Free Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin Page A

Christina’s mom says. “After all, I’m the one who had the problem with this.”

    Christina and Jonathan are my children, and I love my children regardless. I would never throw them out into the street like some parents do. Some families throw their kids out and they get into prostitution and they wind up dead. I would never, ever do that. I told them, “Baby, not for nothing, I’m glad that you guys are proud to be gay or transsexual. But you can’t let people know.” I had a lot of learning to do.
    Christina was always very sensitive. I couldn’t yell at her the way I yell at my other sons, Elvin and Jonathan. She was crying all the time! All the time!
    “Will you stop crying?”
    Even the lady upstairs heard it. “What are you doing to him?”
    “Nothing! He just cries at every little thing.”
    Jonathan was wearing women’s clothes long before Christina came out transgender. He was cross-dressing. That was very hard for me. I said, “Okay, Jonathan, you are gay, but you don’t need to dress like a woman.”
    My next-door neighbor told me that she saw Jonathan dressed as a woman outside. When I confronted him, he said, “No, Mom, not me. I never dressed outside.”
    I thought that was a phase he was going through, because after a while he stopped that altogether. Right now he’s very masculine. He works out; he’s very husky.
    I was telling Jonathan, I said, “Jonathan, do you think Matthew — that was Christina’s name — is gay also?”
    And he would tell me, “Mom, time will tell.”
    As a child, Christina didn’t tell me much about how she felt. I found out that she was transsexual the second year of high school, when she was sixteen. That’s when I noticed certain things about her and I actually thought that she was gay. Her movements — she was acting different — the way she was walking, the things that she liked, and she started wearing makeup.
    She said that she wore makeup because she was breaking out a lot. She said that she was covering up her acne. She was going through puberty. But the truth was, she was transitioning. I had no idea.

    Matthew was at Mount Saint Michael’s, and that was a problem. He was letting his hair grow long. I thought that he was gay, like my other son.
    One time I found him crying. I said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I know that you’re gay.”
    “No, Mom, I’m not gay. I’m transsexual. I feel like a woman inside.”
    That was shocking to me. I didn’t know what that was. “What do you mean, you feel like a girl inside?”
    “Mom, I feel like a woman inside.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    I spoke to my family about it. They were even more in shock than I was. Nobody exactly knew what a transsexual was. I have a huge family, seven sisters and three brothers. One of my sisters said, “Wanda, I thought Matthew was gay. I saw some indications. I saw the way Matthew moved.” At the time he was obese; he was very obese. She’s still a big girl. So I just thought she had her little moves because obese people tend to move in a certain way.
    Most of my family accepts Matthew as Christina. But my older brother in particular does not accept her because he’s religious. He thinks there’s a bad spirit in both my children, that there’s no such thing as being born that way. I don’t want to disrespect my brother, but I tell my mother, “Ma, did you see that program on the Spanish channel about transgender? That they are born this way?” Christina doesn’t want to see her uncle.
    I worry about her when she’s not home. She’ll call me on the phone, crying, “Mom, I got into this situation!”
    We live in a six-building complex. Once she called me: “Mom, some guy punched me in the face!”
    “Are you okay?” I got all upset.
    “‘Yes, Mom, I’m fine.’ ” She called the police. I believe she pressed charges. My son started looking for the guy. A few weeks later, I was coming out of my building and saw a whole bunch of men. I said to myself,
Maybe