--- In Terisa's transgendernews,
tgnews_moderator <tgnews_moderator@y...> wrote:
sfgate.com
Monday, November 4, 2002

http://tinyurl.com/2foi
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/11/04/MN94464.DTL

CHRONICLE PROFILE: Jack Thompson

Teen's journey to transgender identity
Berkeley student, born a girl, now sees himself as boy named Jack

Kelly St. John, Chronicle Staff Writer

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."

<end>
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