Transexual Schoolgirl

Transexual Schoolgirl
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She was told she could wear boys clothes or find a new school.
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A transgender schoolgirl in Kent was forced to hire a solicitor after her school threatened to suspend her for wearing female clothes.
Lily Madigan, 18, battled staff at St Simon Stock Catholic in Maidstone after being told she was not allowed to wear its female dress code, change in female dressing rooms or use female toilets while at school.
The A Level student was also told teachers would not call her ‘Lily’, her legal name, or use female pronouns when referring to her.
Transgender people are protected from discrimination by the 2010 Equalities Act , which requires organisations to treat trans people according to their acquired gender - the gender they have chosen to live as - except in “very restricted circumstances”.
However, Lily was told she would be regarded a boy when she was at school, something that left her in “a deep depression”.
Born as Liam, Lily came out as transgender in a Facebook post in January 2016. In March, she wore women’s clothes to school for the first time.
But although she adhered to the female dress code by wearing a top and trousers, she was sent home before she got through the gates.
“I went home and I was treated like I did something wrong, which was upsetting,” Lily said.
“Wearing male clothes makes me feel really invalidated and puts me in a low mood for the whole day,” she added.
In a meeting the next day with the staff member in charge of equality and diversity, Lily claims she was told she was not protected by the 2010 Equality Act and would have to wear boys clothes if she wanted to return to school.
“They gave me three options: I could come back in the male dress code, go on permanent study leave or find a new school,” she told HuffPost UK.
The petition received more than 200 signatures, with many students expressing their anger towards St Simon’s.
One student commented: “Stocky says we ‘treat everyone as a family’ but their rules prove that they’re far from it. The top concern should be the welfare of their students and making Stocky a happy place to study. Trans students deserve better from this school.”
Another pupil added “Keep fighting Lily x”.
But despite the outcry, the school stood by its decision and Lily was forced to wear a men’s suit and tie to school for six months.
“I went into quite deep depression because of everything that was going on and my attendance got really bad,” Lily said.
Research by the Trans Mental Health Review in 2009 found that 84% of transgender people have thought about ending their lives, while 35% have attempted suicide at least once.
Lily then met with the school’s principal, Brendan Wall.
“He reaffirmed that he wasn’t going to change anything,” she said. “I had changed my name legally at that point and [he said] they wouldn’t change it on the school system.”
The school did eventually allow Lily to be treated as a female student from the start of the new academic year in September - but only after a solicitor threatened to take it to court.
“I hired a solicitor because my family and school weren’t very supportive,” Lily explained. “I felt isolated and very alone.”
The solicitor sent a letter to St Simon Stock Catholic School outlining Lily’s rights and warning of further legal action if they did not comply.
A week later, the school agreed to treat Lily as a female student and sent her a formal letter of apology.
In response to Lily’s claims, Mr Wall told the HuffPost UK: “The School has tried to work with and support Lily within a Catholic School community that prides itself on its inclusive policies and practice. An apology was given to Lily for unintentional hurt.”
The school’s apology to Lily stated: “I would like to offer an apology for any hurt to you which has been caused by individuals or the school in respect of this situation.
“It was never anyone’s intention to cause hurt; on the contrary, St Simon Stock staff, and the pastoral team in particular, have always wanted to support you on this important journey that you are undertaking and remain committed to help you succeed in your education and be happy.”
Responding to Lily’s claims that she had been told she was not covered by the Equalities Act 2010, Mr Wall said: “That’s untrue. The member of staff was counselling Lily with her mother and younger sister, who is in our year 10.
“The younger sister was very upset about Lily coming out and the member of staff was trying to help with our key stage five pastoral manager.
“Lily came out with a comment about equal opportunities and the member of staff said I have written our equalities policy, so I do know some of what I’m talking about,” he continued.
“She [Lily] has twisted it to this member of staff told her she knows nothing about it and is not covered.”
Training in how to handle transgender issues is now being implemented at the school.
A spokesperson from Stonewall, an LGBT rights charity, said: “Trans young people are protected in law and should be fully able to wear whichever uniform they choose. For a school to refuse so is not just breaking the law but also deeply hurtful to the trans community.
“It’s vital that people support the trans community, so we can work toward a world where all young trans people feel able to be themselves at school and are accepted without exception.”
Lily, who has aspirations to study fashion and marketing at university, said she is feeling much more positive now the incident is behind her.
“Since everything has gone on, I think the attitude is a lot better at school.
“Coming out as transgender is very scary, but looking back it shouldn’t have been and that’s why I’m doing all this. I want people to know that it’s okay and we have the rights we have for a reason,” she added.
Lily has now started a student group at school to give younger people someone to look up to.
“To other transgender students I would say: keep fighting your corner, you deserve equality. Don’t let it get you down.”
Politics news reporter, HuffPost UK

