OJR senior wins $30K scholarship with essay
Daniel Kucharik, who will attend WCU, wrote about the difficulties of living with gender dysphoria.
POTTSTOWN >> An Owen J. Roberts High School senior who wrote about the difficulties of living with gender dysphoria has won the Shandy Hill Essay contest that comes with a scholarship of $30,000 over four years.
His name is Daniel Kucharik and he will be attending West Chester University, where he will study music education and composition.
Kucharik contributed a very personal essay about his experiences growing up with the medical and psychological condition known as gender dysphoria.
“According to the American Psychiatric Association, people with gender dysphoria typically experience significant distress (and/or problems functioning) associated with conflict between the way they feel and think of themselves (their experienced or expressed gender), and their physical or assigned gender,” according to a press release from the Greater Pottstown Foundation, which sponsors the essay and scholarship.
“In the past, this condition was called ‘gender identity disorder,’ but medical and psychology professionals now identify the condition by the more descriptive and less pejorative name.
Gender dysphoria is not the same as gender nonconformity, which refers to certain exhibited behaviors not matching the gender norms or stereotypes of the birth assigned gender (for example, girls behaving and dressing more like boys, or occasional cross-dressing in adult men). It is also not the same as being gay or lesbian.
In the essay, Kucharik, who was born a female and lives in North Coventry, describes how he remembers knowing that he was in the wrong body as early as the age of 5 or 6.
He didn’t understand why he felt that way then, but he talks about how he prayed to God every night for years that that he would wake up as a boy. By middle school, the time when most boys and girls are entering puberty, the condition had become increasingly more traumatic and emotionally crippling for him, resulting from his internal feelings and identity, as well as numerous external social pressures.
It was not until eighth grade, when an understanding teacher showed a video about Caitlyn Jenner and explained what true transgenderism is, that Kucharik really began to understand why he had always felt the way he did.
Unfortunately, due mostly to continuing social pressures and fear of rejection, it was not until his sophomore year that he was able to confide his true feelings to some of his closest friends and begin to present himself in a more masculine way.
In 11th grade he changed his name to Daniel, and found, to his great relief, that the transition was not as worrisome as he thought it might be, due to the positive support of his teachers and the majority of his classmates.
Kucharik attributes his “mostly smooth” transition, in part, to the wide diversification of the people in the Greater Pottstown Area — not only from an ethnic perspective, but also the sociological and even the political diversification that people in this area exhibit.
In the essay, Kucharik describes how the diversity in the Pottstown area actually encourages people to listen to each other’s ideas, often discussing opposing viewpoints with a degree of acceptance that might not be possible somewhere else.
He wrote he might not have become the confident young man he is proud to be today, in another area where most people think more similarly to one another.
Kucharik has been a member of the National Honor Society his junior and senior years. He also participated in various school instrumental music programs including the Marching Band, Concert Band, Indoor Percussion Ensemble, and Jazz Band, playing mostly mallet percussion instruments like the marimba and others.
Kucharik is also a member of Leo, the youth arm of Lions Club International. Leo Club members work with local Lions Clubs around the world in the performance of service and humanitarian projects for their communities. Leo was started here in Pennsylvania in 1957, but now has more than 175,000 youth members in 145 different countries.
“The Greater Pottstown Foundation salutes Dan’s well-worded reference to the inclusion and tolerance of our community which is all too often disparaged,” according to the press release.
The Shandy Hill essay contest is open to seniors from The Hill School, Owen J. Roberts, Pottsgrove and Pottstown high schools.
The essay contest and award honor Shandy Hill, the Foundation’s founder and the original editor of the Pottstown Mercury from 1931 until he retired in 1967.
Hill was an ardent believer in supporting education opportunities for students within the Pottstown Community. The Greater Pottstown Foundation strives to continue that objective through various education related grants and student scholarship awards.
Each year senior students from the four area schools, compete in the writing of an original essay which is to focus on some aspect of life in the Greater Pottstown Area.
The foundation seeks the writer’s original and personal interpretation of how any aspect of life is effected by living in the area as opposed to somewhere else. In any year that a winning essay is chosen, the writer is granted a $30,000 college scholarship to be used over four years.
This year, the Foundation received essays from 31 applicants.
According to the press release announcing the winner, “the board was happy to note that, while the majority of essays always seem to come in from The Hill School, and Owen J. Roberts High School, the participation from Pottstown and Pottsgrove was indeed somewhat greater this year. Ideally, the Foundation would be pleased to see a more proportional participation from all four Pottstown area high schools.”