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NEWS / MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
IDENTITY
Transgenders share stories of perseverance, hope
BY SAMANTHA COLLINS
scollins@kansan.com
Saturday marked the 12th anniversary of the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Held every year on Nov. 20, the day is set aside to remember the transgender people who were killed in hate crimes and those who have attempted or committed suicide.
Here are the stories and experiences of two transgender people and how they persevered through hard times to find happiness.
AVERY'S STORY
He said he chose his new name, Avery, because it was gender neutral, and the fact that it meant "adviser to elves" in French was perfect. It fits his quirky, outgoing personality.
Avery Dame, a graduate student from Tuscaloosa, Ala., is a transman. He was born into a woman's body, but he is trying to pass as a man. Growing up, he didn't understand why he was different. He said he never felt he was born into the wrong body when he was a child. However, he knew something was wrong, and his mother constantly told him.
"At one point she told me that I walked like a farmer and I was like 'what?' Dame said.
He experienced a lot of those instances growing up in Alabama. He said he started to believe that whatever he was, was wrong, and he started to have suicidal ideas.
"I was wrong and I didn't really deserve to exist," Dame said.
One night years later, about a month after his sophomore year started at the University of Alabama, Dame took a large amount of over-the-counter pain killers with alcohol. He said he couldn't remember what triggered it, but he attempted suicide that night. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 41 percent of transgender people have attempted suicide.
"People do not accidently take half a bottle of pain killers and a large amount of alcohol," Dame said. "This never happens on purpose — people just don't do that."
As the night passed, Dame
As the night began to think that committing suicide was a bad idea and called one of his good friends, Betty. Betty threatened that if Dame did not call poison control center then she would call
headed to a friend's house. He said the first thing his friend said to him changed his life. She said "How could you think that I wouldn't care?" He said that someone cared and validated his identity; however they did it, was huge for being transgender person.
He said the woman at the center eventually hung up on Dame because she was too busy that night. It had been about two hours since he took the medication.
"It's so easy for the rest of the world to invalidate you because somehow you are breaking the rules."
the campus police. He called the poison control center.
"It's so easy for the rest of the world to invalidate you because somehow you are breaking the rules," he said.
"So much of that night was fuzzy." Dame said. "I know I did it, but I don't remember the specific details of it."
Now, Dame said that although his life has become easier, he still has difficulties passing as a man. He binds his breasts and "packs" by putting a penis-shaped item in his pants. He said the most difficult part of passing is finding clothes
He remembered finding some activated charcoal, which is used to absorb oils in the stomach, and
to hide his
AVERY DAME Graduate student
to hide his femal e shape.
"I have child-birthing hips," he said. "It's sometimes hard to cover them up."
He will start taking
testosterone later this week. He said he won't try to act masculine; he would like himself. He said the hormone would make up for the fact that he was not willing to change his behavior for society. He said he did not plan on having sexual-reassignment surgery because of the risk of being ostracized at home.
However, he said he now feels his life is starting to become more balanced. He knows he can now be more like himself.
"I feel a lot more whole," Dame said.
STEPHANIE'S STORY
She was born in 1957 in Lawrence. She said the very first thing she knew about herself was that she was a little girl born into a little boy's body. She didn't have the words to explain how she felt when she was five or six, but she knew she was different.
Therefore, Stephanie Mott, a Topeka resident, would have to pretend to be a little boy everywhere she went. She said when she wanted to express herself as a little girl she had to be in the "shadows and in the closet in the dark."
"It was horrible," Mott said.
It was only after her family moved to a large farm outside of Eudora that she could secretly express herself as a girl. However, she said she still couldn't talk about it.
"It's like the heat during the summer — the torment, the stress, the shame and the disconnect of having to pretend who you are, and feeling alone," she said.
In 1969, when the first space shuttle landed on the moon, she said when little boys would dream about becoming an astronaut, she had a different dream. She hoped that if she could make the Russians mad enough, they would break into her room and force her to change into a girl.
"It was just a fantasy," Mott said. "Fantasies were all I had."
When she hit puberty, her body started to change. She said the line between being a boy and
FINDING HELP
Mott said if a student needed help with transitioning he or she could e-mail Matt at stepphopeka@yahoo.com. Mott works for the Kansas Statewide Transgender Project, which travels around Kansas educating others about transgender people.
Students can also contact the University's LGBT Resource center at: 785-864-2497.
"Anybody who is out there who doesn't think there is help out there, there are wonderful resources out there for people," Mott said. "All they have to do is ask."
girl became far more obvious in a physical sense. When she turned 13, she said she found that because of Renee Richard, a tennis player who was a transgender from male to female like Stephanie, that transitioning from a male to a female was possible. However, she would not make that change for almost 35 years.
She started college at the University at 17 years old. During her sophomore year at the University she discovered alcohol.
"Alcohol changed the way I felt," Mott said. "For the first time I didn't feel that fear."
