Finding himself
For years, he had felt a piece of him was missing. But now it seems that it had been there all along.
It was early still, not much past 6 a.m., and James Kaplan was already dressed for the first day of third grade. The night before, his mom, Sara, pulled out the iron and he helped press the wrinkles out of his light blue polo. “My first time ironing,” he said. For the past month, he’d been pushing his parents to let him wear a suit to school. James, whose 9th birthday was a couple of months away, thought it was a sharp look.
But after some back and forth, they’d settled on the polo, khaki cargo shorts and the dark blue chambray tie that Sara was now fitting over his head. Charley, James’ 4-year-old brother, still in his pajamas, pointed at him. “Handsome, James. Handsome.” James collapsed on the couch, staring through the windows at the brightening September sky.
“How you feelin’?” James’ dad, Ben, called from the kitchen. “Nervous,” James said. “But excited.”
He wasn’t just thinking about his first day of third grade. He was thinking about the beginning of his first full school year as James.
Some eight months before, James had told his parents his “inner person was a boy.” The roundcheeked 8-year-old they’d always
thought was their daughter was actually their son. It was something he’d been trying to tell them — something he’d been trying to understand for himself — for more than a year.
Sara and Ben considered themselves progressive, but they didn’t know the first thing about raising a transgender child. In the days that followed, they would talk to family, to friends and to their couples therapist. They would take James shopping for “boy clothes” and to get a “boy haircut.”
They had to get to know their firstborn all over again. They loved him as they always had, but there was this sense that maybe they didn’t really know him. And, if they were being honest, he was different — lighter and smiling and more open.
Ben took James into the bathroom, put some pomade in his hands and started running them through his son’s curly brown hair. “I always liked getting a new class,” Ben said. “It’s like a fresh start.”
James nodded, then smoothed out bits of hair Ben had missed. “And for me, it’s a very fresh start,” he said.
Sara poked her head in. “Look — makeup!”
“You never wear makeup,” James said.
“I’m celebrating,” she said. “We’re gonna have a good day.”
The way she said it, it sounded as if she’d practiced saying it a thousand times that morning. We’re gonna have a good day. In May 2014, a Time magazine cover proclaimed, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” calling the issue of gender identity “America’s next civil rights frontier.” One of the subjects of its story was an 11-year-old transgender boy, Mac Davis, who said he’d known his true gender since he was 3.
Today, as politicians fight over which bathroom transgender people are legally allowed to use, health care professionals find themselves having to develop what is essentially a new field for a growing number of transgender children.
This is a difficult task because, while there is considerable evidence that transgender adolescents, when given the space to transition early, go on to have health outcomes similar to non-transgender peers, there’s little empirical data to help guide the way for very young transgender children.
Still, in recent years, there’s been a significant shift in the field. Increasingly, health care professionals are letting children lead the way.
This is the uncertain world James has entered, a world Sara and Ben spend every day trying to navigate. Even as they support him, they worry about his future. That’s why they requested The Chronicle not use their children’s real names in telling this story, hoping to protect their privacy as they grow older. But it is a story they want told.
James is big for his age. He almost always wears cargo shorts and a Warriors T-shirt. He loves baby dolls. (It took him a while to realize that he could still play with them, even if he is a boy.) He also really likes Pokémon and is in a band called CatDogs. He wants to be a singer when he grows up. Maybe not a super famous one, but one people listen to. He loves Taylor Swift. Last summer, he got some blond highlights in his brown hair, which made him feel good, even if it took forever and cost a little too much.
James goes about his days like many 8-year-old boys. He lines up for class before the first bell, does homework when he gets home, plays video games as long as his parents will let him, and argues about bed time. His parents talk a lot about the Berkeley “bubble” he lives in, one made possible by a comfortable life in one of America’s most liberal cities. They’re trying hard to keep him in that bubble — keep him safe — while carefully deflating it, bit by bit.
