The Klebolds were caught in lawsuits brought by some victims’ families. Four years after the tragedy, they were deposed—supposedly confidentially—in front of these parents. The next day, the Denver paper contended that the world had a right to know what they had said. “It was implying, after all that we’d been through, that they still believed we were at fault,” Sue said. “It was, ‘How could you not know? How could you not know?’ And it’s like, ‘I can’t answer that. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. How many times can you say that? Why would we have known and not gotten help, not told anyone?”
In the wake of so many enormous stresses, Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I don’t believe in chakras,” she said. “But you think about all this heart pain, and failed nurturing, and losing a child. I finally had an opportunity to meet some women who had lost children to suicide. There were six women, and three of us have had breast cancer. I used to laugh and say it was my version of comic relief. Because after all we’d been through, the breast cancer seemed like sort of a nice, normal thing.” For two years after the maelstrom of Columbine, she thought that she wanted to die, but now she was jarred into a new sense of purpose. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute! I have something I have to do first. I have to explain who Dylan was and what he was like.’ I met a woman recently who had lost one son to suicide and whose other son was in jail, and I said to her, ‘You can’t appreciate or believe this now, but if you plunge deep into this, it will lead you to enlightenment. It’s not the path you would have chosen, but it will make you a better and stronger person.’”
After Columbine, Sue had a client who was blind, had only one hand, had just lost her job, and was facing trouble at home. “She said, ‘I may have my problems, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything in the world.’ I laughed. All those years I have worked with people with disabilities and thought, ‘Thank God I can see; thank God I can walk; thank God I can scratch my head and feed myself.’ And I’m thinking how funny it is how we all use one another to feel better.”
Sue spoke of herself as a lucky person. “I was fortunate that Dylan did not turn on us. The worst thing he did to us was he took himself away from us. After Columbine, I felt that Dylan killed God. No god could have had anything to do with this, so there must not be one. When everything in your world is gone, all your belief systems, and your self-concepts—your beliefs in yourself, your child, your family—there is a process of trying to establish, who am I? Is there a person there, at all? A woman at work asked me recently how my weekend was, and it happened to be the anniversary of the shootings. So I said that I wasn’t doing so well and I told her why, and she said, ‘I always forget that about you.’ I gave her a hug and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years.’” But Sue does not forget. “I sat next to someone on a train a while ago and we had a really wonderful conversation, and then I could feel the questions coming—‘So, how many kids do you have?’ I had to forestall it. I had to tell him who I was. And who I am forever now is Dylan’s mother.”
When I mentioned to the Klebolds that I thought they spoke with an extraordinary clarity about their situation, in contrast to some of the other people I had interviewed for this chapter, Tom said, “We are able to be open and honest about those things because our son is dead. His story is complete. We can’t hope for him to do something else, something better. You can tell a story a whole lot better when you know its ending.” A few years after we first met, Sue said to me, “Way back when, we almost got a house in California, and our offer was turned down, and this house in Littleton came up, we made a low offer, and we were so thrilled when it was accepted. At the time we said how lucky we were that the house in California hadn’t worked out. But if it had, Columbine wouldn’t have happened. When it first happened, I used to wish that I had never had children, that I had never married. If Tom and I hadn’t crossed paths at Ohio State, Dylan wouldn’t have existed and this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. But over time, I’ve come to feel that, for myself, I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids I did, because the love for them—even at the price of this pain—has been the single greatest joy of my life. When I say that, I am speaking of my own pain, and not of the pain of other people. But I accept my own pain; life is full of suffering, and this is mine. I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.”
XI
Transgender
Western culture likes binaries: life feels less frightening when we can separate good and evil into tidy heaps, when we split off the mind from the body, when men are masculine and women are feminine. Threats to gender are threats to the social order. If rules are not maintained, everything seems to be up for grabs, and Joan of Arc must go to the stake. If we countenance people who want to chop off their penises and breasts, then what chance do we have of preserving the integrity of our own bodies? As the noted psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman once joked, “It might help if they all wore T-shirts that said, ‘Don’t worry—it won’t happen to you.’” Gender itself is a slippery concept. The author Amy Bloom says, “Male is not gay or straight; it’s male. Neither the object of desire nor the drinking of beer nor the clenching of fists makes maleness. We don’t know what does, and neither do transsexual men, and neither do the people who treat them, psychologically and surgically.” But though gender is hard to define, it is not hard to know. Jan Morris, who wrote bravely of her transition—the process of switching gender—in the 1970s, has said, “Transsexualism is not a sexual mode or preference. It is not an act of sex at all. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it.” She explained, “My inner uncertainty could be represented in swirls and clouds of color, a haze inside me. I did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my blood.”
