A Members Story #4
Part Two
A Transgender story titled See Dick Be Jane, The country's youngest
transgender child is ready for school. But is school ready for her?
Continued
.........................................................................................................................................................................
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 a good 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. '"
Below is the link to this story
| ||||||
To post a comment about this story to the author or REN SEP Group, send an E-mail to ... webmistress@RenaissanceSEP.org ... Include in your E-Mail the Number of the Members Story or Adventure as in example,
"A Members Story #4". I will forward your replies to the Author's