It’s easy to see a few of the early signs when you go looking for them, little crumbs James had dropped and hoped his parents might follow back before he was ever called James. But Sara and Ben didn’t know to look. So when he told them he wanted a “boy” haircut in first grade, they took him to the barber and had his hair cut a little shorter and that was that. When he told his dad he felt “like a boy sometimes,” Ben would play along. “Sometimes, I have girl feelings, too.” When James said he had a big secret: “Well, we all have secrets, buddy.”
“We just didn’t think anything of it,” Sara said. “In hindsight, I can see that I wasn’t really seeing him.”
That went on for a year — an entire year, James would say, spent feeling like “a piece of me was missing.” Eventually, though, the day came when hints weren’t enough. Sara remembered the date: Feb. 18, 2016. She’d driven to James’ school at 2 p.m., as she always does, to pick him up. Rose, one of James’ best friends, ran up to her to tell her they’d been fighting. “Why?” Sara asked. “Well,” Rose explained, James’ “inner-person is a boy.”
James had told Rose his secret during recess, while they played on the swings, forcing themselves higher and higher into the sky. Rose wasn’t happy about the news. Girls, she told James, were scientifically proved to be better than boys. James didn’t like that. Soon, he was in tears, trying to make sense of everything with his teacher, Jennifer Adcock, while the other students were off in art class.
“It was this sense of, ‘I know this is true, I need this to be true, and I need my friends and people in my life to accept it,’ ” Adcock said. “There was a lot of concern he wasn’t going to be accepted.”
As Sara made her way through the school to where James and his teacher sat, a blurry image of her child was coming into focus. “I think his friend’s words just woke me up to look at him.”
There are family videos of a tiny James with thick black hair and eyes barely open. Sara and Ben had met a couple of years before James was born — Ben got a job waiting tables at the cafe where Sara worked. She was his manager, but that hadn’t stopped them from flirting.
The family lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in downtown Berkeley. Ben designs and creates jewelry for a local gallery, and Sara manages their building to help cover the rent. Charley and James share a bedroom with bunk beds; Ben and Sara’s bed takes up nearly half of the living room. They’re insured through MediCal, which means Sara has had to spend hours on the phone, getting the right exemptions and exceptions so James can go to the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, a
leader in treating transgender children, where physicians monitor his march toward puberty.
In the year before James came out, Sara and Ben had been working on their relationship in couples counseling, doing what they could to find the holes and sew them up. But still, at the end of the day, when Ben, Sara, James and Charley clean up the train routes Charley’s built through the middle of the living room and sit down to read together, they’re all smiling.
It was that same living room where, the evening after James came out at school, Sara and Ben sat him down on the couch to talk. When James sits on the couch, he sinks into it. His legs don’t quite touch the floor, a reminder of just how young he is. But he was sure, he told them. He is a boy. He’d been trying to tell them for a while.
After James and Charley were in bed, Sara and Ben whispered back and forth. How’d we miss this? Is it a phase?
They turned in on themselves, thinking about all they’d done or hadn’t done as parents. Sara thought maybe she’d done “a really bad job of selling womanhood as being a good thing.” Ben worried whether people would think this was all just “another crazy episode in the lives of Ben and Sara.” Before she went to bed, Sara speedread a book about transgender children, trying to learn everything she could.
In the days that followed, they would learn much more. A dizzying, disturbing collection of facts and figures confronted them. “Once you read the statistics,” Sara said, to not support your child “is actually maybe child abuse.”
Last year, the National Center for Transgender Equality conducted a survey of more than 27,000 transgender adults in all 50 states, the largest study of its kind. Among its findings: Of the respondents who were out in school, 54 percent said they were verbally harassed, 24 percent said they were physically attacked, 13 percent said they were sexually assaulted, and 17 percent said the violence was so extreme they left school.
Nearly a third of the respondents reported living in poverty (double the portion of the general population), and only 16 percent of those surveyed owned a home (compared with 63 percent of the general population). Forty percent of the respondents reported attempting suicide at least once — nine times the national rate.