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Published: 23:31 BST, 22 July 2012 | Updated: 23:31 BST, 22 July 2012
Transsexual Ashlyn Parram, 16, who was told he could not sit his exams unless he wore a boy's uniform, pictured with his mother Miranda
A transgender pupil has used equality laws to force his headmaster to allow him to sit a GCSE exam wearing a skirt.
Ashlyn Parram, 16, who was born a boy but is undergoing gender reassignment treatment, said that at first he was told he could not sit the paper because he was not wearing boys’ uniform.
But he said headmaster Chris Walls backed down after he showed him a copy of the Equality Act 2010, which stated he had to be treated the same as other pupils.
Ashlyn, who was wearing make-up and hair extensions as well as a girl’s uniform, claimed, however, that when he returned to the sports hall for the GCSE maths paper he was segregated from other pupils. He was put at the back of the room 40ft from everyone else.
Ashlyn, who used to be called Lewis, said: ‘The whole way through the exam I felt like bursting into tears, and it was around 15 minutes before I even started the exam because I was so upset.’
He claims to have been victimised several times at Giles Academy in Boston, Lincolnshire.
The teenager, who has now left the school and is hoping to go to college to study maths, said: ‘They made me feel like a freak. It’s sad that people can’t be more open-minded.’
His mother, IT worker Miranda Johnson, 42, lodged a complaint. It was investigated by the chairman of governors, Frank Pickett, and dismissed. In a letter, he said all the allegations had been rejected.
Ashlyn’s mother said: ‘We don’t want a penny of compensation. It’s not about the money – it’s about protecting other children and educating people.
‘To be made to sit on your own during an exam is horrendous. If Ashlyn had been black or disabled there would have been uproar.’
Ashlyn announced he was gay at 11 but later realised he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body. Doctors and social services referred him to specialists, who diagnosed gender dysphoria.
He is now on a waiting list to start hormone treatment. From the age of 18 he will be eligible for full sex-change surgery.
The first clash with the school happened earlier this year when Ashlyn was told to take swimming lessons with boys despite feeling uncomfortable about it. His family said that, in the end, sympathetic staff quietly let him skip classes.
Ashlyn, now aged 16 wearing girls' clothes and hair extensions, left, and when he was 11 ready for his first day of school dressed as a boy, pictured right
Later a female teacher mimicked a ‘slutty’ walk in front of laughing pupils, pretending to be Ashlyn. Giles Academy confirmed that the teacher had been spoken to about how to ‘conduct herself in future’.
Ashlyn – who lives with his mother, brother, sister and stepfather, a partner in a firm of surveyors – made his first appearance in a girl’s uniform on June 1.
It was a plain clothes day and other children turned up in outlandish and ripped outfits. Ashlyn said he was banned from going outside at breaktime because he was ‘ruining the school’s reputation’. The exam incident happened ten days later.
The Equality Act protects transsexuals from discrimination and harassment in a range of situations, including ‘by a teacher at school’.
A school spokesman said: ‘Every time we get a complaint we will deal with it in a professional way.’
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It was not easy. For days afterward, she had dry heaves. She lost weight from her already frail frame. She did not seem empowered; she seemed regressed.

“I just want to hold Emma,” she said in her darkened room at the bed and breakfast in New Hope, Pa., run by the doctor who performed the surgery in a hospital nearby. Emma is her black and white cat, at home outside Syracuse, N.Y., 200 miles away.

Her childlike reaction was, perhaps, not surprising. Kat, whose side-parted hair was dyed fire engine red, is just 18, and about to graduate from high school.

