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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 19:33
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 Helping Trans Kids Out of the Shadows
By Jacob Anderson-Minshall
“How does a 14 year old shoot a 15 year old in the back of the head because he’s wearing high heels?” Trans activist Jenn Burleton sits across a small table outside one of Portland’s ubiquitous coffee houses, musing on the schoolground murder of a Southern California gender nonconforming child. “More than any other source of childhood abuse, teasing, and bullying; femininity in male children kills. It scars.”
“This work is not just for trans kids,” she insists. “Because all children are victims of gender expression oppression. We are all oppressed, particularly by misogynistic ideas about gender identity.”
A lesbian-identified trans woman, who recently celebrated her 25th anniversary with her partner, Burleton previously co-founded Trans Youth Family Allies (TYFA—formerly Trans Youth Family Advocates) a national organization providing support for trans kids and their families, where she served as the inaugural executive director and board president.
Burleton’s attraction to her work harks back to her first hand experience in the mid-1960’s, when the then 12-year-old Milwaukee resident became one of the earliest—albeit unsanctioned—trans person to begin hormone treatments at a young age, after she discovered Dr. Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon and began stealing her mother’s Premarin.
Self-medicating with the drug for menopausal women, Burleton began successfully developing breasts, but jokes, “Nobody noticed. I had the benefit that my mom was an alcoholic. She was out of it so much she couldn’t keep track of what was going on.”
While Burleton’s access to female hormones staved off a testosterone-fueled puberty, it also impacted her at a deeper level, empowering her to become her own best ally. “That saved my life…[and] led to me transitioning at eighteen.” She moved to Tennessee, enrolled in the Vanderbilt University’s gender identity clinic and immediately began passing as cigender. “I was essentially stealth for a long time. Not because I was ashamed or anything. There wasn’t a community I really felt connected to.”
For the next several decades, Burleton had a successful career as guitar playing, keyboardist singer-songwriter. Playing everything from rock to jazz and pop she says she toured with some well-known musicians and recorded television audio and music soundtracks.
But she acknowledges, “I never lost the pain of not having had anyone support that child that I was. That’s the part I could never shake…No matter how great the rest of my life was I still felt the pain of the kid and what could have been.”
Eventually, that ache drove Burleton to advocate for today’s trans kids, and she produced the short film Out Of The Shadows about trans and gender non-conforming children and youth. Since posted on YouTube in early 2007, it’s been viewed over 300,000 times, translated into Portuguese and utilized as valuable tool for those raising awareness about trans kids.
“It’s now my life’s work to advocate on behalf of these children,” Burleton says, contending that her early experiences make her uniquely qualified for her role of trans youth advocate. Still, she admits, “There’s something that happens when you sit in a room with a seven year old trans kid who’s getting to be themselves with the support of their parents. It happens to the little kid in you. It’s what made me passionate about the work, but I also had some things I had to work through, because it was extremely emotional.”
In retrospect, Burleton believes that emotional bagage, may have led to her ouster from TYFA, because it served as an unpleasant reminder of the psychological scars a transgender life can enflict.
“I’ve come to this conclusion: A lot of trans parents—and I don’t [hold] this against them, because I think it may be natural—are hoping…to cure their kids of being trans. By letting them be themselves when they’re young, [parents] hope to raise a child that’s so gender mainstreamed that the trans thing becomes a non issue. That somehow they can make this child be a typical regular little girl or little boy.”
It’s not that easy, Burleton contends. “I know a lot of trans people who say, ‘I’m not trans I’m just a man,’ ‘I’m not trans, I’m just a woman.’ Personally, I think that that’s a valiant effort to give the illusion of mainstreaming your own consciousness, but I cannot imagine any person having gone through this experience not, on some level—a completely functional level, not a debilitating level—[being impacted by it]. Cancer survivor don’t forget they had cancer.”
Those parents who believe otherwise, Burleton maintains, are most likely to distance themselves from transgender adults—who may not be so well adjusted and may “remind them that it may not all be peaches and cream when the child grows up.”
Burleton admits TYFA’s dismisal sent her into a depression. “I was once again rejected…by people who I’d really come to think of [as] sisters. I had a bit of a break down.” But within a few months the activist had been able to put the experience behind her well enough to launch TransActive Education & Advocacy.
“I realized that there was a direction that I had wanted to take TYFA in that had been short curcuited. Their ability to actually do boots on the ground things is very limited. So, I started TransActive, using everything I’d learned…but focusing much more specifically on the Portland Metro Area, the Pacific Northwest…[and] going to the schools proactively instead of waiting for the families to come to us.”
It was important to her, Burleton says, to have an organization run by trans people, but with children in mind. “Trans people have a significant role to play in this—not only as role models for the kids but role models for the parents. Nobody can explain what these kids are going through like an adult survivor of being a trans child.”
Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-writes the Blind Eye mystery series with his wife.
© 2008 Jacob Anderson-Minshall
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