“If they have the fortitude to tell you what they’re experiencing, then, as a parent, I think it’s your obligation to support them,” Ben said.
Even as they worked to understand what it would mean to parent a transgender child, Ben and Sara began to try. They emptied James’ closet of his pink clothes. They gave away his pink bike. One night at the dinner table, they handed him a list of the top 100 boys’ names of 2015 to look through. Sara took him shopping at Target, where he wanted superhero everything. James still talks about the first time he got to walk through the boys’ department like you might expect him to talk about a trip to Disneyland.
Sara took James to get his hair cut again, shorter this time. As she watched him in the swivel chair, his brown curls falling away, she felt overwhelmed. She started to cry, but caught herself and ducked into the bathroom.
“We didn’t have an option other than support this, even though it was so uncomfortable,” she said. When she came back, her eyes were red and swollen. The hairdresser noticed, but James never did. He smiled the whole time.
Once the stray hairs were brushed away, Sara sent a photo to Ben. “It just made it real. Really real,” Ben said. “I spent so much time raising my daughter, and so many hours combing her hair.”
There were other things Sara was busy doing that James didn’t notice. Buying books about gender, setting up appointments with therapists, looking for support programs that might help her build some sort of safety net around James. She and Ben did all this while trying to cope themselves, sorting through the end of one thing and the beginning of another.
“It was really, really wild to feel so disconnected from a child you are so connected to,” Sara said. “Welcoming him and getting to know him and mourning the loss at the same time — I don’t know any other experience like it.”
Charley, James’ little brother, has blond hair that twists and reaches every which way. He’s lithe and springy, and he loves a dance party, even one without music.
Lately, Charley has been calling himself transgender, too. It’s hard to know whether it’s just talk — something he’s saying to be more like his brother, or a deeper truth. For the time being, his parents are just letting Charley be, giving him space to explore. For Halloween, Charley went as Shimmer, a genie with long pink hair who dresses in all purple.
The days and months since James came out have been full of stressful moments, big and small. Sara’s found herself worrying about whether James would know how to act in the men’s restroom, and whether people might catch on if he didn’t. There have been difficult conversations with family members, and curious glances from other parents, from tenants in their apartment building, from the Chinese food delivery person. They’ve dealt with him being bullied on the playground. Then there are the things far out of their control. The election of Donald Trump has thrown some crucial aspects of their life into question, such as health care and restroom access. For example, if Obamacare and the connected subsidies were to vanish, Sara and the children would no longer qualify for Medi-Cal. There’s also a sense, since November, that the world they’ve been trying to shield James from is even harder and less accepting than they realized.
“It’s hard to manage your stress levels,” Ben said. “I just want to feel like I’m not sinking.
“I know on a fundamental level, I’m a good person, and I feel like I have to defend my reality against hatred and bigotry and ignorance.”
Ben’s always been a private person. He speaks slowly, intentionally, weighing each word, wanting to get it all just right. Sara is different. She’s shared her life online for the past few years, using social media as a way to connect with people. She’s shared James’ story, too, though masking his identity to protect him. She’s also become an advocate for transgender rights, a role she’s come to see as an integral part of being his parent.
She’s planned LGBT support days at his school and attended rallies on his behalf. As the case of Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy who was fighting to use the bathroom in Virginia, wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Trump administration lifted bathroom protection guidelines, she and James found themselves on the steps of San Francisco City Hall addressing hundreds of people at a rally supporting transgender youth. James, in a bow tie and brand-new suit jacket, stood to her side as she read a speech he’d written but was too nervous to deliver.
“The whole reason I’m standing up here is because our new president is being rude to people of many different kinds and yesterday he took away bathroom privileges for transgender people and I think that’s just wrong,” James had written. His speech called President Trump a “bully.” Later, he’d say, he was surprised when the crowd laughed at that line. He was serious. “I just want to help as much as possible.”
“If they have the fortitude to tell you what they’re experiencing, then, as a parent, I think it’s your obligation to support them.” Ben Kaplan, James’ father