‘It’s a human thing’
Transgender children grapple with Texas legislation that targets them
Last summer while playing with slime in her family’s garage, Maya Stanton found the plastic bins of preschool art her mother stashed for her and her twin brother. She tossed out every scribbled drawing and hand-print turkey with her old name on it.
The sassy 10-year-old recalled her frustration that the world didn’t understand what she knew intuitively — despite her anatomy — when she’d made that artwork.
“Since I had a mind … I knew I was a girl and I thought I wasn’t allowed to
be,” she said.
Once Maya could form sentences, she found words to express to her parents that she was a girl — not a boy with an affinity for dress-up princess gowns.
During her last year of preschool in Houston, Maya’s tight-knit Jewish family began a fraught journey. Eventually, she began wearing girls’ clothes in public and using her new name and pronouns. The child who had wrapped a towel in a “Rapunzel braid” over her short hair at bath time grew out her curly locks. After ardent lobbying by her parents and a team of supportive strangers, she ob
tained a new birth certificate before kindergarten.
This spring, Maya and her parents have been among the crew of families such as hers shuttling back and forth to Austin to speak out against a slate of anti-transgender bills in the Texas Legislature, including one that would ban her from girls’ gymnastics and another that would redefine as child abuse the gender-affirming medical care she hopes to access.
“I finally feel right in my body,” Maya said in testimony before a state Senate committee in April. “I’m a girl in my head and in my heart, and I’m sorry if you don’t understand what it’s like to be trans, but you should not get to make decisions about my appearance or what treatment I get from a doctor.”
She’s terrified that if the medical care bill passes, the government will remove her from her parents. Her parents plan to move out of state if the law passes.
If every place in the world banned puberty blockers and hormone therapy, she said matter-offactly, “I would kill myself.”
A 2020 study in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics found that 90 percent of transgender adults who were unable to access gender-affirming care had suicidal thoughts. Only 4 percent of those in the study who wanted puberty suppression therapy — to allow for time to decide about more interventions — ever received it.
Eli, an 18-year-old in his final month of high school in northwest Houston, is among the staggering number who considered suicide before his post-puberty transition. The easygoing boy who loves Van Gogh, RenFest and cartoon art once routinely engaged in self-harm. He imagined how he’d kill himself. After he started taking testosterone — a gift from his mother on his 17th birthday — he pictured what it would be like to live to adulthood for the first time.
The Houston Chronicle spent a week with Eli and Maya to better understand how anti-trans legislation in Texas and more than 100 similar proposed laws around the country could affect families such as theirs.
‘In the wrong body’
Lisa and Jeffrey Stanton assumed their fraternal twins born Jan. 26, 2011, were sons. The couple celebrated with a bris, a rite of passage where boys are circumcised and welcomed into the covenant. The babies wore chin-strap yarmulkes and white swaddle blankets embroidered in baby blue with their names. Two perfect little boys, Lisa thought. The photograph is in one of the albums she can’t display anymore.
“We imagined their lives and all the things they would accomplish,” Lisa said in testimony before the House Public Health Committee.
“Our two kids shared the same room, the same toys, the same routine, yet from the moment my daughter Maya could express herself she presented with feminine mannerisms, was attracted to only stereotypically girl things and began insisting she was really a girl and that God had put her in the wrong body,” Lisa testified. Maya’s brother, Max, “presented as male and acted like a typical boy,” she said.
After a swim day with friends at her in-laws’ condo in Galveston, Lisa plopped the 2-year-old twins in the bathtub with their little chum Lindsey. As the kids stepped out of the water, Maya asked, “When is my penie gonna fall off ?”
The mother bought an age-appropriate book about male and female
bodies. When Maya saw what she would look like as a grownup, she was inconsolable. She cried all the time.
At 3, Maya voiced a new thought: “What if I cut it off ? Can I just cut it off ?”
“That’s dangerous,” Lisa said. She made an appointment with a psychologist.
Jeffrey kept an even keel when the therapist advised the couple to give their child time to explore the idea of identity. Try not to respond with judgment, the therapist said. For nearly two years, Lisa slipped across the street to a friend’s to cry and work through her grief.
Periodically, Lisa asked, “Are you sure you still want to be a girl?” She feels bad about it but recalls hoping for a change of mind.
‘Growing backwards’
Riki and John came from families scarred by addiction and abuse. The Chronicle has agreed to omit their last name to protect their safety and privacy. The couple intended to start fresh when their firstborn arrived on Oct. 14, 2002.
“She was a perfect little girl, the easiest kid,” John said. Pretty. Sunny. Riki’s labor was drama-free, and the baby fed on time and slept through the night.
At 3, the child saw John peeing and asked Riki, “Mom, how come I don’t have a thing?”
Being a boy was something Eli said, “I kinda felt like I always knew, but I didn’t know know.” Riki assumed she was raising “a nice, strong lesbian.” Eli shunned his little sister, Leah, but Leah wanted a relationship so desperately she made a step-by-step guide on how to be a good older sister.
