"Mother And Son Stick Together"

by

Sara Steffens

It wasn't hard to figure out that Jaime, the towering woman with the feathered blond hair, had been born a man. And that made both her and her son a target of ridicule.

Like the day in March of last year when Dan and Jaime went to the bank together.

Dan had started his first real job, assembling sandwiches behind the counter of a fast food restaurant, and was eager to spend his earnings. Jaime offered to help him cash his first paycheck. When they walked in, Dan saw a girl he knew, waiting for a teller with her mother. She shared a few of his freshman classes at Antioch High School, and she loved to pick on him. Cute, but with a real mean streak.

When she saw Dan and Jaime, the girl leaned over to her mom and started whispering, not very quietly.

"Oh yeah?" said the mother, craning her neck to look at Jaime. "Gross!"

Jaime, no stranger to insults, figured that being friendly might help defuse the situation. So she leaned over and introduced herself to the girl.

Dan bolted, afraid of what might happen next. He was crying in the parking lot when Jaime found him. They argued for a bit, she consoled him, and finally they walked back into the bank as the girl and her mom were walking out.

The mother looked Jaime right in the eye and said "Eeeeeeew!"

* * *

That wasn't the first public confrontation.

It certainly wouldn't be the last.

Though she did her best to blend in -- choosing casual, conservative clothing and endlessly rehearsing the tone of her voice -- Jaime couldn't hide her height nor conceal her masculine features.

"I feel like I am public enemy No. 1 or a public freak most of the time," she said during a particularly low phase last year.

In the checkout line, people nudged each other when they saw her. Passengers waiting for BART trains leaned forward to get a better look at her. In Berkeley, a gang of gutter punks stopped harassing other passers-by to whisper: "Is that a guy?" "No way!"

Men she'd never met threw taunts. "Freak," they would say.

And "faggot." Sometimes, their language was sexual, sometimes just mean.

The people who said these things didn't always see Dan, standing quietly beside his mom. But he noticed them. He always noticed. It was hard to tell whether he flinched for her or for himself.

No matter: They were family. Dan would stick by Jaime, and she would stick by him. Two outsiders bound by love.

Together, as mother and son, they would struggle to find a place to belong. Together, they would endure loneliness, misunderstanding and discrimination. And when things got too bad to ignore, they would fight back.

* * *

The tow-headed boy stands in a sea of grass, taking hesitant steps here and there. As he tests his walking skills, his doting parents follow every move.

"Come back, Daniel. Don't go too far," calls his father, somewhere off-camera.

Later, we see the speaker: Skinny with dark hair, reminiscent somehow of a sleepy-eyed Ted Danson. They're visiting the playground, and the boy has managed to eat sand. James, the gentle dad, tries to teach his son how to spit, and laughs at the results.

Wind rushes across the microphone, obscuring their conversation. Jaime loved to watch those old home movies and remember.

Just yesterday, it seemed, her son was that goofy toddler, the kid who adored his daddy and loved to splash in the bathtub. Back then, their family looked just like any other: juggling loads of laundry, lugging around car seats, struggling to stretch their paychecks. But now, Dan was a lanky teen-ager -- taller than Jaime, even. And now, Jaime couldn't blend in with the other parents at the playground, couldn't hope to escape unnoticed at a school function. Instead, strangers mocked her on the street.

Still, she felt blessed to have come so far.

"It's a miracle," Jaime said. "I feel like one in a million people like me gets to keep having a son." Dan was 31/2 when his parents divorced. At first they planned to rotate custody -- the little boy in one home for three years, in the other for the next three. But after the first switch, Dan asked to come back home to live with his dad, and he just stayed.

Dan always knew his father was somehow different from other fathers. He was 12 when he found out exactly how different.

It didn't upset him, Dan insists, to hear that his father was going to start dressing and living as a woman. But it did, he admits, take about a year to get used to the word "mom." He'd say, "Hey, Dad, let's go do this -- oh wait, I mean, hey, Mom, let's go do this." When James first became Jaime, they lived in a trailer park in Redwood City. But in the summer of 1998, before Dan started eighth grade, Jaime decided that they should move to Antioch. Nestled in the outer ring of suburbia, the city's cost of living was still cheap enough that they might be able to buy a house there someday.

