JACK Thompson wears baggy cargo pants
and steel-toed sneakers. He's a slender
16-year-old with a shaved head, tawny-colored
skin and a swath of disarmingly cute freckles
across his nose.
His bedroom walls are plastered with
photographs of Blink 182, Eminem and Ozzy
Osbourne. A Raiderettes calendar hangs on the
wall, and his girlfriend is a cheerleader.
A regular Bay Area high school guy. But look
again. Jack wore a dress to his second-grade
birthday party and still has a collection of
teddy bears in his room, which, with its pink
trim, makes him wince.
There's the nagging struggle of his little
sister and others calling him she. And a
persistent fear that cruel insults -- or even
the kind of violence that has taken the lives of
other transgender teens -- could be right around
the corner.
Jack, a 16-year-old Berkeley High School
student, is biologically a girl but identifies
as a boy. Five months ago, Jack told his family
and friends that he wanted to stop using his
given name, Devin.
He told them he considers himself a he, and
asked stop calling him by female pronouns.
"You wouldn't call a regular guy a she,
because it's not who he identifies as," he said.
"I just want people to see me as any other
guy."
Jack is among a small but growing group of
teens who are living openly as transgendered in
the Bay Area. Their exact numbers are unknown,
but "we do know they are coming out more," said
Wiggsy Sivertsen, director of counseling
services at San Jose State University and an
activist who works on behalf of the gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
"Sadly," Sivertsen said, "what we also know
is that as a result of this, the consequences
have been quite severe."
In many respects, Jack is one of the lucky
ones. Born and raised in famously tolerant
Berkeley, he has a supportive family, community
and school. But one doesn't have to go far, even
in the Bay Area, to find examples of transgender
teens who have been killed for expressing what
they believe is their true identity.
Last month, 17-year-old Eddie "Gwen" Araujo,
a boy who dressed and lived as a girl, was
beaten and strangled allegedly by three men who
discovered the girl before them was biologically
male, police say. In 1999, 19-year-old Alina
Marie Barragan, a biological male who identified
as female, was strangled in San Jose.
The most publicized case of rage against a
transgender youth was the 1993 killing of
Brandon Teena, 21, of Nebraska, who was born a
female but identified as a male. Her murder was
the subject of the movie "Boys Don't Cry."
"It's such a threat to a lot of the ways
people think," said Lark Ashford, a longtime
friend of Jack's family. "Living in Berkeley,
going to Berkeley High, having liberal parents
who are mixed race, (Jack) is very blessed to be
living in the setting she is in to be who she
is."
More than just a phase
Since grade school, Jack has struggled with
many of the same identity issues and intolerance
that Araujo faced, from cruelty at school to
well-meaning adults who think he's just going
through a phase he will grow out of.
It has been a process of self-discovery that
involved coming out twice -- first as a lesbian
and ultimately as transgender. Through it all,
his parents have worked hard to be
understanding, though they are the first to
admit it hasn't been easy.
Jack "has guts and I take my hat off to her,
but now I'm really scared," said Jack's mother,
Corinne Thompson. "I'm just worried about how
she'll be received. People are mean. She could
get hurt. She could get killed."
The worst hate incident Jack endured was in
eighth grade, he recalled, when he was once
followed home by a group of older boys
snickering words like "dyke" and "lesbian"
behind his back. They pelted him with rocks, and
he escaped by running home.
"I didn't want to cry," Jack said. "So I went
home and lay on my bed and cried there."
Jack was born in 1986, the first daughter to
Scott and Corinne Thompson, and he has lived in
the same tidy Berkeley home his entire life.
He has always been different.
'I've always liked girls'
"I've always liked girls. I had a big crush
on my preschool teacher's daughter. She was in
kindergarten," he recalled.
In sixth grade, Jack began coming out to
himself, acknowledging that he was attracted to
girls and not boys.
In seventh grade, while attending Martin
Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Jack
was talking to a friend who asked him to tell
his deepest secret. He sighed, took a deep
breath and said that he had a crush on a girl at
school.
He was outed as a lesbian
"After a week, everybody knew," Jack said. "A
lot of friends I'd had for so long stopped
talking to me."
In the aftermath, Jack stopped attending
school. His parents, who hadn't heard about the
schoolyard outing, got him into counseling and
helped him return to school.
