Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out

It’s snowing in Madison, Wisconsin. Soft, sticky flakes slow down traffic and white out the majestic state capitol. Sixteen-year-old Luke (Luke’s real name has been changed, and his image is only partially revealed, at the request of his family) is in rehearsal with an LBGTQ teen theater group called Proud Theater. Every week, teen actors and writers divide up into small groups to explore a chosen topic. They ask one another questions and share personal stories. Then they do improvisations, searching for common threads that could turn personal stories into something theatrical. At the end of the rehearsal, they all come together to present their theater pieces. The theme tonight is transgender youths.

On a bare stage with no lighting and three people in the audience, Luke rehearses a poem he wrote. Later in the evening, he will read it before the entire company.

make sure that soap and water doesn’t wash away your

definition —

red and sore down there from the moment those red curtains opened,

exposing me to the cries of “It’s a —”

and

fill

the

blank

well not everything needs a diagnosis,

and you blame it back on things past in childhood

this is still my childhood

had wiped smooth like wet clay

and re-sculpted something hideous.

and they told me,

hide it.

But somewhere, there’s this scared young woman in a black dress

on a claustrophobic staircase, bleeding

’cause that safety razor wasn’t all that safe after all

backstage and illuminated by a blue ghost light, and she

finally dares to look you in the eye

And me

and her

we’re gonna go dancing on air

Filling the space between these canyon walls, our

Bodies broken at the bottom.

’Cause, yeah, you have to give up some things

“WOO, WOO, WOO, WOW! Pow-er-ful! Powerful, man,” shouts Sol Kelley-Jones, totally wrapped up in Luke’s poetry. Sol, one of the founders of Proud Theater, is rehearsing Luke for an upcoming benefit performance that will be hosted by Chaz Bono. Luke is tall and lanky, with blue eyes and sandy-blond hair that flies here and there as he moves.

Slowly coming out of his impassioned, demanding poem, he looks to Sol, smiling. Luke is an accomplished actor, writer, and poet. He wrote the poem he just recited for a ninth-grade poetry slam at his school. At that time, he was the only out person in his school. “In middle school, nobody else was queer. It was great to be around people, theater people, that identified as queer, people whose company I enjoyed.”

“Let’s try it again,” Sol says, after giving a few stage directions — when a turn becomes a pivot, when to look directly at the audience. Taking on the role of emcee, she shouts, “And now we have Proud Theater . . . ”

“Yeah! Proud Theater!” Sol’s also the audience. Clap! Clap! Clap! “Wooooo!”

Luke jumps up and down and shakes his long, tapered fingers like a whirlybird in preparation to recite again.

Watching Luke this evening, it is hard to imagine how shy he is offstage. Extreme shydom. Offstage he giggles lots. Onstage he’s authoritative and in total control.

Luke performs the poem again.

“WHOA!” yells Sol before lowering her voice. “It’s powerful stuff. Every time I hear it, I get new richness out of it. All right! Try it again.”

Last year, when I started writing the poem, I knew I was trans but I didn’t know if I was gender neutral or FTM (female-to-male). There’s a lot you can say in poetry that you can’t say in conversation. In poetry you can get images and you can get feelings. It’s more abstract, but it’s also more concrete.

I wanted to write a piece that I could do with authority. I wanted to explain this to my school. I wanted to explain it to myself too, because I didn’t know who or what I was at that time. I got a very, very positive response, which I was proud of. The poem got a twenty-nine out of a thirty score, a pretty good rating.

At that time, I identified as female but presented in a masculine way. You’ve probably heard the expression “write what you know”? I wrote my poem when I was starting to think, Maybe I’m trans, maybe I’m trans, maybe I’m trans, and this is kinda given away in the first couple of lines.

Coming out trans is very exposing. It opens you up to a lot of mockery. The reason I wrote the poem as I did was to come out with a bang. I wrote it also to clear away some of the criticism that I knew would be coming. If you get up on a stage and say “I’m trans” by doing a poem — that is hopefully an all right poem — it is more impressive than just coming out. At least it was for me.