It is a transgender moment. President Obama was hailed just for saying the word “transgender” in his State of the Union speech this year, in a list of people who should not be discriminated against. They are characters in popular TV shows. Bruce Jenner’s transition from male sex symbol to a comely female named Caitlyn has elevated him back to his public profile as a gold-medal decathlete at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
In a cozy cottage decorated with butterflies to symbolize transformation, Katherine Boone was recovering in April from the operation that had changed her, in the most intimate part of her body, from a biological male into a female.
It was not easy. She retched for days afterward. She could hardly eat. She did not seem empowered; she seemed regressed.
“I just want to hold Emma,” she said in her darkened room at the bed-and-breakfast in New Hope, Pa., run by the doctor who performed the operation in a hospital nearby. Emma is her black and white cat, at her home outside Syracuse in central New York State, 250 miles away.
Her childlike reaction was, perhaps, not surprising. Kat, whose side-parted hair was dyed a sassy red, is just 18, and about to graduate from high school.
It is a transgender moment. President Obama was hailed just for saying the word “transgender” in his State of the Union address this year, in a list of people who should not be discriminated against. They are characters in popular television shows. Bruce Jenner’s transition from male sex symbol to a comely female named Caitlyn has elevated her back to her public profile as a gold-medal decathlete at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
With growing tolerance, the question is no longer whether gender reassignment is an option but rather how young should it begin.
No law prohibits minors from receiving sex-change hormones or even surgery, but insurers, both private and public, have generally refused to extend coverage for these procedures to those under 18. In March, New York’s Medicaid drew a line at that age, and at 21 for some procedures.
But the number of teenagers going through gender reassignment has been growing amid wider acceptance of transgender identity, more parental comfort with the treatment and the emergence of a number of willing practitioners. Now advocates like Empire State Pride Agenda are fighting for coverage at an earlier age, beginning with hormone blockers at the onset of puberty, saying it is more seamless for a teenage boy to transition to becoming an adult woman, for example, if he does not first become a full-bodied man.
“Some of these women are passing, but barely, when they transition at 40 or 50,” said Dr. Irene Sills, an endocrinologist who just retired from a busy practice in the Syracuse area treating transgender children, including Kat. “At 16 or 17, you are going to have such an easier life with this.”
Given that there are no proven biological markers for what is known as gender dysphoria , however, there is no consensus in the medical community on the central question: whether teenagers, habitually trying on new identities and not known for foresight, should be granted an irreversible physical fix for what is still considered a psychological condition.
The debates invoke biology, ideology and emotion. Is gender dysphoria governed by a miswiring of the brain or by genetic coding? How much does it stem from the pressure to fit into society’s boxes — pink and dolls for girls, blue and sports for boys? Has the Internet liberated teenagers like Kat from a narrow view of how they should live their life, or has it seduced them by offering them, for the first time, an answer to their self-searching, an answer they might later choose to reject?
Some experts argue that the earlier the decision is made, the more treacherous, because it is impossible to predict which children will grow up to be transgender and which will not.
“Basically you have clinics working by the seat of the pants, making these decisions, and depending on which clinic you go to, you get a different response,” said Dr. Jack Drescher , a New York City psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who helped develop the latest diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria.
On the other hand, Dr. Drescher said, “Is it fair to make a child who’s never going to change wait till 16 or 18 to get treatment?”
Kat Boone did not fit the stereotype of a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
As a child, she dressed in jeans and shirts, like all the other boys, and her best friend was a boy. She liked to play with cars and slash bad guys in the Legend of Zelda video games. She still shuns dresses, preferring skinny jeans and band T-shirts.
But as a freshman in high school in Cazenovia, N.Y., she became depressed and withdrawn. “I knew that the changes going on with puberty were not me,” Kat said. “I started to really hate my life, myself. I was uncomfortable with my body, my voice, and I just felt like I was really a girl.”
When she discovered the transgender world on the Internet, she had a flash of recognition. “I was reading through some symptoms, not really symptoms, but some of the attributes of it did click,” she recalled.
It took a few months, but one night, she crept into her mother’s room and sat on the bed, crying. When she finally came out with what was bothering her, her mother’s first impulse was to comfort her, holding her hand and saying: “It’s O.K. It’s O.K.”
But inside, Gail Boone was terrified. She had wondered if her son was gay, and that, she says, would have been easier to deal with than a child who wanted to be the opposite sex.
“There’s this fear,” Ms. Boone said, “what is this going to do to my kid, what are people going to think, what are people going to think about me?”
Kat’s father, Andrew, had moved out when she was in fifth grade, and it took a few months for Kat and her mother to find the courage to tell him. Gail Boone had a background in psychology, which helped her understand. Mr. Boone, an operations and project manager, had a harder time, but was brought around for the sake of his child.
He read books about being transgender and raked his memory for clues in Kat’s early childhood, but could not find any. “Maybe she thinks this is the thing, and there’s something else going on,” he remembered thinking. “How do we know?” He wished there were something scientific like a blood test that would give him 100 percent certainty.
Mr. Boone recalls going into “a zombie trance,” a period of mourning for the child he thought he knew. “I
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