Florida,
USA — It's a spring break morning, and by 11
a.m. at the Anderson home, chaos is erupting. School is
out for the week, and the twin boys are throwing a ball
inside the spacious, two-story house. Upstairs, the
preteen daughter pretends not to hear her mother calling.
Lauren Anderson, a tanned and well-dressed stay-at-home
mom who seems incapable of sitting still, cajoles her
offspring to behave as she waits for a babysitter to
arrive.
Her youngest, Nicole, 5,
is frowning. Nicole's face is framed with delicate brown
braids, and her fingernails are painted a rainbow of
colors. She plans to go swimming with a friend at the
community pool, but at the moment, she doesn't like the
way her dress feels. She yanks the hot-pink halter-top
over her head, telling her mother, "This is poking me. I
want to change my dress."
Minutes later, she
scampers back, now as naked as a jaybird except for her
underwear. Without the dress, you can clearly see her
penis, tucked carefully into her pink patterned
panties.
Born a biological male
whom the family named Nicholas, Nicole today dresses,
acts, and lives like a girl. She's been insisting she's
female since she could talk, say the Andersons, who asked
that their real names not be used for this article. "He
has always been attracted to the flowers, the bright
colors, his Barbie dolls, and his beloved mermaids,"
Lauren says, using the male pronoun for her child. In
fact, talking with Lauren, who fully supports Nicole's
desire to live as a girl, it's clear that the family is
still working out the grammar of how to refer to its
youngest.
"As a young toddler, he
wouldn't let me snap her onesies together because she
wanted to wear a 'dwess' like his sister," Lauren says,
mixing pronouns like he and her
interchangeably.
Lauren admits that the
family is feeling its way down a path very few families
find themselves navigating. Although it's common for
young boys to play with dolls or paint their nails —
what parents classically refer to as "a phase" —
it's much rarer for a child to so completely identify as
the opposite sex. And what to do about it has been the
subject of fierce debate for decades.
Nine years ago, a Belgian
film, Ma Vie en Rose, explored the most common
reaction to a young boy's decision to live as a girl. In
other words, the parents panicked. So did the rest of
the neighborhood, who shunned and ridiculed the boy's
family until they felt compelled to move away. In real
life, meanwhile, another famous case in 2000 ended even
worse. When Zachary Lipscomb's parents attempted to
enroll him as a girl named Aurora in an Ohio school at
age 6, a state child protection agency took the child
away.
Some therapists insist
that such children should be discouraged from living as
the opposite sex because, they have found, the large
majority of such children grow out of it. Studies show
that many end up as gay adults. But a growing coalition
of therapists, scientists, and activists disagree and
refer to such children — even those as young as 3
years old — as transgendered, insisting that the
child's new identification shouldn't be
discouraged.
The Andersons are in the
latter camp, encouraging Nicholas to be Nicole. Experts
consulted by New Times say the Andersons are the
only family in the United States supporting a
5-year-old's choice to live as the opposite sex. This
fall, the Andersons plan to enroll Nicole in a Broward
County kindergarten class as a female. They are convinced
that's the only way she'll be happy.
That decision has rallied
much support for the family's side. There's attorney
Karen Doering of the National Center for Lesbian Rights
<http://www.nclrights.org/>,
for example, who represented Michael Kantaras, a
female-to-male transsexual, in a widely publicized 2004
victorious custody battle in the Florida Supreme Court.
Kantaras, who won joint custody of his two children when
the court ruled that his parental rights were not
nullified by his sex change, was the first transsexual
parent to win such a high-profile victory. Doering is
advising the Andersons as they wait to hear from school
officials, who so far have given no indication of how
they plan to prepare for Nicole's enrollment.
And that's where Nicole's
story veers even further from the ordinary. Because
trying to pressure school officials to address the
Andersons' concerns is a person who could be either a big
help or a big distraction.
Mark Angelo Cummings, a
man who once was a woman, has become something of a
Spanish-language television talk-show phenomenon.
Cummings' outspoken appearances, which have wowed Latino
TV hosts with stories of his transformation, are leading
to a new openness about transsexuality in the Latino
community. And Cummings plans to use his celebrity, such
as it is, to promote Nicole's cause.