And with its rural, small-town values, Antioch would be a good place, Jaime believed, to raise her son.

* * *

Maybe he would have been teased anyway. At 13, Dan stood head and shoulders above his classmates, skinny as a telephone pole, agonized by the constant embarrassment of too-short pants.

But height wasn't the only thing that made Dan stick out at Antioch Middle School. All the other kids had heard about his mom.

"I had to find out who I was and be stable with who I was quickly," Dan remembers. "I couldn't walk down the hallway without people yelling things at me, good or mostly bad. Or throwing things at my back."

In the eighth grade, Dan began dreading school, where the taunting seemed constant. Kids whispered about him, called him names. Once in math class, while the teacher stood in the hall, students started chanting, "Dan's mom has a mustache!"

Another time, in the bathroom, a group of boys came after Dan. As he hid in a stall, they kicked the door repeatedly, threatening to knock it down, hissing insults. Finally, they threw a urine-soaked paper towel over the top of the stall.

The worst, though, was the afternoon when a boy followed Dan home after school. He was a tough guy, one who constantly accused Dan of being gay.

"Hey, Dan!" the kid yelled.

Dan didn't turn around. "I sensed that he didn't have any good intentions. I kind of quickened my pace and he kind of quickened his pace."

If he could just walk fast enough, he figured, everything would be OK. But the other boy overtook him. They traded insults. He called Dan a "fag" and swung at him.

Dan fell down, striking his head. "All of a sudden this whole side of my face went black." Across the street, a group of kids was playing Hacky Sack. He doesn't remember much after that, he says, except that somehow he got away.

That night, Jaime took Dan to the hospital, where nurses watched him for signs of a concussion. The next week, he stayed home from school. "I didn't want to go back," he said. "I knew what was waiting for me."

The boy who hit Dan was suspended for five days, so they returned to school at the same time. He confronted Dan for reporting their scuffle, then got suspended again.

Looking back, Dan said, "I see what really happened. Back then I was just kind of in a daze. I'm pretty mad about it now."

* * *

After the assault, Dan started seeing a therapist.

"I don't know if it helped or not," he said.

Jaime, angry that the school hadn't protected Dan from the taunting, hired F. Anthony Edwards, an attorney who specializes in cases of civil rights, sexual harassment and gay-bashing.

"When she came to me initially, I was skeptical because I said there was no law that would cover this," Edwards said. "But then I thought -- why would the law cover everyone else and not this case?"

One story made his blood boil: the day the other boys threw urine-soaked paper towels at Dan. "None of those kids got punished," Edwards said. "That's what really got to me. I got ballistic. No one deserves to be treated like that."

On behalf of the Rays, Edwards filed a lawsuit against the Antioch school district, seeking $700,000 in damages. By failing to protect Dan, the suit alleged, the school district violated Dan's right to equal education under the provisions of Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in schools.

The legal fight could take years, Jaime knew, but to her the case was about much more than money.

"It's therapeutic," she said. "It's like Dan's way of fighting back. And that was one of my goals. I wanted him to learn the proper way of dealing with conflict. I wanted him to learn to go through the system."

* * *

Most teens go through a phase when they're embarrassed by their parents. But Dan, fiercely loyal, never complained about his mom or her appearance. He never wondered aloud how things might have been different. Even in private, he insisted that he was "fine," that things were "good."

Keren Alldredge, Dan's biological mother -- the woman he usually refers to as his "other mother" -- suspected things were not really so easy for her firstborn.

"Daniel is a really, really special kid," said Alldredge, who has remarried and has five other children. "He will not ever say or do anything that he thinks is going to hurt his parent. Daniel struggles with conflicting emotions, but overriding that is a strong sense of loyalty and love."

