'Born in the Wrong Body'

At the House of LaPerla, which Deasja is a member of, most refer to founder Juan LaPerla as “father.”

“They are trying to find a support system outside that will accept them for who they are,” said LaPerla, a New Jersey entrepreneur who is gay but not transgender. “So they find each other, they network, and we all become one big family.”

The ballroom scene isn’t just a safe haven. It’s also a party scene revolving around events that feature fierce competition in categories like “Butch Queen, “Femme Queen,” and “Miss Thing.” The parties begin in the middle of the night and last until morning.

“It seems to me like the number one lesson in the ballroom scene is one of acceptance,” Trebay said. “That’s the baseline – ‘there is a place for me’ – for these people, and for anybody.”

Angelika

Like many transgender teens, Angelika, 21, felt like she needed to look beyond her family for support. One of her closest confidants is Katherine Linton, a lesbian filmmaker. She calls Katherine her “papa bear” and sees her as a parental figure.

“What I discovered with many of these kids, they don’t have adults in their life,” Linton said. “So if anything, she calls me Papa Bear because I’m hard on her. I tell her she’s got to get an apartment, got to work really hard…got to really, because no one’s going to give it to her.”

The dating scene
Angelika encounters one of her biggest obstacles when it comes to dating.

“Telling a guy that you’re interested in, and that is interested in you, that you’re trans sucks,” said Angelika. “I just have to say that as bluntly as I can. It sucks.”

Surprising even herself, Tayler has found romance.

“I don’t see myself as very attractive,” she said. “I just kind of assumed that no guy would be interested in me.”

Tayler’s boyfriend Calvin is a graduate student at Clemson University, where Tayler is a junior. Calvin considers himself heterosexual, and explains his romance with a transgender woman analytically.

“I guess an analogy would be, if you like hamburgers but you don’t like French fries and someone gives you, like, a fast-food combo meal, you wouldn’t refuse the whole meal just because you don’t like fries,” he said. “You can still eat the hamburger and just not eat the fries if you don’t like fries. And so, that’s kind of how I would say it was what I’m doing.”

In finding love and acceptance, Tayler has finally found peace.

“It is a hard journey but I would say it’s worth it,” Tayler said. “It’s definitely been worth it for me. I love my life a lot more than I ever did before. I used to hate my life, but now it’s, it’s actually pretty good now.”

‘No going back’
Dr. Marvin Belzer, the Medical Director of Transgender Services at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, says the biggest obstacle in treating young transgender people is prejudice in our society.

“The biggest point I think people don’t understand, they think there’s a matter of choice in this,” Belzer said. “And after having dealt with this, and dealt with hundreds and hundreds of patients, the patients we’re talking about are the ones who were born this way. This is who they are. There is really no going back.”

The American Psychiatric Association considers transgenderism a mental disorder, a controversial diagnosis that upsets much of the transgender community.

“It puts transpeople in an awkward situation where, to get the treatments that they need, they have to withstand this medical diagnosis of having an illness,” Beam said.

Beyond coping with the stigma of being diagnosed as mentally ill are the practical ramifications of such a label. Insurance companies often use the psychiatric diagnosis to deny paying for hormones and surgery.

Most transgender patients believe they just want to correct the physical problems they say they are born with, which leads to the question, what makes people transgender?

“There’s the idea of what’s called the ‘hormone wash’ theory which is that in utero, the fetus got washed with extra testosterone which would make a trans boy or extra estrogen which would make a trans girl,” Beam said. “That’s not been substantiated, but it’s an idea.”

“I think trying to find a cause of transgenderism or trying to find a cause of sexual orientation is really going down the wrong track,” Aronoff said. “It doesn’t really matter why people are who they are, it just matters that they are. And that they be treated with respect and are able to live to their full potential.”

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