This fall, whether it's
ready or not, the Broward School District will make some
sort of history. Thanks to a showboating transsexual
guardian angel and the little boy who insists he's a
girl.
On a recent morning, it
takes a lot of coaxing to tear Nicole away from watching
The Ten Commandments to tell a reporter how she feels
about being a "special girl."
"Do you know why you're a
special girl?" her mother asks.
"Because... I have a girl
brain in a boy body," Nicole says, lowering her usual
penetrating voice to an almost inaudible sigh.
"What does that feel
like? Does it feel good? Or is it hard?"
"Hard," Nicole
says.
When her mother asks her
if she's happy with the way she looks, she says
no.
"What would you change
about yourself?"
"Mm... my penis," Nicole
murmurs.
"What would you do with
it?" her mother asks.
"Um... cut it," Nicole
replies, very softly.
"And what would you do
with it then?" asks a surprised Lauren, who later says
she's never before heard Nicole express dislike for her
penis.
"I would hammer it,"
Nicole says.
"What?" Lauren
says.
"Hammer it," Nicole
insists more strongly.
Later, Lauren says she
constantly feels as if she's flying by the seat of her
pants. "There is no protocol," she says. "Nobody knows of
anybody. No 5-year-olds who go to school fully
transitioned. There's no book called How to Raise Your
Gender Variant Preschooler."
Nicole "carried like a
girl" when Lauren was pregnant, but when Nicholas was
born, he was definitely a baby boy.
"So we dressed him all
boyish," Lauren says, as she fondly turns the pages of a
fat baby album. There are pages and pages of little
Nicholas — with his family smiling at his bris,
dressed in a tiny football uniform, being hugged by his
older siblings. Nicholas looks happy. But Lauren says his
desire to be treated like a girl was constant.
"At first, I thought it
was cute," she explains. "I don't have a problem putting
nail polish on a little boy. I don't have a problem if my
son plays with dolls. His older brothers went through a
similar period of doll playing and asking for nail polish
on their toes. There's no reason to say no to a phase. I
never once said 'no.' A phase is a phase."
So baby Nicholas was
allowed to wear high heels. To play with Little Mermaid
and Barbie dolls. To grow his hair a little longer. But
instead of being satisfied with these concessions,
Nicholas always asked for more. One day, he asked for
something his parents weren't expecting.
Lauren was sitting at her
computer working when 2-year-old Nicholas, who, like all
the Anderson children, had a frank understanding of
anatomy, came to her with a request: "I want the fairy
princess to come and make my penis into a vagina," he
said.
Lauren mentioned
Nicholas' strange demand to his pediatrician at the
child's three-year birthday checkup, expecting to be told
that the behavior was part of the phase. "She got a
concerned look on her face," she says. "This was not the
reaction I was looking for." The Andersons were advised
to look into Nicholas' desires with the help of a
therapist.
Frightened, Lauren says
she turned to her college copy of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and looked
up something called "Gender Identity Disorder," the
clinical term for transsexualism. It seemed to describe
Nicole's behaviors exactly.
The Andersons called
Marcia Schultz, a psychologist in Coral Springs. One
session with Nicholas, who was then 3, convinced Schultz
that he had a form of GID.
"Nicholas is a
transsexual who wants to be a woman," Schultz says.
Through Schultz, the
Andersons met Heather Wright, a jovial and frank
male-to-female transsexual with a hearty handshake who
lives in Green Acres with her female partner and their
three children. They took Nicholas to see her. Wright
immediately noticed that little Nicholas seemed
uncomfortable in his body.
"He was definitely very
quiet," Wright remembers. "He definitely wasn't happy
with having to wear the clothes he was wearing. One of
the things he was upset about was he wanted to wear girl
clothes. All he got away with was getting Little Mermaid
flip-flops."
After meeting with
Schultz and Wright, the Andersons began allowing Nicholas
to act and dress like a girl in the safety of their home
or in the anonymity of the grocery store or at Disney
World. That summer, Nicholas' camp even allowed him to
wear a girl's bathing suit. But at preschool, Nicholas
remained a boy and seemed satisfied with relegating his
girl time to afterschool hours. Until he turned
5.