The term transgender is an encompassing term that includes anyone whose behavior departs significantly from the norms of the gender suggested by his or her anatomy at birth. The term transsexual usually refers to someone who has had surgery or hormones to align his or her body with a nonbirth gender. The term transvestite refers to someone who enjoys wearing clothing usually reserved for the other gender. Though the terms get used in a variety of ways, transgender and its abbreviation as trans are the most widely accepted in the trans community. A transman was born female and became a man; a transwoman was born male and became a woman. Intersex describes people who are born with ambiguous genitalia or are in some other physical way both male and female from birth.
It is a poverty of our language that we use the word sex to refer both to gender and to carnal acts, and from that unfortunate conflation springs much of the disgust around the notion of transgender children. Being trans is taken to be a depravity, and depravities in children are anomalous and disturbing. But trans children are not manifesting sexuality; they are manifesting gender. The issue is not whom they wish to be with, but whom they wish to be. As Aiden Key, a trans activist, put it, “My gender is who I am; my sexuality is who I bounce it off of.” This is an essential distinction. Yet teasing out the complexities of transgender identity reveals how often these things can be confused—in a child, by a parent, and across the larger community. Gay and trans are separate categories, but a grayscale runs between them. Making the distinction is especially hard in childhood. A butch little girl or a feminine little boy may want to switch genders immediately; may develop that wish later; or may never develop it at all. One mother described being asked by a male friend whether her boyish daughter was gay and saying, “She’s four—I don’t think she’s got sexual desires yet.” But such children may be demonstrating qualities associated with subsequent patterns of attraction; they may, in effect, be pre-gay even if they haven’t yet conceptualized the erotic.
In 1987, Richard Green published his influential The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality, in which he foll
owed a cohort of forty-four feminine little boys for fifteen years. Only one transitioned; most turned out simply to be gay. Sexuality and gender are independent yet entwined variables. Because cross-gender expression is much more common among gay people than it is among straight people, prejudice against such expression is a gay issue. Despite Jan Morris’s assertion, gay, too, is an identity—not something you do, but something you are. One can be gay despite never having had carnal relations with anyone of one’s own gender; and one can be trans and have presented only in the gender one was assigned at birth. Those who are ignorant about homosexuality and transgender culture tend to confuse and conflate them with reason: homophobia has always targeted gender nonconformity. Immeasurable differences exist between the outré gay guy who likes fashion and decorating magazines, and the school football hero who happens to prefer sex with men. While the footballer may encounter legal challenges if he tries to marry a man, and may hear slurs from his teammates if they find out, he will not encounter the same day-to-day abuse that will likely make his classmate’s life a living hell.
The political liberty of transgender people has been ingrained in the battle for gay and lesbian rights. There are far more gay people than trans people, and the trans movement needs numbers behind it, but the conflation of the two issues nonetheless causes confusion. Some gay people think their trans brothers and sisters are in the same situation as themselves only more so and become passionate advocates on their behalf; others find the trans community embarrassing and attempt to dissociate themselves, a pattern especially common among gay men who want to assert their masculinity credentials. The split echoes, in some ways, the split among early feminists about lesbians, with some viewing lesbianism as the ultimate expression of their identity, and others believing gay women would undermine their battle to ingratiate their ideals with the mainstream. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), intended to protect gay people from job discrimination, came before Congress in 2008 without any protection for gender expression. When the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force fought for a gender-expression clause that would have prevented people from being denied employment or fired solely because they did not conform to gender type, they were told by Representative Barney Frank, who had introduced the bill, that they were asking for too much.
Gender dissonance can manifest extremely early. By age three or four, sometimes even younger, children may notice an incongruity between who they are told they are and who they sense they are. That discrepancy has been called gender identity disorder, or GID. In early childhood, gender nonconformity is often tolerated, but by seven or so, children are pushed hard into gender stereotypes. Trans children may respond to such pressure by becoming anxious and depressed. Telling their parents is usually terrifying for them. “If you don’t let them transition, their internal energy is fully occupied with gender identity, and this keeps them from reaching their developmental markers,” said Stephanie Brill, founder of the counseling entity Gender Spectrum, and author, with Rachel Pepper, of The Transgender Child. “Often with transition, children’s learning disabilities and other diagnoses resolve themselves because the mind and heart are not so occupied with this central problem.”
Even twenty years ago, most transsexuals sought to move completely from one gender to the other. Nowadays, the categories are blurred. Some live stealth, meaning that everyone around them believes that they were born into the gender they inhabit. They feel they have failed when they are identified as their natal sex. Others live openly as transmen or transwomen. Many spend some time stealth and some openly trans. Some people are genderqueer, identifying as neither male nor female. Others are gender fluid: male some days, female other days, and sometimes neither, or both. Some suffer from gender dysphoria—a deep misery about the body into which they were born—but others reject the darkness of that term. Some are exhibitionistic, and some, extremely private.