Leah’s sibling began dressing like a boy at 5. At 10 came requests for short haircuts. At 12, the child looked in the mirror and thought, “I could pass for a boy.” Eli considered wrestling, but joining the middle school’s girls team and wearing that tight outfit was a nonstarter.
Then puberty hit along with depression that felt like an ocean of pressure from above. It felt like he was “growing backwards,” like Benjamin Button, regressing into someone less like the adult he aimed to be.
He would rather die than live as a girl, he thought. Eli showered in the dark so he wouldn’t have to look at his body. For three years he slashed his thighs or arms, where no one could see the marks, to let out some of the pain. He feared his parents would kick him out or someone might hurt him if he expressed what he increasingly knew was his true identity.
“We lost him for a little bit,” recalled
John, who works long days downtown while Riki is home with the kids. “My fear was that one day I’d come home and I wouldn’t have a kid anymore.”
The teen chatted about gender identity with new friends online. In middle school, a girl Eli barely knew asked straightforwardly, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m a boy,” he said. It felt great. His 9-year-old sister was accepting and relaxed when Eli shared the news with her. The barriers between them began to fade and they bonded over “Gravity Falls” and making up characters in sideby-side sketchbooks.
The week Eli first wore a chest binder was the happiest of his life. He started hugging his mom and sister. He finally looked right the mirror. “It was freeing,” he said.
Riki confronted Eli about the chest binder and later about the cutting, something she had done as a teen. He was heaving in tears on the couch next to her, trying to get the words out. His heart was pounding.
John wondered, “What broke?” adding, “You ask the stupid questions first.”
A trip to Target
After the Stantons’ 5-year-old completed a year and a half of therapy, the therapist told Lisa it was time to let their child wear girls’ clothes. Lisa called her husband in tears as she drove from the appointment to Target. Her heart was racing as they entered the girls’ section.
Maya walked into preschool the next day in a party dress, and her classmates gasped and giggled. She buried her head in her teacher’s lap. Her brother, Max, yelled, “Don’t be mean to my sister.”
Maya had secretly called herself Emily, but her parents said she had to pick a “J” name for her mom’s grandfather, Jerome Katz, or an “M” name, for her father’s grandfather, Meyer Braun, a Texas legislator allied with a rare cohort known for bipartisanship. Together with her parents, she picked “Maya” from a book. The family later held a Simchat Bat, a new naming ceremony for a girl. Jeffrey’s parents pushed back about Maya’s transition. It was too soon, she was young and they feared the ramifications, he said.
Maya’s family also made a pilgrimage with other transgender Houstonians to Bexar County — which had some Democrats on the bench — to get their names changed. A transgender Vietnam vet who got her name changed that day thanked Maya’s parents, explaining she had waited for her parents to die before she came out as a woman.
Not political
At 16, Eli declared he was “definitely a dude” and he wanted to do something about it. He tried out the names Logan, Tristan and Anthony. But now that it was really happening, he asked his parents to name him. They’d done it the first time. He felt close to them and wanted them to feel included in his transition.
They picked Eli, which Riki said means “ascent.”
One friend refused to use his new name. That child is no longer Eli’s friend. Eli’s government professor in his dual high school-college program kept using the female name on his old paperwork during roll call. Eli, whose name change is now official, is comfortable with who he is. He waited around after class — in person and later on Zoom — to correct the professor.
At 18, he’s on the brink of high school graduation. He said he’d be heartbroken if the state punished his parents or his doctor for allowing him to take his weekly testosterone shot.
Riki, who calls herself a momma bear, an outspoken LGBT parent advocate, is horrified by the legislation being considered in Austin and grateful her son is grown up and already taking meds.
“This isn’t a political thing; it’s a human thing,” she said.
“I finally feel right in my body. … I’m sorry if you don’t understand what it’s like to be trans, but you should not get to make decisions about my appearance or what treatment I get from a doctor.” Maya Stanton, 10
‘A stupid thing’
Lisa said no one looks at their little baby and imagines their child could be transgender. In the current culture, it’s something children and their parents arrive at after a great deal of soul searching and consultation with trained specialists.
Maya says “it’s a stupid thing” politicians are contemplating: imposing laws on children such as her, who want to halt puberty or play sports on the team that matches their gender. She is tired of waiting in committee rooms and outside lawmakers’ offices for her mom to speak on her behalf.
She used to wonder during bedtime prayers why God gave her the wrong body. She realized this year: “He put me in this body so I could teach people what it’s like to be transgender … to protest for other people who are not brave enough.”
Her parents have been lobbying everyone they know for months to call their representatives about the anti-trans bills. Lisa explained after deconstructing every preconception about gender she finally arrived at the conclusion that Maya was a girl from the day she was born.
“The truth is she didn’t transition,” Lisa said. “We transitioned.”