I wanted to perform it in the end-of-year Proud Theater program, but it was near showtime and I didn’t push it. A couple of weeks ago, Brian (Brian Wild, the adult artistic director of the company) remembered it and asked me to do it for the benefit. I took it out and said to myself, You know what? This sucks. I need to rewrite this. So I did. I don’t think I had it completely written down anywhere. It’s all been memorized. Basically I wrote everything down as I remembered it and filled in the parts that I couldn’t remember with stuff that I made up.

I’m not good about talking about poetry. I don’t know how to do it. Poetry is like thoughts, it gets at things more accurately.

When I was eleven or maybe twelve, I went to a performance at Proud Theater with some of my mom’s friends. Oh, yeah, it’s so good, I thought. When I turned thirteen, my mother’s friend’s son and I decided to check it out.

It was in a church, the sub-sub-basement of a church. We went down a flight of stairs, then another flight of stairs, then another flight of stairs, until we’re basically in a fallout shelter.

Luke and his friend Samuel found themselves in a big room filled with a bunch of high-school seniors. It was a bit intimidating.

We were sitting by ourselves in a little corner ’cause everybody’s, like, twice as tall as us, twice as old as us — well, not exactly. One guy, Seb, came up to us. He was wearing a skirt, and his hair was long. He said, “Hey, it’s so great you came! You’re like little children, and you’re here and that’s awesome. Like, high five!”

I was cool with that. “Yay, you accept me. At least you’re being nice to me.”

A twenty-year-old transgender playwright-mentor, who joined us for one of our interviews, was at the rehearsal too. He actually helped the two young actors through a warm-up session that begins every rehearsal. The playwright explained that Luke did not talk to him at first.

“I used to be intimidating,” the playwright says with a laugh.

And I used to be shy as hell. I would go to Proud Theater and talk to my friend Samuel. I would follow him around because he was less shy than I was. I’m shy even around people my age, and these people were three or four years older than me.

After maybe four or five months of silence, Emma, an adult mentor, got me out of my shell. Emma became my first friend in Proud Theater other than Samuel. I thought, You can actually talk to these people.

During my first year with the group, the playwright wrote a skit called “Do It Yourself.” I got cast as the trans man. Even though I was still identifying as female, I remember trying out for the part and really wanting it. But I didn’t actually know why.

“Do It Yourself” is like a foggy mirror, artfully hinting at the playwright’s mind-set before he came out trans to his parents. He told me that he chose to give the lead to Luke because he saw a lot of his own earlier behavior in the young actor. “I thought it would be interesting to give him the role and see what he would do with it. I figured by playing it, maybe it could get the gender identity ball rolling. If nothing else, it would be a great role for him.”

Probably the first major bully was in third grade. He made the usual generic insults for bullying trans people: “Are you a boy or a girl?” he would ask me. He asked a lot. “Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a boy or a girl? Do you want to be a boy?” I think he may have had a Napoleon complex because he was a small kid. He was athletic and good in sports, though.

I was good in sports too, but I didn’t participate much. When we played, we were always separated by gender, and I felt really uncomfortable playing with the girls. When I did play with the boys, if I did something wrong, I’d be so mortified that I’d be too embarrassed to go back and play again. Oh, my gosh, I was, like, deathly, deathly shy.

When I got to middle school, it got a lot worse — especially in sixth grade. There was this guy who . . . oh, my God . . . who was very, very — he was one of those people who was the typical popular jock type. Big. Tall. Athletic. Handsome. Stuff like that. Yeah. He was definitely one of the main harassers. He had a couple of guys who would accompany him. It was mostly verbal. When you are questioning whether you are a boy or a girl, and someone comes right out and asks you, “Are you a boy or a girl?” it’s like rubbing alcohol on a cut.

