A Focus on the "T" in LGBTQ

Susan Kuklin

When Susan Kuklin gave her acceptance speech at Bank Street College of Education for the 2015 Flora Stieglitz Straus Award for Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, she spoke of realizing, six years ago, that the "T" in LGBTQ was "underreported and undervalued." She thought it was time to give them a voice.

Kuklin approached New York's Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, and their team put out a call for anyone willing to speak with Kuklin for her book project.

Kuklin said she believes, as the law professor and humanitarian Brian Stevenson believes, that, "Society needs to pay attention to the marginalized, to the bullied, to poverty, to suffering, to exclusion, to unfairness and to injustice." This part of identity is more challenging, Kuklin added. Transgender youth were bullied, and their suicide rate was high for so small a group. As she interviewed the six youth in her book, she says, "I saw that 'them' was 'us.'"

Her half-dozen subjects tell their stories with humor and poignancy; they tell of their challenges and their triumphs. They discuss their transitions with candor and compassion. Jessy spoke of noticing the difference in other people's responses toward him as a man versus when he had been perceived as a woman. He could take up more room on the subway without dirty looks--it's accepted for men, it's not for women. Christina describes attending her all-boy Catholic School as Matthew, dressed like a woman. At a panel at Bank Street College of Education's BookFest last fall, Christina said, "If I could survive that, I could survive anything."

Susan Kuklin serves as a conduit for extraordinary people whose voices might not otherwise be heard. She speaks of capturing their words, photographing their progress, and her fascinating process of making Beyond Magenta on KidLit TV.

Outsiderdom

How well do we really know another person? And in adolescence, when everybody is changing--from their physical looks to their aspirations of belonging--it can seem as if the ground is shifting beneath teens who are navigating home life, school life and the world at large. Colin Fischer by Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz captures this feeling of "outsiderdom" and "'turns [it] up to 11,' to use a Spinal Tap phrase," as Zack Stentz put it when I got to interview the co-authors recently.

Zack Stentz (l.) and Ashley Edward Miller

Through notebook entries and footnotes we get to know the inner workings of Colin Fischer's mind. He looks at the world a bit differently, as a brilliant kid who also has Asperger's. We walk with him through his days. His need to decode his world, to get to the truth of his experience and the events around him, border on obsessive. So much so that when the kid who has bullied Colin all his life and is wrongly accused of bringing a gun to school, Colin cannot rest until he finds the true culprit.

In this way, the authors tap into the universal adolescent experience, with humor and insight. Either we fearlessly go in search of the truth or try to run from it, which can often lead to drug or alcohol use and other delinquent behavior. Colin would rather team up with wrongly-accused Wayne to discover the real villain than to let Wayne take the rap for something he did not do. Colin is fascinating to watch, and thanks to the authors, we get an intimate view of his internal logic and the way he unravels the mystery of not only the true gun owner but also the mystery of his life.

Kids can't help but gain appreciation for Colin and, through Colin, for other outsider kids whom they may have misjudged or overlooked. It's an invitation to understand someone else, who may seem to be unlike you on the surface, but whose passions and pursuits are just as (or perhaps more so, in Colin's case) involving and inspiring.

The Price of Admission

The central paradox of Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers, is that the thing that gets Ismae Rienne banished from her fellow Bretons (the scar left by the herbwitch’s poison and the “proof” that she was sired by the god of death) is the very thing that gains her admission to her proper tribe.

Ismae discovers, upon reaching the convent of Saint Mortain, that there are many others like her, who have survived death-defying events, and this creates a bond and closeness between her and the others that she has never experienced before. But it also creates within her a tension that’s new to her: the sisters have trained her in poisons and weaponry and “the womanly arts,” but when Ismae is on assignment—alone—she must search her own conscience. Is Gavriel Duval, whom the abbess and Chancellor Crunard suspect of leaking the secrets of Brittany’s inner court to France, truly a traitor? Or is his loyalty to the duchess as unwavering as it seems to Ismae in the days and weeks that she has shadowed him? And what of the others with the “mark” of Saint Mortain? Are they irredeemable? Do they deserve to die?

Ismae is torn between the loyalty she feels toward the sisters in the convent, the only true home she’s ever known, and what she believes for herself when it’s just Ismae and her mark. These kinds of choices serve as metaphors for the defining moments of adolescence, which lead the way to adulthood. It’s about taking responsibility for our choices and living with that responsibility, whatever we deem it, right or wrong, in hindsight. Ismae has come far to gain this sisterhood, but she must travel further—alone—to come to herself.

Going It Alone

White Cat by Holly Black is all about the experience of adolescence as a solo journey. All of the members of Cassel Sharpe’s family were born with a gift; each is a curse worker who can alter memories or dreams or life itself. Cassel doesn’t understand why he doesn’t have the gift. He doesn’t fit in with his peers (because of his family’s heritage—curse-working was banned in 1929) nor does he feel that he belongs in his family. Adolescence is all about questioning. Why is my body changing? What do I believe? Where do I belong? It is during this period—when you feel entirely alone—that you discover who you are, what you enjoy, what is uniquely yours.

The best YA authors explore this central experience of adolescence in new and interesting ways, as Holly Black does here. She answers none of these questions, but raises them in a fictional context and from different perspectives to allow teens to examine these questions for themselves. Cassel’s family tells him that he killed Lila Zacharov, but this makes no sense to him. He loved Lila. Something also seems off about his memories of the night that he supposedly killed her. And he’s been having strange dreams about a white cat. Little by little his instinct to investigate these nagging questions leads him to discover that his family is not telling the truth. Are they protecting him? Or themselves? He feels betrayed by them.

What do you do when you feel alone? You search for the answers yourself, and you begin to take responsibility for your life. This is the transition to adulthood, and while Holly Black constructs a framework of magic, the feelings and the experiences are real.

Finding Meaning

The observance of Passover and Easter are difficult to explain to a child. They hear the stories each spring, but children aren’t really equipped to process the events recounted in those stories for years. It’s right around adolescence that young people begin to understand and take in the stories they’ve been hearing in Temple and church, about injustice, life and death, and starting over with a second chance at life.

Whatever your family’s traditions may be, nature reinforces these themes, with its renewal of life, crocuses bursting from the barren earth, blossoms forming on bare trees, and longer stretches of sunlight. A sense of hope emerges. That sense of hope is what Sam gains during the course of the seven days following her fatal injury in a car accident in the first chapter of Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. It is not a book with religious themes, but it is a book about finding meaning in one’s life. Much of the rebellion associated with the teenage years involves finding one’s own way, not accepting as a package what we’ve always been told, questioning our parents, our teachers, our religious practices. We have to doubt in order to find a deeper sense of faith, whatever that faith may be.

When I was younger, I deeply resented the phrase (usually uttered by my grandparents or their friends) “Youth is wasted on the young.” I’ve come to think that what underlies that statement is that when we’re younger we have no sense of our mortality, so we take things for granted. As we get older, the moments matter more. Faced with the possibility of death, Sam begins to wonder, why did she abide her friend Lindsay’s cruelty? Why would Sam want the guy who makes her more in the eyes of her peers, rather than the guy who brings out the best in her? The fact that Sam is in the popular crowd makes her vulnerability all the more poignant. She begins to see things and people, including her own family, differently when she realizes they may be lost to her—forever. She begins to think about her “greatest hits,… the things I wanted to remember; the things I wanted to be remembered for.”