She drank abusively for years. By 2005, she said she managed to drink herself homeless and ended up in a rescue mission in Topeka. Soon she realized that she needed to change.
"My sisters were tired of watching me kill myself," she said.
She said things finally got bad
enough that she realized she needed to stop pretending to be a man. She joined a church in Topeka where she met a transgender woman for the first time. After talking with her she believed that she could finally transition. It took her 35 years and she was finally ready. She said she thought it would be too hard, too much money. She said she feared that her loved ones would disown her or that she would lose her job. That fear was gone.
"I wasn't alone anymore," she said. "That changed the nature of my problems."
In July 2006, she went from Stephen, her given name, to Stephanie.
"It was like somebody turned on the light switch and I was no longer living in the dark," Mott said. "I was born for the first time. I was really living."
MOVIES
Edited by Anna Nordling
BY ALLYSON SHAW ashaw@kansan.com
"Harry Potter is completely
At the stroke of midnight, witch and wizard wannabes of Lawrence gathered for the penultimate installment of Harry Potter. Although the film is based on a children's book, every theater in South Wind 12 was filled with mostly 18- to 22-year-
otter films attract Y generation College-aged students grew up with the story's characters.
and the Deathly Hallows Part 1."
and the Deakin Hallows Part 1.
The first book, "Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone," was published
in the United States in 1998, when
most current college-aged students
were in elementary school.
unique to our generation
unique to our generation — it has shaped who we are," said Kayla Wellemeyer, a sophomore from Wichita. "And now I'm becoming an adult as the movies are ending. It's sad."
When Welleymeyer picked up the first Harry Potter book, it was the biggest book she'd ever read. But in one summer she raced through the first three books and began counting down to the next one. Every summer, she revisits the series.
Ethan Ness, a sophomore from Minnetonka, Minn., said he feels he owes a lot to the series. When Ness was in elementary school he struggled with reading. He was in the lowest level reading group. But in fifth grade he picked up the first Harry Potter book.
"It made me want to read," Ness said. "By my freshman year of high school I was in the accelerated reading group."
Ness and millions of other readers became attached to Harry Potter as children. As the characters grew older, so did the readers. A theater full of 20-somethings dressed as fictional characters may be the first signs of Generation Y's wave of
nostalgia.
"It makes me feel like I'm a kid again," said Teagan Seeley, a freshman from Salinas, Calif. "I go online and look up spells and
pretend to cast them on people.
It's fun to act like a kid — when I believed in magic."
Seeley said the series hooked her because it was relatable.
"I was a teenager when they were teenagers." Seeley said. "I could relate to the relationship stuff. When Hormione liked Ron, but she saw him with someone else — I understood how that felt."
pitch on Nov. 18, as thousands of Potter faithful referenced the series on Facebook, stayed up until 3 a.m. watching the film, and probably missed their Friday morning classes. But although the excitement over a new book or film lulls after a time, a dedication to Harry Potter will remain with our generation for years to come.
QUIDDITCH | 6B
Harry Potter fever reached a
The books have even inspired a real-life Quidditch team at the University. Fourteen adults run around a grassy field, broomsticks in hand.
Fantasy is now reality
A team has been formed at Kansas simulating the fictional game.
"I'll be so sad when the last one comes out." Seeley said. "It's the end of a phemenon, the end of an era. But I'll still
watch the movies, read the books, and talk about it constantly, even when it's all over."
Edited by Anna Nordling
INTERNATIONAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Palestinian president rejects US peace plan
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Obama administration's troubled attempt to revive Mideast peace talks took another blow Sunday when the Palestinian president rejected the latest U.S. plan to get the sides talking again.
Mahmoud Abbas said a proposed 90-day freeze on Israeli settlement construction wouldn't get him back to the negotiating table unless it includes east Jerusalem, a condition Israel stamically opposes.
Palestinians claim east Jerusalem for their future capital. For decades, Israel has built Jewish sections around the city's periphery, and about 200,000 Jews live there now. Palestinians consider the large neighborhoods as illegal settlements.
The impasse highlights the gaps the U.S. must bridge — not to just achieve a peace deal, but even to get the sides to sit down and talk about one.
In Cairo Sunday, Abbas said any construction freeze must include east Jerusalem "first and foremost," along with the West Bank.
"If the moratorium does not apply to all Palestinian territories, including east Jerusalem, we will not accept it," Abbas said after consultations with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
The issue of Israeli settlements has bedeviled the latest round of peace talks since their launch in September. They broke down three weeks later when a previous 10-month slowdown on West Bank construction expired.
Since then, the U.S. has been pushing Israel to impose a new, 90-day moratorium to draw the Palestinians back to talks. The U.S. hopes the sides can reach a deal on future borders during that time, in effect determining which settlements Israel will get to keep in a peace agreement and defusing the issue of where it can build.
To entice Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's pro-settlement coalition government, the U.S. has offered a fleet of next-generation stealth warplanes and promises to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations.
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