Teaching Trans for Children, Youth, and Adults Who Care for Them

Three picture books published in 2014 focus on gender expression in very young children. In Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, the main character (Morris) enjoys donning a tangerine-colored dress at school: “Morris likes the color of the dress. It reminds him of tigers, the sun and his mother's hair. He likes the noises the dress makes—swish, swish, swish when he walks and crinkle, crinkle, crinkle when he sits down.” Morris is ridiculed by the other children and pretends to be sick to stay home from school. He dreams of riding an elephant on a space safari and paints a picture of himself atop an elephant in the tangerine dress. He returns to school on Monday with his painting and slips on the dress. When his classmates won't let them play, Morris creates his own adventure, and soon the other children are drawn in. “By the time they returned to Earth, Eli and Henry had decided that it didn't matter if astronauts wore dresses or not. The best astronauts were the ones who knew where all the good adventures were hiding.” This gentle story about a creative child who does not conform to gender expectations would be a wonderful addition to the preschool or kindergarten class library.In Jacob's New Dress, Jacob chooses to be the princess during dress-up time, putting on a pink dress and a crown. One of the boys in his class, Christopher, becomes upset. When he complains, the teacher, Ms. Wilson, says, “The dress-up corner is where we come to use our imaginations.” After school, Jacob asks his mother if he can wear a witch's dress to school. “I don't think so,” she said. “That's for dress-up at home.” Jacob rather ingeniously fashions a dress out of a towel (calling it a “dress-thing”) the next day and insists on wearing it to school. His parents acquiesce, telling him he can wear it if he puts shorts and a shirt underneath the towel. But at school, Christopher pulls the towel off Jacob. When Jacob comes home from school, he asks his mother to help him make a real dress to wear to school. She eventually says yes, and the two make a dress together. The next day in school, Jacob proudly shares the new dress at circle time. When Christopher asks why Jacob wears dresses, Ms. Wilson responds, “I think Jacob wears what he's comfortable in. Just like you do. Not very long ago little girls couldn't wear pants. Can you imagine that?” Later on the playground, Christopher teases Jacob once again. But this time, “Jacob felt his dress surrounding him. Like armor. Soft, cottony, magic armor.” This book provides some wonderful language for teachers to use when addressing gender-expression-based bullying in the preschool or kindergarten classroom.In I Am Jazz, Jessica Herthel shares the story of Jazz Jennings, a transgender teen, when she was young. Jazz likes the color pink, “dancing, singing, back flips, drawing, soccer, swimming, makeup, and pretending I'm a pop star.” Jazz talks about her best friends but adds, “But I'm not exactly like Samantha and Casey. I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way!” Jazz tells the reader how this was at first confusing for her parents and siblings, who at first insisted that Jazz wear “boy clothes” when leaving the house. Eventually, though, Jazz's parents bring her to a new doctor, who “spoke to my parents and I heard the word ‘transgender’ for the very first time.” Later in the evening, Jazz's parents tell her, “We understand now. Be who you are. We love you no matter what.” At first the teachers at school want Jazz to use the boys' bathroom and play on the boys' team in gym, but eventually they change their minds. While Jazz still faces teasing, she says, “I don't mind being different. Different is special! I think what matters most is what a person is like inside.” This book could be useful in teaching about transgender in the elementary classroom.Arin Andrews and Katie Rain Hill gained national attention in 2012 after a segment aired on 20/20 featuring the young transgender couple, and their story subsequently went viral, appearing in the Huffington Post as well as other online news sources. Andrews, then age 17, and Hill, then age 18, had been dating for a year at the time, having met in a transgender support group in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Each published a memoir in 2014, sharing their stories of dysphoria, coming out, transitioning, falling in love, and, eventually, ending their relationship with each other. Read together, the memoirs feel at times parallel, each author recounting many of the same events in their relationship. Parallel, too, are the experiences each had growing up transgender in “the buckle of the bible belt,” small-town Oklahoma, where gender roles and expression are highly defined and constricted. Each author, however, has a unique perspective and personality, and each book a unique tone. Readers may enjoy hearing about the same events, especially related to the authors' relationship with each other, recounted at times quite differently. One can't help but think that Simon and Schuster, who published both memoirs, expects the “he said/she said” interplay will help to sell books.Some Assembly Required opens with the author, Arin Andrews, “getting dumped at prom,” not by Katie Hill, but by a date named Jessica. Andrews's tone is light and earnest as he recounts the evening, which sounds like a typical teenage prom heartbreak story—boy fumbling with corsage, arguments about the after-party, the two going their separate ways by the end of the evening. Andrews keeps this easy, laid-back style of writing for the course of the book, even as he recounts a difficult childhood.From early on, Andrews's mother insisted on his participation in dance class and pageants, dressing him in frilly dresses and hair ribbons. Unable to convince his mother to cut his hair and