She’s a 10-year-old South Carolina kid. She’s transgender. And her parents are more scared than ever.
The world has never been kind to girls like her. Under President Barack Obama, there was the promise of progress. Now that promise has fallen apart. The day after Donald Trump was elected, she confessed to her mother how scared she felt, how uncertain.
"I don't know what he's going to do with me," she said of Trump during the ride to school that Wednesday morning.
"We’re gonna be fine," her mother said. "We’re the strongest family I know."
But privately her mother wondered how she and her husband would protect their daughter — a 10-year-old trapped in a foreign body who has already faced more scrutiny and aversion than most adults will in a lifetime.
She has long chestnut hair that cascades past her waist. Her round, ruddy cheeks are dusted with freckles, which her mother calls “fairy kisses.” A sliver of space separates her two front teeth. She’s slightly knobby kneed, just like her grandmother "YaYa." At 5 feet flat, she is one of the tallest in her fifth-grade class. Her shoe size is a woman’s 11. Her endocrinologist says she’ll grow up to be 6-foot-4. Proudly, she says she’ll be 7 feet in heels.
Her favorite movie is “Twister.” She is in the gifted and talented program at her school, which means “you get to go on two field trips instead of one.” Science is her favorite subject; math, her least. When she grows up, she wants to be a meteorologist, like The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore, forging headfirst into storms, floods and hurricanes, fearless and full of bravado. Her icon, though, is the late Joanne Simpson, the first woman to earn a doctorate in meteorology.
Her new name — canonized in a Dorchester County court order — evokes glamour, old Hollywood and pearls. YaYa suggested it. She chose it. But for this story, at she and her parents' request, she’ll go by one initial: "G."
To her bullies, G says she does not know what they mean. Even when her parents believed they had three sons, instead of two boys and a daughter, this is who G has always been. G has always been she.
And on this drizzly afternoon in January — the day after Trump's inauguration — G wants a deluxe spa pedicure. Deluxe with an emphasis on “luxe.” The word slides off G’s tongue like syrup as she begs her mother in conspiring whispers for the fancy pedicure that costs $7 more than the regular one.
“Can we get the deluxe?” she says turning toward her husband.
“No,” he says, arms crossed.