"Right at the age of 5,
it was like 'boom,'" Lauren says. "Since he hit 5, he
totally rebelled and refused to wear boy clothes. Every
single day was a fight. By the end of the school year,
she looked like a totally different child."
Today, Nicole gets to be
all girl at home and is supposed to be "neutral" in
public at her preschool, where many of her friends, all
girls, call her "she." But every day, Nicole chips away
at the vestiges of her boyhood.
"I try to do the neutral
thing, and it doesn't work," Lauren says, "Slowly, every
day, a new article of clothing will come out of the
closet. And we end up looking like a girl."
Nicole has settled on a
gender, but there's little else that's settled when it
comes to Gender Identity Disorder. Even the name itself
— that a child like Nicole has a "disorder" —
is contested.
Until 1973, homosexuality
was listed in the DSM as a mental disorder; then it was
removed after intense debate in the psychiatric
community. And many transsexuals believe GID should have
been tossed out at the same time. For some, however, GID
continues to be a useful diagnosis that helps determine
whether a person is a good candidate for sex reassignment
surgery.
Politics about
transsexualism permeates any discussion of GID. The only
long-range scientific study conducted by psychologists,
harshly criticized by transsexual activists, shows that
many boys diagnosed with GID as children grow up to be
gay males and that only a few continue to identify as
female. Studies by endocrinologists, on the other hand,
have uncovered some biological similarities in the brains
of transsexuals, a finding that suggests that
transgenderism is not something one can merely "grow out
of."
All of which means that
there's little anyone can agree on when it comes to
treating five-year-old boys who want to be
girls.
"There are three basic
types of attitudes about this," says Heino F.L.
Meyer-Bahlburg, director of the Program of Developmental
Psychoendocrinology at the New York State Psychiatric
Institute and a professor of psychiatry at Columbia
University. "There are people who are strictly anti-trans
kids who always try to modify the behavior. There are
people who are strongly supportive, who from the outset
would strongly encourage a transgender identity. Then
there are the people sitting on the fence."
Kenneth Zucker, a
psychologist who has treated hundreds of young Gender
Identity Disorder children at the Centre for Addiction
and Mental Health <http://www.camh.net/>
at the University of Toronto, is a well-known proponent
of modifying behavior. He advises that children with GID
undergo therapy to work through their hatred of their
bodies before being accepted as transsexuals. His
clinical research shows that he has an 80 to 90 percent
success rate of steering young GID children away from
living as trans adults. Gay and transsexual groups are
harshly critical of Zucker, saying that his work
encourages religious-right organizations that seek to
"cure" gays of their homosexuality. But Zucker himself
has taken pains to separate himself and his work from
those organizations.
Told of the Andersons and
their plans to enroll Nicole in school as a girl, Zucker
says he's concerned that the Andersons have been swayed
by an activist transsexual agenda and are ignoring the
possibility that Nicole might simply be a troubled child.
"Let's see if there are ways to try and help this child
work this through," he says. "Instead, they're going to
cement this in more and more." He says that what the
Andersons are doing could be considered "some type of
emotional neglect."
Meyer-Bahlburg is more
ambivalent. "Force doesn't really work very well. On the
other hand, I don't feel clear about strong encouragement
in the transgender direction, because the vast majority
of kids fall out of it," he says. When he treats GID
boys, he advises his patients to beef up boyish
activities and play with carefully selected male
playmates.
The Andersons, however,
side with experts who consider children like Nicole
transsexuals. Lauren attended the annual Philadelphia
Trans-health Conference <http://www.trans-health.org/>
this January, where gender-variant children was a main
topic and the subject of panels such as one titled "How
Young Is Too Young?" Most parents at the conference
seemed to agree that it's never too early to support a
child as a transsexual, even at age 5.
"I would never want to
force any person to be something they're not," says Tom
Anderson, Nicole's father. "This is different from 'It's
time to stop drinking chocolate milk from a baba' or
taking away a blanket. This is the essence of the
person."
Mark Angelo Cummings'
transsexual essence is so overwhelming, he's had Maury
Povich eating out of his hand.
"I even tried marrying a
man," his introductory voice-over intoned, and the studio
audience yelled "Ewwww!"
"I had my breasts
removed."
Ughhhhh!