allow him to wear pants, Andrews sneaked clothes from a male cousin, and he even fashioned a funnel-type device in order to pee standing up outside. His mother, perhaps sensing his unease around his peers, tried desperately to line up play dates and slumber parties, which only increased Andrews's feelings of isolation as he failed to fit in with the girls from school and dance class.Once puberty hit, it became more difficult for Andrews to cope with the gender dysphoria that he was experiencing. Menstruation was traumatic, and his developing breasts felt like a betrayal. Andrews soon began to experience attraction toward a fellow dance student, Darian. The two teenagers began sneaking off to spend time together, and they soon became very close. But while Andrews enjoyed exploring his sexuality with Darian, he still felt unease about his gender and had no language to identify the feelings of dysphoria he was experiencing. One day, he began to search on the internet for LGBT websites, and he stumbled on the video blog posted by a transgender man, recounting his experience on testosterone. Andrews immediately recognized the feelings and experiences of the blogger as his own and was thrilled to finally have a word to describe what he felt.Andrews came out to his mother, who initially refused to accept that she was the parent of a transgender son. But eventually, realizing that Andrews was experiencing depression and was feeling suicidal, she agreed to help him to transition. She helped him to decide on a new name—Arin, which was a masculinized version of his former middle name—and made appointments with a doctor who could help him to begin taking testosterone. She began driving him to Tulsa to meet with a transgender support group. It was at this point that Arin first met Katie Hill, whom he had first seen in a magazine article.Rethinking Normal opens as author Katie Hill is beginning college at the University of Tulsa, happy to be experiencing life as a typical college freshman: “Three years before, I had been a gangly teenage boy, braces and glasses, face hidden underneath a black hoodie, horrified by the thought of anyone looking at me. I was teased every day, spat on, and called ‘fag.’ Now I was Katie, an attractive woman with long, shiny dark brown hair, high cheekbones, boobs, and a butt that fit into my new feminine clothes perfectly.”Hill's childhood was marked by dark periods of depression, even from a young age. Beginning at age seven she began expressing suicidal thoughts to her parents, who brought her to a number of psychiatrists. By the time she was nine, she had been prescribed Zoloft, Cymbalta, Adderall, Xanax, and Prozac. The medications did not help, and she eventually confessed to one psychiatrist that she felt trapped in a boy's body, only to have her statement ignored. Frustrated with the lack of response, Hill set out to fool her therapist into thinking she had recovered, acting cheerier at each visit, until finally the therapist declared to her parents that she was perfectly happy and well-adjusted. Hill was far from happy, though, and she made numerous attempts at suicide, deciding to cut her wrists at age eight and attempting to drown herself in the pool at age nine.By the time she entered middle school, Katie was clearly not fitting in as a boy at school. While she had some close friends, she endured much bullying from classmates. She tried to explain to her mother that she was a girl trapped in a boy's body, but each time, her mother quickly changed the subject. Finally, at age fifteen, Katie read an article online about a transgender girl named Jazz, and she shared it with her mother. Katie's mother could finally make sense of what her child had been trying to tell her, and she agreed to help her transition.While Katie's mother quickly became an advocate for her daughter, life at school became unbearable during her transition. Katie lost friends, endured ridicule from classmates, and received little support from teachers and administration. Katie's high school principal even asked Katie's mother to remove her from the high school, on the grounds that the school did not have restrooms that would accommodate a transgender student. Katie's mother brought photocopies of court cases and legislation to the school, insisting that the school would be breaking the law if they refused her daughter an education.Bright and articulate, Hill became an advocate for transgender youth, interviewing first with CNN and then with Tulsa World. She began to enjoy sharing her story with others and was happy to accept opportunities for speaking engagements at high schools, colleges, and youth centers. Her newfound notoriety brought financial support as well: an anonymous donor arranged to pay for Katie's gender reassignment surgery as well as helped to pay her college tuition.It is at about this time in the story that Katie Hill meets and begins a relationship with Arin Andrews. The two become close very quickly, sharing a profound connection through their shared experiences. When Hill mentioned Andrews in an interview, the two are offered an opportunity to interview together, thus pulling them into the national spotlight. While Hill's account varies in some details from Andrews's, one can simply conclude from both memoirs that the two endured much pressure to remain a couple, but, in the end, they grew apart from each other. In the end, this reviewer finds that the relationship between the two teens is, while novel, the least interesting part of each memoir. More intriguing is the manner in which each author serves to overcome the challenges of growing up transgender in small-town Oklahoma.And, while parallel memoirs and a book tour have merged their stories again, each author has contributed to a growing body of literature by and for transgender youth with a unique voice

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