People in any of these categories may or may not have had surgery, be taking hormones, or have had a variety of other physical interventions; collectively, they form what one author has called a “gender chiaroscuro.” The DSM says that one in thirty thousand genetic males and one in a hundred thousand genetic females will undergo actual sex reassignment surgery in their lifetime, but such statistics would suggest that there are only fifteen hundred postsurgical transmen and five thousand postsurgical transwomen in the United States. The figures are based on antiquated surveys and reflect an extreme view of what constitutes reassignment surgery, not acknowledging, for example, that creating or removing breasts is a reassignment surgery even in the absence of genital procedures. Lynn Conway, a computer engineer who has analyzed more recent data, has estimated that there are between thirty-two thousand and forty thousand postoperative transwomen in the United States, but said that only one in five or ten people who experiences intense discomfort with birth gender pursues genital surgery. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates that for up to three million Americans, in Barbara Walters’s phrase, “what’s between their legs doesn’t match what’s between their ears.”
Scientists, psychologists, clergy, and academics argue about whether bodies should be altered to accommodate minds, or minds to accommodate bodies. Some believe that all people who vary from gender norms can, with psychiatric treatment, live contentedly in their birth gender; they prescribe a broad range of reparative therapies to address the mind/body dissonance. Others presume that the role of medicine is to facilitate transition and believe in using hormones and surgery to do so. Parents are in a bind, familiar throughout this book, between cure and acceptance. Advocates for reparative therapy insist that people live better in unmutilated bodies and that medical corrections involving considerable pain, risk, and expense should be options of last resort. Opponents contend that strict gender rules are archaic and punitive, and that discouraging transgender people from inhabiting their real selves is a prescription for despair, often for suicide. Received wisdom is evolving at a breakneck pace. The social model of disability—that the problems trans people have are the result largely of the social attitudes they encounter—is argued here with particular ferocity.
Parents who support their child’s transition—the shift away from a natal gender—must refer to that child by a new name; they must use new pronouns; and they must switch the words son and daughter. Linguistic chaos often ensues. “He’s my daughter,” one mother explained to me as she introduced her transgender son. Another said, “I use the word child because I cannot wrap my mind around daughter, even though I am fine calling my child Elaine.” Sociologist Holly Devor writes, “In those cases where persons were living as men at the time of their interviews but were talking about events lived as girls or women, I have used feminine pronouns. For example, ‘He remembered that as a girl, she had been a tomboy.’” How we name something determines how we perceive it.
Most of the trans people I met disliked MTF (for male to female) and FTM (female to male), feeling that these terms demean the people to whom they are applied. Many activists speak of people having been “declared male” or “declared female” at birth and later becoming “affirmed females” or “affirmed males.” Trans people often refer to the nontrans population as cisgender, borrowing the idea from the cis-trans distinction in chemistry; the Latin prefix cis means “on the same side.” I have chosen to refer to people by natal gender prior to transition and by affirmed gender after transition, and to impose this on my interviews with families as much as possible. In cases where people prefer that their pretransition name be forgotten, I have consistently used the post-transition name.
• • •
Twenty-seven weeks pregnant as a single mother, Venessia Romero was rushed to a Denver hospital, where she gave birth to a girl and a boy. The girl looked fairly strong, but the boy was less than a pound and a half and covered with fuzz, his organs visible through his unformed skin. Premature babies are given pulmonary surfactants, which help them to breathe. Because the girl was stronger, t
hey treated her first; she had an adverse reaction and died within minutes. The boy survived.
Within a year, Venessia met and married Joseph Romero, an air force sergeant. The baby’s father had never even seen him; Joseph adopted him and changed his name to Joseph Romero II, called Joey. When the baby was twenty months old, the family was posted to the US Air Force base in Okinawa. “The baby would cry all the time,” Joseph recalled. “But not ‘I want food,’ ‘I want to be changed.’ It wasn’t a physical need, and we had no way to console him. The temper tantrums were so bad that we couldn’t take him out in public.”
Over the next four years, Joey was diagnosed with ADHD, depression, anxiety, attachment disorder, and asthma. At three, he was on fourteen different medications. “We had a child who never smiled,” Venessia said. “All the time we were cooing, ‘Oh, you’re such a good boy, such a beautiful boy.’ Boy, boy, boy. Every time I put shoes on him, they were little boy’s shoes. A little boy’s jacket.” Joey was already interested in wearing girlish outfits; Venessia thought he was probably gay and worried about how that would go with her military husband.
The Romeros had access only to military doctors, who were cautious of a diagnosis that the military does not welcome, but one finally told Venessia, when Joey was five, to look up GID online. “It was making him squirm just to say that, like his rank was going to fall off,” Venessia said. “I had never even heard the word transgender. I was hugely relieved. Other people go through this?” The Internet introduces trans people and their families into instant networks that can provide information and support; it likewise offers misinformation. Online spaces created to shield and help trans children can easily become the locus of predators with disturbing erotic fantasies, or of transphobic people with murderous intentions. In this instance, however, Kim Pearson—herself the mother of a transgender child and one of the founders of TransYouth Family Allies (TYFA), a group that supports families addressing gender variance—found Venessia online. “She carried me to a forum with other parents,” Venessia said. “I cried with gratitude.”
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