Then Cummings, a
female-to-male transsexual from Hollywood, Florida,
walked onto The Maury Povich Show's set with a swagger,
wearing a jean jacket, a cowboy hat, and a generous crop
of stubble.
Maury's first question
cut to the chase: "What's going on below the belt," he
asked in a jokey tone, waggling his finger in the
direction of Mark's crotch. Without skipping a beat, Mark
quipped back: "I could ask you what's going on below your
belt."
Zing! The audience
laughed, and then Mark really took control. He explained
the biological basis of what he prefers to call "gender
dysphoria." (As for the answer to Povich's question: Mark
is still waiting to raise enough money for the genital
surgery that would complete his transformation.) When
Cummings' wife, Violet, joined him onstage, his statement
that "love has no color or gender" was followed by
raucous applause. At the end of the segment, the talk
show host was breathless.
"Well, I'll tell ya, I've
learned a lot," Maury said. "You're a great spokesman for
this. I mean, this is quite remarkable."
He turned toward the
audience: "I'm tellin' ya, I do this all the time, and I
mean I'm sitting inches from this guy, and I'm looking
for one little, just a fraction of Maritza, and I can't
see a thing!"
"Well, Maury," said Mark,
seeing his chance, "I want viewers to know that being
transgender is not a sin, a crime, or a deviant behavior.
What it is, is a birth defect. We are human beings with
feelings, and all we ask is the respect... "
And as the audience began
applauding, Mark plowed right through, standing and
raising his voice:
"I stand before you all
and plead: Please stop hating and start understanding.
Open up your hearts and minds and realize that we are
God's children too. Amen."
Following this
performance, the Andersons contacted Cummings, and
immediately, without even meeting Nicole, Cummings made
her a central part of his mission. Nicole, he believes,
should become a poster child for childhood transsexuality
and should be protected at all costs from scientists like
Zucker, whom he compares to Hitler.
A 42-year-old
Cuban-American who wears his mastectomy scars and
thatching of springy black body hair as hard-won trophies
of his true self, Cummings has made acceptance of South
Florida's transsexuals a crusade.
And apparently, the
bilingual man is just what Spanish television has been
waiting for.
In the past four months,
since the January Povich appearance, Cummings and his
wife have appeared on six different local, national, and
international Spanish-language television shows,
including Cristina, the Spanish-language Oprah. Each
time, he has delivered a pitch-perfect performance,
patiently explaining the gender-bending qualities of
environmental toxins on local call-in show
Quiéreme Descalzi on America Teve and fielding
embarrassing questions about his wife's sexuality from
polished interviewers on Sin Fronteras, Telemundo's
answer to Dateline. On each, he's preached his fevered
pitch for the "birth defect" that is
transgenderism.
"They're all just
grabbing for me," he says.
That's because Cummings
may be the perfect spokesman to explain transsexualism to
the Latino community, says Anagloria Mora, a Miami-based
sexologist who specializes in Hispanic sex and gender
issues. Mora appeared with Cummings on Cada Día,
another Telemundo program, and featured him as a guest
speaker in her Miami-Dade Community College class on
human sexuality.
"Mark and Violeta spoke
about his life, and he was very animated, very
insightful," she says. "You can see he's not a freak, and
you can empathize. It was the best workshop I've ever
had, by far. My dream is to have Mark and me, side by
side in a huge stadium full of Hispanics. To become
public speakers throughout the nation to help Hispanic
trannies."
After Cummings met the
Andersons through the Internet, he launched the tactics
that have worked so well on the Latino talk-show circuit
at the Broward County School Superintendent's Office. He
shot off two e-mails, exhorting Superintendent Frank Till
to do everything necessary to accept Nicole as a girl,
including allowing him to educate and train teachers and
administrators himself.
The school system
politely declined Cummings' offer. "They assured me that
they are aware of how to treat disabilities of such a
nature," he says. "But gender dysphoria? I doubt
it."
Cummings keeps in close
contact with the Andersons, advising Lauren to keep the
heat on the school system. Impatient to create change, he
has urged the family to help him advocate for transsexual
issues and to make a documentary about Nicole. (It was
Cummings who persuaded the Andersons to talk to New
Times.) They are grateful for his help but sometimes
find him a bit overwhelming. "Mark is in a rush," Lauren
says. "I just need to go at my own pace right
now."