A few months later, on Easter weekend, he
blurted out to them that he was a lesbian.
"The night they found out, her mom stayed in
her room crying all night, and her dad went out
drinking," said a close family friend, Lark
Ashford.
But after the initial reluctance, Jack's
parents were supportive of their child. They
helped Jack when he was battling deep
depression, and then encouraged Jack when, as an
eighth-grader, he helped found a Gay Straight
Alliance club at King Middle School, one of the
first such clubs at a middle school in the
country.
"The level of intolerance and verbal
harassment is at its worst in middle school
because that is the time when adolescents are
identifying a sense of sexual identity," said
Carolyn Laub, executive director of the state
network. "It's a really intense time."
When Jack was a freshman at Berkeley High, he
met a man named Lawrence at a social function.
Lawrence seemed outwardly to just be a "short,
cute gay guy" but Jack soon learned that
Lawrence had been born a woman and underwent
hormone treatments and gender reassignment
surgery.
"I didn't even realize you could do that. It
just clicked. The whole cartoon bulb popped
above my head," Jack said. "When I came out as a
lesbian, I had felt better, but there was
something missing. The outwards of me wasn't how
I felt on the inside."
Gender Reassignment Option
Jack did some research and decided that when
he turns 18, he wants to begin taking male
hormones that will deepen his voice and allow
him to bulk up and start to grow facial hair.
Ultimately, he hopes to have gender reassignment
surgery.
He also decided to take a new name. His given
name, Devin, can be a boy's name, but it doesn't
feel right because it was given to him as a
girl, he said.
So he settled on Jack.
"It's strong. It's singular," he said. "Jack
sticks. Jack feels good."
But he waited until five months ago to tell
his parents and family friends that he was
transgender. He broached the subject with his
father first, armed with a stack of papers
explaining transgenderism.
"He was just quiet. He looked away," Jack
recalled. "Then he said, 'As long as you're not
hurting yourself or anyone else, I'm OK.' He
said, 'It will be hard to think of you as my
little boy, not my little girl.'
"You love your kids. They are going to grow
up and make their own decisions, " Scott
Thompson said last week. "The concerns I really
have are for her health and safety. I hope she's
happy. I hope she's not discriminated
against."
A month later, Jack told his mother. Her
first words?
"She said, 'Oh Lord, give me strength. Oh
Lord,' " he recalled. "She said, 'I had my baby
girl, and I'm happy with my baby girl.' "
Corinne Thompson said she had just gotten
used to the idea that her child was a lesbian
when Jack came out to her as transgendered.
"It's kind of blowing my mind. Being gay is
one thing, that's fine, but this is something
completely different, and I'm trying to deal
with it," she said.
Jack and his mother attend monthly counseling
sessions together, and Corinne Thompson said she
loves Jack unconditionally and could never "turn
my kid out" like some parents of gay or
transgender teens.
"My mom's really great," Jack said. "I could
have gone through so much worse than I already
went through."
Jack, who always has turned to humor to deal
with his problems, has started performing as a
stand-up comic. His routine has incorporated his
experience as a transgender youth, and at one
point during a recent performance he riffed,
"I've lost so much thought of my own gender that
I don't even know what's what anymore."
Jack gradually introduced the idea that he
wanted to change his name and be addressed as a
boy rather than a girl. While his close friends
and girlfriend Ellessa have complied, some of
his friends and most of his family slip up. Or
like little sister Danielle, they simply refuse
to give in.
On a recent afternoon, Jack sat in his
bedroom next to his 11-year-old sister, who was
not shy about crinkling up her nose and saying
what she thinks about Jack.
Boys, said Danielle, don't have teddy bears
in their rooms like Jack does. Boys, she said,
don't wear dresses to their second-grade
birthday parties, like Jack did.
"She's my sister," said Danielle, with a sigh
of exasperation. "When I was born, she was my
sister, and she's going to be my sister until I
die."
Jack, who passed his high school equivalency
exam and is taking independent study courses at
Berkeley High, plans to enroll in a community
college next semester and ultimately transfer to
a four-year college and study sociology and
biology.
In another sign of progress, Jack's father
has recently started referring to him as "my
son" instead of "my daughter," while his
Berkeley High friends are also using the male
pronoun.
"It's comforting that they're trying," Jack
said. "There's no other way to say it. I'm your
regular Joe."
