, but it was not a boarding school.

This was one of the best places I had ever been to. The things I did there I probably never would have done had I stayed with my grandmother, to tell you the truth. She didn’t have the money. She didn’t have resources. She didn’t have a car.

In placement, I couldn’t wear girls’ clothes and I actually accepted being a boy. I played sports and felt normal. But I always had these urges. I wanted long hair. I loved pretty dresses. I loved skirts.

I remember saying to myself,
I have to grow my hair to look like a girl so boys will like me.
Now, when I think back, I think,
Did I really say that back then? Did my body, my soul, know what I was supposed to be?

We were so close, like brothers. I don’t know if he’s gay — I haven’t seen him in years. We’d play kitty games, like, every time we took showers, we’d take off our clothes and put towels around us. Michael would rip off my towel. “Stop ripping off my towel!” He was really sneaky about this. I would get really mad.

Then he’d do it to some of the other kids, and I actually had a jealousy feeling. I keep thinking,
What is this feeling?
I didn’t know the word
jealousy,
only the feeling.

We would go on trips every day. We went ice-skating. I started biking. I saw animals in the zoo. We had a really good time.

Two staff members always went with us. One was Kathy, the recreation person, and the other was Franklin. He was Puerto Rican, and a lot of people told us we looked like each other ’cause I looked Spanish when I was a kid. And our names were almost the same,
Frank
and
Franklin.

Because we all liked Kathy, anyone who Kathy liked, we liked. They were really good to us. No abuse. No abuse at all.

There was sex — what I would call curiosity sex. We were experimenting. Isn’t that what a kid does at that age?

Michael and I became roommates, and we got really close. We told each other things about our parents. His mother was a crackhead. I told him certain things about my parents. Because I was a private person, people thought I was very mysterious. But back then I didn’t know much about my family.

We’d share our clothes and share our CDs. At night, he used to get in bed with me and we’d kiss or hug each other.

On trips, I’d sleep on his lap in the van. I used to like that type of stuff.

Michael was a type-one diabetic. He had to test his blood, and he couldn’t eat certain things. He used to give himself his own needle. We kids thought that was cool. Most kids are scared of needles. It was really cool to see him give himself a needle ’cause none of us could do it. Michael was a popular kid. In a way, I was popular too, but I was very quiet, a shy person. The staff loved me.

My mother died in 2001, just before the World Trade Center. It was around my birthday, July 6. I thought,
This is one bad birthday present.

This is where my belief in God comes in the picture. When my mom passed away and I was told the news, I was really sad. I thought of one person on the staff who I wanted to take me to the funeral. Her name was Marie, and she treated me like I was her son. I loved her. I asked for Marie, but she had already gone home. Then, for some reason, she came back. I thought that I must have a guardian angel. It was so weird: she wasn’t here, and all of a sudden, she appeared. I didn’t know how to process it at that time, so I thought it must be God sending me a guardian angel.

After the funeral, I was scared to sleep in my own room. By that time, Michael had been discharged and I had my own room. I even had my own bathroom and walk-in closet. I didn’t want to sleep where it was dark. I thought maybe I’d see my mother’s presence again, and it scared me. I slept in the hallway.

I had always been afraid of my mother. Once she almost killed me. I don’t know what I did to make her so mad. I always had an attitude, a bad mouth, a fresh mouth. I was really rude and snotty. I don’t know what I did, but she started throwing seven or eight beer bottles at me. One hit my back, one almost hit my head, and I was running for my life. She could have killed me. No one called the police, because the neighbors stopped her from trying to kill me. I still have a little scar on my back. What mother throws glass beer bottles at a child? Who does that?