But Mark considers his
work a matter of life and death. "Do you know how many
people commit suicide that are transsexual because they
just can't deal with it anymore?" he says. "If I could
stop one life from being killed, then I've done my
work."
Born in Havana in 1964,
Maritza Perdomo was both severely cross-eyed and
completely besotted with boys' toys, a double-whammy of
challenges for her traditional Cuban family.
"I knew from the time I
was 3," Cummings says. "My relatives would all say, 'Oh,
she's going to end up as a lesbian.' I was very butchy,
very rough and tough, always had to have male things
around. At 5, I wanted to take my dress off."
Maritza's toilet training
was especially problematic because she could never
understand why she couldn't urinate standing up, like her
father. She constantly ruined her frilly dresses with
rough play. Every move was dominated by a controlling
mother who refused to understand her desire to be a
boy.
The teenaged Maritza fell
in love with women and managed a full-blown addiction to
crack cocaine while in the Army, a wild nightlife in the
gay scene in Miami, and a slew of low-wage jobs. At 24,
she made a last-ditch attempt to succeed at being a
straight woman by marrying a 55-year-old Englishman in a
frilly white ceremony. In the wedding video, a favorite
prop on the talk shows, she looks young, lovely, and
extremely nervous as she feeds cake into her new
husband's mouth.
The marriage fell apart
quickly, and Martiza quit crack cold turkey and then
embarked on a series of lesbian relationships, including
one woman with whom she planned to start a family. But
Maritza, the one who would carry the baby, was never able
to get pregnant, and eventually the partnership
disintegrated.
At 38, Maritza met
Violet, a straight woman who approached her at the gym.
Nine months later, at their commitment ceremony in Key
West, someone asked Maritza if she was "transitioning."
The question was understandable — Maritza had
discovered bodybuilding, and her once-chubby body was
bulging with muscle and looked decidedly masculine, the
classic appearance of a woman transitioning into a man.
But Maritza didn't know that, because she had never heard
of transsexuals.
"I get home and get on
the Internet, and the tears went rolling down my cheeks,
and the sky just like opened up," Mark says. "There are
others like me. It was like a revelation."
Maritza barreled through
gender transition, going from the initial consultation
with a therapist to hormone therapy to a full mastectomy
to a legal name and sex change in just five months. "It
was the easiest thing," he says. "I don't let grass grow
under my feet. I was fulfilling my destiny. This is what
I was supposed to be."
On February 6, 2004,
Cummings and Violet were legally married as woman and
newly minted man. Immediately, Cummings launched a
campaign to help other transsexual men and women combat
the gender dysphoria that he blames for so much of his
life's pain.
If they would let him,
Cummings would turn the Broward County Public Schools
into one of his many projects, alongside his recently
completed, self-published autobiography, The Mirror
Makes No Sense; his plans for a documentary; and his
greatest dream — a feature film about his life
story. He says that he has been contacted by a filmmaker
who has the ear of none other than Stephen Spielberg and
that preliminary talks about the script are set for this
summer.
Speaking of Nicole,
though he has never met her, brings tears to Cummings'
eyes.
"I was Nicholas at one
point. I was 5 years old at one point. The best thing for
Nicole would be to expose the whole thing," Mark says. "I
don't think it will put him in danger. I think it will be
agood thing."
Even among transsexuals,
not everyone thinks being raised as a girl will be good
for Nicole. At one meeting of a transgender support
group, Lauren encountered criticism from a female-to-male
adult transsexual who thought Lauren's permissiveness was
harming the child.
"He told me, 'I'm the man
I am today because I suffered as a child,'" she says. "He
was basically putting me down for accepting my child,
saying, 'I think we all need to suffer because of this.
'"
And at least one local
adult who identifies as a gender variant and who
requested that his name be withheld also has
doubts.
"Nobody wants to be
premature in definitively diagnosing anything," he says.
"This isn't something that's reversible. Hormones can be
started, hormones can be stopped, but they're not without
their side effects. You're not going to get a whole
school system to change overnight. There are no
definites, not at such a young age."