Choosing her words carefully, she made her position clear: "When adults make a choice to have a child, they need to realize that they are saying that for the next 18 years, 'I need to be unselfish, I need to do whatever is best, not for myself, but for the well-being and best interest of the child.' ... Maybe that will help other people who do not have kids yet but may be struggling with these issues."

Why couldn't Jaime wait until Dan was older, until he left the house or at least finished middle school, to begin living as a woman? The question itself is enough to make Jaime angry. "My son isn't hurt by me at all," she says. "He's hurt by other people's assumptions and reactions and prejudice. My son is proud of me."

Pressed, she explains the circumstances.

The first was simple: Jaime's longtime therapist, a Jungian analyst, had advised waiting until Dan was 12 to explore a change in gender. By that age, the therapist said, the boy could separate fantasy from reality and would be better able to understand his father's decision. The deeper reasons remain harder to explain.

Even back when Jaime was a child, little Jimmy, he knew -- she knew -- that he was really supposed to be a girl. "I told a couple of my closest friends, and then I learned not to tell anybody," she recalled.

James didn't talk about it, but it didn't go away. He tried to set the feelings aside, to be "normal." He did what men were supposed to do: went to church, got married, had a child. But always, the torment came back. Always, he felt trapped, ashamed and miserable.

Even now, Jaime struggles to put the feeling into words: "I am not my body. I am inside my body... And lots of other people are walking around with a body that's making a different statement than who they believe they are...

"If something inside you drives you so far that you would even do this, if you had lived with this since you were 5 or 6 years old, maybe you could begin to understand."

* * *

In the fall of 1999, Dan started his freshman year at Antioch High School. He still didn't have many friends, though he usually ate lunch with the same group of kids. They were all pretty nice, but no one seemed to have much in common, beyond an earnest awkwardness. For a while, in the early spring, Dan hung out with a punk rocker. They both loved music and video games, and Dan wanted to bring his new friend home to meet his mom. But Jaime discouraged the idea -- apparently the boy hadn't heard about her, and she didn't want to scare him off.

Later, she told her son, when you can trust him.

Before long, she hoped, she wouldn't need to be so wary. That same spring, someone she knew had offered to pay for her gender-reassignment surgery.

Elated, her first reaction had been to jump up and down on the bed, like a child. From her meager salary as a consultant, helping people with disabilities find and keep jobs, Jaime had been trying to save for the procedure for years.

Later, though, the reality became sobering. Gender-reassignment surgery would be painful and expensive, requiring a series of invasive procedures during two separate hospital stays. Her life would be at risk. The results weren't guaranteed. Recuperating would take weeks, even months.

On the other hand, her body would, at long last, match her mind. She wouldn't have to fear the scrutiny of strangers, because she would no longer have something to hide. And after years of soul-searching and prayer, after hundreds of hours of therapy and a lifetime of shame, she was ready.

"Now," Jaime said, "the only thing that stands between me and this journey is time."

* * *

The school year ended, and the summer of 2000 flew by -- a haze of vacations, backpacking trips and long afternoons spent throwing crab traps into the ocean. In August, Jaime and Dan's lives veered in a new direction.

Dan's grandfather offered to cover the tuition at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. The suggestion had been made before, and Dan had never been interested. He wanted to stay with his mom in California. But this time Dan was tempted. The school whispered of wealth and privilege; it seemed to promise the sort of life he'd only seen on television. He asked Jaime for permission to apply.

At first, she was angry and terrified. She suspected that her father was deliberately attempting to separate her from her son. But later, she said, "I realized this was a pretty good idea, regardless of his motives ... What parent wouldn't want their child to go to this kind of school, to have this opportunity?"

They went shopping for a suit, aiming to impress the admissions officer. Nothing really fit, though, so they ended up buying a pair of khaki pants, the only ones that were long enough and not too baggy. At JCPenney, they chose a navy blazer with gold buttons. Jaime showed Dan how to knot his tie. Then Dan stood at the mirror, admiring himself.

"I could get used to looking like this," he said. "I could see myself walking around in a coat like this and acting all prestigious."

