(Time)
Even before her son turned two, Sherry Lipscomb noticed that he
wasn't like other boys. When she took him shopping, he would go
gaga at sparkly dresses. He would toss his baby blanket around
his head like a wig and prance on the balls of his feet. Around
age 3, he announced one day that when he married his friend
Emily, they would both wear red wedding gowns at the ceremony.
Yet, says Mom, her child "was still a little boy to me at the
time."
Not so anymore. After struggling with their six-year-old's
nonconforming gender behavior for years, Sherry and Paul Lipscomb
decided a few months ago to treat their little one like a girl,
at least at home. In kindergarten last year, he was Zachary, but
after school, she was Aurora--Rori for short--a name the Lipscombs
say their child chose in honor of the princess in Sleeping
Beauty. Over the summer, when the child asked to have pierced
ears and announced to neighbors, "I'm a girl," the Lipscombs came
to believe that it was wrong not to "let Aurora express her
gender in public," as Paul says. So with the help of a Cleveland,
Ohio, support group for transgendered people, they hired an
attorney to seek a legal name change for their child. And last
month they informed the school principal that it was Rori who
would be enrolling, not Zach.
The Lipscombs' unusual decision has dumbfounded Westerville,
Ohio, a homogeneous Columbus suburb. (And a Republican
stronghold: on his way to the G.O.P. Convention last month,
George W. Bush stopped to read to students at a school here.)
After the Lipscombs met with the principal, an anonymous tipster
contacted the Franklin County Children Services agency, which
swiftly asked a court to remove the minor from the home. A
magistrate granted the agency temporary custody, citing
"reasonable grounds to believe that the child is suffering from
illness...and is not receiving proper care."
Thus a complicated family dynamic became a legal struggle. And a
public event--the Lipscombs insisted on turning their child over
to social workers before cameras at a local TV-news station. (The
parents say the media scrutiny will keep the children's services
office in check.) Gender PAC, a Washington-based group that
lobbies for equality for transgendered people, has also helped
publicize the case. Transgender activists around the world have
contacted the county children's agency in protest. A growing
media circus greets each court development. Last week the child's
case was stalled while everyone argued for days over whether
cameras should be in the courtroom.
But underneath the layers of tabloid story lines and political
opportunities lies a family that's struggling through a gray
time. The children's services department had actually first
encountered the Lipscombs in February, when the parents
voluntarily began working with the agency to get help with a host
of family problems: Paul and Sherry both have bipolar disorder;
they have fought in the past, sometimes violently; Paul struggles
with memories of being beaten as a child; Sherry told TIME she
has never allowed her husband to be home alone with her child
overnight. ("They are both too hotheaded," she explained.) She
said she has occasionally become overwhelmed by the many physical
and psychological needs of her child, who has been found to have
Asperger's syndrome (which is related to autism), bipolar illness
and obsessive-compulsive disorder, in addition to gender-identity
disorder. And although he hadn't come out in public until an
interview with TIME, Paul now says he believes he too has
gender-identity disorder and that he intends to make the
transition from male to female. For now, Sherry is supporting
Paul as he writes this new chapter in his life. But both say
their main focus is regaining custody of their child, who is
living with a foster family.
In short, you might safely say the Lipscombs aren't the Cleavers.
But the county, perhaps recognizing that it's not a crime for a
family to be dysfunctional, never saw reason to break up the
Lipscombs--until the parents began to refer to their youngster as
a girl in public. Since then, some county officials have treated
the Lipscombs, including the troubled child, as pariahs. Claims
and counterclaims abound. The Lipscombs say the child told them
the foster parents won't use the name Aurora and hid the dresses
they bought for Aurora; they've also allegedly belittled the
vegetarian diet Paul and Sherry follow. County officials do call
the child Zachary but say the youth has access to the dresses and
doesn't want them. Both sides have alleged that the other hasn't
provided proper medication for the child.
What's best for this youngster? Unfortunately, few experts study
children with persistent gender variance, and the ones who do are
in disagreement about what to do about it, if anything. "I think
it's just the way they are born," says Catherine Tuerk, a
mental-health nurse who runs a Washington support group for
parents of kids who are gender-atypical. Her group has nine
families at the moment, and Tuerk encourages them to support
their children's unconventional gender expression "in a world
where they will be stigmatized."
Some child psychologists, on the other hand, believe that
children who express discomfort with their birth gender probably
have larger problems. "There's a lot of pain in many of these
families, and part of the way the child has dealt with the pain
is to have this fantasy solution," says Ken Zucker, a
psychologist who runs the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity
Clinic in Toronto. Zucker also encourages children and parents to
recognize that boys and girls don't have to maintain rigid gender
roles to remain boys and girls. Zucker says that widening his
young patients' conception of gender may save them the difficulty
of pursuing sex-reassignment surgery later in life.
Other rogue therapists mistreat gender-variant children by trying
to force them to conform to gender rules. They use blunt
behavior-modification techniques such as rewarding tomboys for
wearing frilly dresses or punishing effeminate boys for playing
with a Barbie. "Many of those kids become runaways, and they are
damaged for life," says Gender PAC's Riki Anne Wilchins.
Amid all the problems, the Lipscomb child apparently has loving
parents. But whether Aurora remains Aurora, or returns to
Zachary--or decides on another identity--the kid is destined to
conduct this search with armies
of lawyers battling nearby.
John Cloud/Westerville, Behavior:
His Name Is Aurora When a boy is raised as a girl, an Ohio suburb is suddenly
in the throes of transgender politics. , Time, 09-25-2000, pp 90+.