It only got physical a couple of times. I reported it once. The whole experience was so humiliating and useless that it kind of made me feel that I couldn’t trust the school system. One guy was coming on with the usual are-you-a-guy-or-a-girl-do-you-want-to-be-a-boy stuff. It was one of the first weeks in middle school, so I thought, You know, it’s middle school. I should not take this anymore. I need to do something. And I went to the teacher and said that I’d like to file a harassment report. As far as I know, the report wasn’t filed. They had me go into a room with him and asked me to tell him why I was upset. And he had to say “sorry.” It was very juvenile. It was very ineffective. A lot of it was mortifying because I didn’t like talking about harassment. When I did, it tended to bring more attention to what I was harassed about, which was gender expression.

I came out as trans to my mom. We were in the kitchen, sitting at the table. I think it was after school, but I don’t remember exactly. I was feeling emotionally shaky, and I don’t remember how it came out, but it did.

My older sister was there. She told my mom that if I said I was, I probably was. She actually said that to my mom, which I really appreciated. But my mom still said, “No, I don’t think you are.” That cut pretty deep, deep enough that I dropped it.

I had a couple of journal entries around that time: I guess I’m a boy . . . I’m a boy . . . I’m a boy. After my mom denied it, I stopped writing about it. I stopped thinking about it. When I stopped talking about it, my sister stopped too.

In seventh grade, there were attempts by the girls to fem me up. A couple of times, they held me down and put makeup on my face. To them it was very, very funny. Part of me didn’t want to say anything because, in a twisted sort of way, I was making people laugh. It was a chance to please people, so I didn’t tell anyone. Besides, I called these girls my friends. You always want to be able to have somebody as your friend. No one wants to say I don’t have any friends. And out of everybody in the school, they were the ones who paid me the most attention, so that translated into, oh, they’re friends.

I didn’t think I could tell my parents about them. I was afraid that Mom might have said what my friends did was for my own good. I mean, I don’t think she’d really say that, but there was always the fear that she might. Part of that was because when I dressed more female-like, because all my male clothes were dirty or something, my mom would say, “Oh, you look so nice today.” I didn’t look especially nice. I just looked more female.

I really, really enjoy acting. It’s the one thing that I’ve had positive feedback about all my life. I acted in school plays, little things on campus, basically wherever I could. It’s definitely a passion of mine. And it’s one of the few things I like doing that I’ve been told I do well. That gave me the confidence to try out for the play.

I kept a folder with all my Proud Theater scripts in it. I printed out information about testosterone and stuff like that, telling myself I was doing all this research for the skit, that I wanted to know about being trans for the skit. It was a total lie.

Portraying a trans person came really, really easily. “Hmmm, this feels right. Maybe I am trans.” I mean, in an oversimplified version of things, because I was acting the role of a trans man, I could explore being trans deeper than I could by just thinking about it. It was, like, “I’m not reading this stuff because I’m trans; I’m reading it because the character’s trans.” In reality it was a huge personal exploration.

Acting is so strange. You become someone else. Their troubles are your troubles. So it gets blurry, especially in this case. Who is who? Who is what?

At the time, I still identified as gay. I never liked using the word lesbian because it implies female. If anyone ever asked me, I’d say I was gay, not lesbian. I was on the verge of questioning my gender when I was cast in the part. It kinda allowed me to question more.

During a rehearsal, the playwright came up to me and said, “So I heard you were questioning stuff. Do you want to talk about it?”

I could talk to Samuel, but I didn’t really. The playwright became a role model for me. I had had role models in the past, but I always felt a sense of competition because they were male-bodied and I wasn’t. With him it was like, “Whoa, this is a male person who isn’t male-bodied, and I can really, really relate to you.”

My family was okay with me being gay, but trans was a different issue for them. I think a lot of it was because they had no experience with it. My mom said, “I’m going to be an okay-onboard mom, and you’re going to be a lesbian. I’m okay with that.”

Toward the end of eighth grade, Luke started dating.