* * *

Everything happened so fast: Dan went to his interview, got accepted and was instructed to report back to campus before Labor Day. He flew home to California, spent a few days with Keren, his "other mom," enjoyed one last Saturday crabbing at the pier with Jaime.

Dan waited until his last few hours in Antioch -- the morning of his flight -- to begin packing his stuff. Sensing that her window of influence was closing, Jaime lectured her son.

If he wore T-shirts under his dress shirts, she advised, he could go longer without washing them. "But don't wear it two days in a row. If you're going to wear it again, wear it later in the week." It would be cold back East, she said. He would need a winter coat, a sweatshirt, a few long-sleeved shirts.

"I'm looking forward to being at the school when it snows," Dan said. "I've never seen it actually snow."

* * *

After her son left, Jaime was depressed, overcome by random crying jags. "My whole life has been organized around this critter," she said. "I couldn't go to the right or to the left without considering what impact that would have on him."

She tried to look on the bright side. Now, Jaime supposed, she had freedom. Her surgery was just around the corner, and so was the life she imagined beyond -- a life no longer clouded by confusion and misery about her gender.

Soon, she thought, she would have nothing to hide from the world. Soon, she would arrive on the other side.

* * *

From her hospital room in Wisconsin, Jaime could look through a window out onto the parking lot. It looked like industrialized Germany, she thought, with steam rising out of pipes and rooftops. She could see bursts of vibrant color, too -- autumn's changing leaves. Everything hurt.

"I can't reach my arm across the other side, can't sit up, but my bleeding is slowing down," she reported.

The day after Jaime's surgery, everything seemed to move really slowly. That was the Demerol, she knew.

Jaime wore inflatable pressure cuffs wrapped around her legs, bandages around her chest, and ice packs on her pelvis. A trapeze bar hung above her bed to help her move. Her mouth was cottony. But Jaime was ecstatic.

"I don't feel gender identity conflict today, not at all," she said. "My body and my gender are the same. I am who I am, who I say I am ... It's magnificent, and it's long overdue." For six days, Jaime couldn't get out of bed. On the seventh, she tried walking but managed just five steps before collapsing to rest. When she arrived home in California, her mother flew into town for a week to help out. Recuperating, Jaime missed nearly three months of work. In December, just as she was starting to feel better, she flew back to the Midwest for a second set of surgeries -- cosmetic procedures this time, designed to create more feminine features. At Christmastime, her surgeries complete, Jaime composed a special note for the family newsletter:

I am going to reintroduce myself to you so that my immediate family can be spared the task of coming up with the proper words. I have made many changes to my life, my body and social role over the past few years ... I am now legally and socially known as Jaime Lynn Ray... I have experienced this transition between genders to be a very healing one. I continue to observe my Christian faith, and have seen where my journey is now a major part of my personal testimony about God's magnificent love and mercy. I have found a level of personal and social functioning that I had not enjoyed in many years... Wishing All a Gracious Holiday.

Love, and Peace,

-- Jaime

* * *

Lawsuits move like snails. Weeks and months could pass without Jaime and Dan thinking much about their case against the Antioch Unified School District.

But their lawyer, F. Anthony Edwards, continued to press forward, collecting information, sitting through marathon depositions, sending Dan to medical and psychiatric examinations, filing papers in U.S. District Court.

By the spring of 2001, things were looking good, Edwards thought. He was especially buoyed by a decision from federal Magistrate Maria Elena James.

Attorney Louis Leone, representing the school district, had asked James to dismiss the lawsuit. Leone, who declined to comment for this story, argued in court documents that although Title IX prohibits gender discrimination, the law says nothing about transsexuals or homosexuality.

James disagreed, and because her ruling was the first of its type, the written decision was published in the 2001 edition of the Federal Supplement, which records precedent-setting case law. The entry describes the case, citing Dan and Jaime by name, then concludes that "harassment due to a victim's perceived homosexuality can constitute sexual harassment within the meaning of Title IX" when it is "so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive, that it can be said to deprive the victim of access to educational opportunities or benefits."

