To look at him now, TJ, in his early twenties, comes off a little like the young Sal Mineo. Sal, let's say, when he was cast as the impetuous Israeli freedom-fighter in Otto Preminger's epic Exodus. By sheer coincidence, part of Exodus was filmed on TJ's transplanted home, the island of Cyprus. He moved there from Lebanon with his parents when he was three. From three until 18, TJ spent the island's long, hot, dry summers playing boys' games with other boys; which is a perfectly unremarkable fact until you consider that TJ was not thought of as a boy by his parents or the classmates at his Armenian boarding school.
"When I look back into my childhood, there are definitely a lot of moments when I recognize I was rebelling against the girl people told me I was. I would play with the boys, try to have the toys that other boys had, want to get into sports, but wasn't allowed to. Looking back at the pictures now, I think, 'Oh, yeah, you were definitely a boy.'"
The boy that TJ would be had to bide his time until a scholarship allowed him to pursue his gender identity along with a degree in business administration at Michigan State University. Beginning Tuesday, September 20, the freshman college experiences of TJ and three other trans-identifying college students will be the subject of an eight-part documentary, TransGeneration, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on the Sundance Channel. Produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the folks who brought us Party Monster and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, TransGeneration follows TJ and Lucas, both female-to-male transsexuals (FTM), and Gabbie and Raci, who are making the more traditional gender-altering passage from male to female (MTF).
Sitting in a upscale hotel suite with me and a small army of publicists a week before Gay Day this year, TJ, Lucas, Gabbie and Raci frequently giggle as they realize how often their individual stories, whether first played out in the Philippines, or near an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, or a logging town in Northern California or on Cyprus, resembled each other: the early recognition that the gender they had assigned you didn't fit the person you knew yourself to be, and the painful journey to convincing them to let you pursue your own path.
With her pink T-shirt, beaded necklaces and Valley Girl accent, Gabbie is, by her own admission, a work-in-progress, but quite a remarkable work when you consider the courage it has taken a young man from rural California to overcome every obstacle and emerge as a gloriously post-operative young woman, pursuing a double major: pure science and Japanese at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"I was born in Redlands, California, and was there for seven years. I really don't remember a whole lot of it. I played with my sisters all the time. They were my best friends growing up, I was always with them, although I definitely remember times when I was excluded because, like, I was a 'boy.' Then I'd go and cry."
At seven, Gabbie's family moved to Virginia, where things started to get really tough. "I started to develop that geeky side of me because that was the only way I could express any masculinity — like the only kind of guy I could pass as was a really geeky guy.
"In high school, I always felt like a girl, but I didn't know anything about any trans stuff. I looked it up online, and I was just like, 'Whoa, that's me!'"
Gabbie's began dressing up in her sisters' clothes. Coming out to her mother as a high school sophomore tranny-in-training, Gabbie was told it was "just a phase" she'd grow out of. She spent a high school career popping in and out of her gender closet. In her junior year, an essay that she wrote on death for her Spanish class prompted her parents to send her to a shrink, but "she wouldn't even help me explore my identity. It was just trials and tests, then back into the closet."
Outdoors guy
Growing up in Ada, Oklahoma, near the headquarters of the Chickasaw Nation, Lucas developed a fondness for a rugged, outdoors way of life, and from an early age, even his parents realized he was going to be a very masculine girl. "My parents were pretty cool about it and learned not to buy certain things for me. They didn't actually pick up on the severity that I was a guy, they just picked up on the masculinity, which is better than nothing."
His parents' divorce thrust him at age nine into the life of a character out of an SE Hinton novel: working-class rebel in a suburban Tulsa middle school. By 14, Lucas had been sent back to live with his dad in the country. "After puberty, I was looking to form relationships. I had trouble with my parents because I wanted to form relationships with girls, and I didn't necessarily think of myself as a lesbian, I just thought, 'I want to kiss girls. What's the problem?'"
Lucas then bounced from Ada to Oklahoma City. He made a fateful choice in deciding to attend college at Smith, "which is a women's college. There are several reasons, including the atmosphere there. I found in Oklahoma, a lot of the time I felt less physically threatened by women."
At first glance, Raci comes off a girl, perhaps a Ritalin-fueled girl. Long, dark hair frames androgynous features. Her right hand cups her ear, the only real tip that Raci is profoundly deaf. Â
"I was born in the northernmost part of the Philippines, where Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator, was born. I was always by the beach, that's why I'm dark. I was a happy kid, I just acted like a girl when I was little. I would line up with girls, go to the girls' room, and fight with girls instead of boys."
Raci moved with her mother to Northern California when she was 15. "I was living as a boy, but I grew my hair long, and didn't have boobs or whatever. I had bawdy clothes and spiky hair, and talked like a boy, but people would ask me, 'Are you a guy or a girl?' 'I'm dressed up like a boy, so what do you think?' 'You look like a lesbian.' 'Well, I'm not! I'm a boy.'" A move to LA and enrollment in John Marshall High cemented Raci's penchant for a highly visible public profile. She is now a pre-law major with a minor in drama at California State University in Los Angeles.
In her segment of TransGeneration, Raci is seen kissing a boy in a drama class exercise. She doesn't want to come out as a tranny in class, because a lot of the straight male students would feel uncomfortable if they knew they were playing intimate scenes with a biological male. In another scene, Raci is visibly uncomfortable hanging out on campus with a friend who is obviously a transsexual woman.
Part of the problem faced by the cast of TransGeneration is the complete absence of social rules to guide people through the new awkwardness faced by our gender-challenged society. At one point, TJ goes through a comic riff on all the identities he's passed through since leaving his conservative upbringing on Cyprus.
"I first came out as a bisexual woman in my freshman year; moved on to being a lesbian full-time my second year; towards the end of my undergrad, I came out as gender-queer; and finally entered the graduate world as a transgendered person. So next stop is, you know, gay male. We'll see when that happens. Right now, I'm pretty happy with women."
TJ recalled the time he finally discovered a movie role-model for the man he intends to be, Hilary Swank's pioneering performance as Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. At one point in the film, Swank as Brandon is alone in the bathroom inserting the fake "apparatus" that will allow him to pass as a boy in a nest of homicidally angry rednecks.
"I started putting together all of this stuff when I watched the movie Boys Don't Cry for the fourth time. That time I watched it with my best friend Jordan, who's also trans-male. It was that experience of watching that movie together that made things click for me. I told him, 'I'm Brandon,' and that was the first time I vocalized to myself who I felt I was."
In TransGeneration, TJ is observed trying to mentor an angry FTM buddy in the aftermath of his arrest at a political zap at convention selling KKK and Nazi souvenirs; Raci is late for class because she overslept, missed her bus and forgot her hearing aid; Lucas debates the efficacy of starting the male-hormone treatments that will get him one step closer to his dream of having his clit turn into a real dick; and Gabbie celebrates Gay Pride Day in Boulder by hugging all the girls, until one frustrated woman tells her to back off. It's real life in the gender-crossing fast lane.
More David Lamble reviews at www.claudesplace.com.