I really, really liked this girl. She was cute, she was funny, she was intelligent, and all that stuff. She was someone I had known since sixth grade. We had always been grouped together because we were the quiet, intelligent people. It wasn’t like a slick kind of friendship. We were incredibly awkward. She was even shyer than I was. She almost never said anything. And she would never talk about things that involved emotions. When I finally got up the nerve to tell her I liked her, her response was just, “Okay, I kinda figured.”

The awkwardness got even worse when we started dating. When I look back on it now, I clench up. It was very, very awkward. A lot of silences, stuff like that. But even so, I was totally elated. I thought about her the entire summer. It’s hard to concentrate on being trans when you have a girlfriend.

By the end of summer, the couple broke up.

I felt it was just too awkward. It wasn’t a bad breakup. It was, like, this is awkward and we should probably stop torturing ourselves.

Once the school year started, I was thinking about the trans thing again. It’s weird. I was quite convinced I was trans in sixth grade, but because of my mom’s reaction, I took her word for it that I wasn’t. I put it from my mind.

I slowly started to rediscover my gender in eighth grade. So there were two separate processes — sixth grade and eighth grade — a double discovery process. When I came out to my mom this second time, we talked about my taking hormones because that was what I wanted to do.

I was a lot more nervous coming out to my dad than I was with my mom. My dad’s generally less accepting, I guess.

Three years earlier, when I came out to him as gay, I had thought about how to do it a lot. I was really stressed about it, and I ended up deliberately coming out to him at the worst time. He was angry with my older sister, who had come home late and hadn’t called, and the dinner was burned, and my sister was on the verge of tears, and he was yelling, and while all this stuff was happening, I said, “Hey, Dad, I’m gay!” I figured it couldn’t get any worse so I should just say it. Everything got very quiet. He was just like, “Uh, okay.” It got tense. It was tense before, and now it was very tense.

Personally I was a lot more relieved when I said it. Once you get over that initial hurdle of saying the words, “I’m ‘fill-in-the-blank,’” it’s generally easier. I don’t remember too much about what happened afterward. I don’t think there was a lot of talking, just tense silence. A couple of weeks later, he gave me a book by Ellen DeGeneres. He said, “Here’s this book. She’s a lesbian,” and he walked away. It was a good book; she’s a very funny lady.

A couple of weeks after coming out trans to my mom, I came out to my dad. He was dropping me and my older sister off at school; I got out of the car and was about to shut the door . . . .

We didn’t really talk about it until a couple of days later. There was more explaining about what that meant. Everyone knows what gay is. Nobody knew what trans is.

I explained that “I’m mentally male and I would like it if you use male pronouns and stuff.” He wasn’t dubious like my mom was, but he didn’t think it was . . . well . . . he thought it was a phase and was waiting for it to go away.

My parents were definitely worried about health issues. My mom especially was worried about health risks involved with taking hormones because she was unsure about the process.

At Luke’s request, people started using male pronouns.

Some had more trouble than others. I didn’t find it offensive because it was understandable. I was messed up in my head about it too. I’d screw up. I’d refer to myself, saying, “Oh, she’s doing something about something.” Wait a minute! I’m supposed to be using male pronouns. I identify as male now.

It took about a year to convince my mom to use male pronouns. My dad was pretty against it until a couple of months ago. My dad still calls my hormones steroids rather than T, which I asked him not to do. He messes up with pronouns a lot and doesn’t apologize for it. He uses my birth name a lot. But I don’t actually care. It’s definitely better than before. Now everything was out in the open.

The opportunity to go onstage kind of melded me together. I am definitely less shy now than I used to be. I try to keep some of the energy I have onstage offstage. I’m still most comfortable onstage.

The night Luke played the leading role in “Do It Yourself,” he also performed a monologue that he wrote.

I remember standing backstage, about to go on with my monologue, being soooo, so scared. As soon as it ended, I was utterly, utterly elated. It’s the best feeling to be onstage and do something you love and do it well.

Opening night was great. It was only topped by the night after, which was when my friends came. The house was sold out. It was a great audience. They were laughing, crying all over the place. I remember feeling very proud to be doing that play before my friends. I was definitely introducing transgender to them.