"The court finds no material difference," James wrote, "between the institution in which a female student is subject to unwelcome sexual comments and advances due to her harasser's perception that she is a sexual object, and the instance in which a male student is insulted and abused due to his harasser's perception that he is a homosexual, and therefore a subject of prey."

That sort of ruling, Edwards said, makes school administrators take notice. The stern words might also inspire litigation-shy school boards to pass new policies, he hoped, to fight student-on-student harassment.

The school district's lawyers continued to fight the decision, arguing that teachers had responded appropriately to Dan's complaints, that the district could not be held responsible for an assault that occurred off-campus, that higher court cases showed that Dan and Jaime had no basis for their claim.

Still, Dan Ray's name has been inscribed in history. His struggle is preserved in the formal paragraphs of a serious legal book, waiting for another lawyer to discover the story and perhaps build upon it. "Whatever the outcome at this stage," Edwards said, "at least we have gotten the attention of society."

* * *

If life were made of tidy endings, Dan and Jaime Ray could point to a time and a place when they knew their struggle was over, to a moment when they knew they were no longer outsiders, vagabonds at the gates of "normal" society.

Instead, the days roll on, each one carrying new challenges and complications. Dan may always remain wary of strangers, half expecting rejection and ridicule from even the nicest-looking people.

Jaime may always worry, when she meets someone new, about what to disclose of her past.

They will, quite likely, always feel a bit sad to live so far apart. But still, in so many ways, things have gotten easier.

Slowly, surely, they are leaving that dark time behind.

In late July, during a closed mediation session at the federal courthouse, they ended their lawsuit by accepting a financial settlement from the Antioch school district. Disappointed and exhausted, they still explained their reasons with conviction: Dan, now 16 and thriving at his new school, had grown weary of the legal struggle. Jaime feared that pushing forward meant risking financial ruin. Worse yet, she said, the courts might reverse James' ruling -- a decision they see as the case's true victory.

After years of job-hopping, Jaime, who is 41, has found steady employment working as an office clerk. She wears demure business skirts, turtlenecks, subtly smudged eye makeup. The scars have faded from her forehead and her nose.

She no longer believes that the label "transgender" fits her. The transformation part, Jaime says, was in her past. Now, she's just Jaime, a woman. "People I'm meeting now don't know unless I tell them," she says. "It's so weird. I don't know how to handle it." Mostly, she just doesn't bring it up.

"My old life, in a very real way, does not exist anymore," Jaime says. "I have to re-create myself from top to bottom." Dan, home in Antioch for the summer, has grown another inch. His voice is noticeably deeper.

His sophomore year at boarding school, Dan reports, went even better than he'd hoped. He made a few good friends, joined the junior varsity soccer team and won a bit part in the school play.

"It was actually a lot of fun," he says. "I was so nervous when the curtain opened, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I don't want to do this anymore.' But in five minutes, I forgot."

Most of the other students know nothing about Dan's mom or what he went through back in California. In fact, Dan told the story to only one person, a trustworthy roommate who seemed to think it was "no big deal."

One day last spring, Dan went out to buy a quart of milk - a minor errand, really, but one that his mom used to do for him. Suddenly, he stopped and thought, "Wow." His independence thrilled him.

If given the chance, he insists, he wouldn't change a thing that's happened over the last few years. He describes his ordeal as just "another of life's experiences."

"All the stuff we've been through, it's brought us a lot closer," Dan says.

Dan says his mom seems happier since the surgery, but otherwise not so different. "She didn't change as a person," he explains. "When she was my dad, it was the same person, just under a different title." Dan, now more a young man than a boy, has a perspective that seems startlingly mature. He knows how to speak his mind, how to stick up for himself. He accepts compliments gracefully. And he readily agrees that if he hadn't suffered hardship, he wouldn't be who he is.

"If you put a rock in a tumbler, it's not easy for that rock," he says. "It's getting all bashed and turned around. But it comes out as a shiny little gem."