Nicole will have no need
for medical intervention for years — until puberty
will begin to ruin her girlish figure. But eventually,
she may consider taking hormone blockers to prevent
masculinization and then eventually begin to take
feminizing hormones. Or she could change her mind,
prompting an awkward female-to-male transition. Either
way, when these changes happen, she's likely to be the
target of bullying.
Lauren says that rumors
have already started at Nicole's school. "Some teachers
were apparently milling around and talking about our
family," she says. "One of them said, 'I heard she really
wanted another daughter. '"
But Lauren says the
potential for bullying won't change her mind. "I don't
want to take that child's soul and squash it," she says.
"The school doesn't have a choice. If the school says no,
they're violating my child's rights. The plan B is not to
switch schools or to homeschool. The plan B is to say
'no. '"
"We're the parents; we
need to make a decision," Tom Anderson adds. "We see a
child that's extremely happy, who loves and is loved by
everybody. We're just going by our parental
gut."
Logistically, the
Andersons believe, having Nicole attend school as a girl
shouldn't be difficult. Most of the classrooms at the
school have attached single-stall bathrooms. With the
cooperation of teachers, other children would never have
to know.
Marilyn Volker, a Miami
sexologist, says other transsexual children have
successfully navigated Florida schools, often with the
discreet help of teachers. "Sometimes only individual
teachers know about it," she says. "Often, the teacher
deals with it."
"This is a child with
wonderfully supportive, loving parents who's got medical
and mental health professionals on her side," lesbian
rights attorney Karen Doering says. "I think as far as
being able to handle bullying, I think this child will do
just fine."
Although the Broward
County School District would not acknowledge that it had
received communications about Nicole's needs from the
Andersons, it insists that it has protocols for dealing
with a GID child.
"We take each child as an
individual," district spokesman Andrew Feirstein says.
"Any time a student enrolls in a district school and has
specific needs, all appropriate information is gathered
for an evaluation. District professionals meet together
and work with parents to determine the student's best
educational plan."
The Andersons say they
contacted Nicole's principal in January, sending along
two letters from mental health professionals who
explained Nicole's special needs.
Then they waited. With
registration for fall's kindergarten classes already
beginning, the Andersons are still in the dark about the
school's plans, making the task of listing Nicole's
gender on the registration forms difficult. "I'm not
going to put male or female. I'm going to put down 'I,'"
Lauren says, which she means to stand for
intersexed.
Oblivious to the fight
swirling around her as only a 5-year-old can be, Nicole
is headstrong and boisterous, with a room full of Barbie
dolls and a fondness for singing showtunes to visitors.
She seems to be a happy, healthy — and perhaps a
tiny bit spoiled — little girl.
Male-to-female
transsexual Heather Wright, who had first met Nicholas
when he was only 3, met Nicole for the first time six
weeks ago, when the Andersons brought her to hear Wright
speak at a local panel about transgender
issues.
"It was a big
difference," Wright says. "I couldn't believe her
personality. I didn't recognize her at first. If I had
not known, I would never have known. This time, she kept
being the center of attention. She was very outgoing.
Definitely able to function better. Now she seems to be
Miss Personality, and very happy. Not the introverted
person that I saw before."
A month ago, Nicole
debuted in her first theatrical role in a local community
musical. On the show's closing night, the stage is dark,
and a chorus of small, childish voices lisp a showtune.
Parading around the stage singing along and concentrating
hard on her stage directions, Nicole is possible to pick
out only because she is the youngest child in the show, a
good head shorter than the other girls.
If anyone in the crowd or
the cast knows that Nicole was once Nicholas, they don't
seem to care — proof, the Andersons say, that Nicole
will be able to function happily in public as a
girl.
Nicole's 10-year-old
sister, Angela, explains that for a while, having her
younger brother turn into a younger sister was difficult.
"When I was younger, I
thought that it was just a stage," she says. But now the
most annoying part is that Nicole steals Angela's
clothes. "But I guess that's what having a sister is
like, because I've never had a sister."
As for Nicole's
interactions with the outside world, Angela is used to
answering questions.
"It's kind of strange,"
she says, "because my friends always call it a he, and
I'm like, 'No, it's a she,' and it's kind of hard.
Everyone always goes up to me and goes, 'That's a boy,
right?' and I go, 'No, it's my sister,' and they go, 'Oh.
'"
