The Bold World Page 25

  Bishop is a dynamic woman, moving around the classroom as though it’s her stage, punctuating her teaching with the occasional curse word to drive her point home. She is funny: getting down on the dance floor with the kids at the school’s annual disco. She is smart: graduating from Princeton’s Seminary School, where she founded the Seminarians for Justice Coalition. And she’s incredibly committed: often boarding kids from school in her own home when needed, and providing counsel to parents after hours in her office. Bishop reminds me of the preachers I’ve seen in Black churches: super sharp, a little unpredictable, a lot respected, and regarded, always, with just the right amount of fear.

  From the time we first met Bishop and her team in 2011, they embraced our complex family as if we were no big deal. And that was saying a lot, because we brought a lot to the table. I remember the day before we started school, I boldly stated to Bishop that we had great kids who were soon to be great students—I was betting on top of the class. But they came with a few particularities I needed her to understand.

  Cassius, I explained, was an extremely sensitive child; he had been since he was a baby. Physical touch—hand-holding, hugging—didn’t make him feel comfortable. In the past, I’d seen people thrown by Cassius’s particulars, making assumptions about his intellect and social ability. I received a lot of carefully worded suggestions from friends and relatives that maybe Cassius was “slow,” or “on the spectrum.” But in reality, he was just shy. Whenever new people came around, he’d often avoid making eye contact or hide behind my body, clinging to my leg. I just wanted Bishop to see Cassius for what he was: a kid with quirks—quirks we all have.

  Penelope, only three years old at the time, would be entering school with a few particulars, too. I tried to state the gist of it to Bishop as simply as possible, without getting into what I’d just learned from Penelope that summer in the mountain house: Everyone thinks I’m a girl and I’m not.

  “Penelope will never, ever wear a dress or a skirt,” I said to Bishop. “Not to school, or in a class play, or anywhere else for that matter. She’s just not that type of girl.” I let Bishop know that the girls’ uniform would be out of the question, and asked if Penelope could wear the boys’ uniform instead. I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth, but the bigger topic, the one that acknowledged Penelope’s spirit, felt too complicated for that moment. These were still early days—the ten-thousand-hours period—and Joe and I were still trying to figure things out privately, between ourselves. Even more, I wasn’t sure how Bishop, a woman of faith, would take to knowing that my “daughter” was actually my son.

  “As long as Penelope’s in a uniform—either the boys’ or the girls’—and she does the work that’s required of her, she’ll be just fine,” Bishop said after I’d finished all my explanations. “And Cassius will be just fine, too. Don’t worry, we got this.” These were small acceptances from our new school, but hearing them from Bishop at the time made me feel at ease. From that first interaction with the school’s founder, I had a strong feeling that we would get along. She, like me, seemed less concerned with outside appearance than with the inner workings of a person.

  It was this tone of acceptance set by Bishop and her simple, reassuring words that gave me confidence in the school, enough confidence to entrust them with my children, quirks and all. But I questioned whether the entire truth about Penelope would be something the school could digest and stand by when the time came. Until I could be sure, I knew we would have to speak in half-truths, inching our way out into the open one day at a time.

  And for the next two years, that’s just what we did.

  Penelope went to school on his very first day, and every day thereafter, wearing the same uniform as Cassius: blue front-pleated trousers, white button-front shirt, navy blue tie. And, to our surprise, there wasn’t a teacher or student who ever asked why. In fact, some even complimented Penelope’s style. “Love it!” they’d say as he walked up the school stairs in the morning. As time went by, other students picked up on Penelope’s confidence, and a few girls started wearing pants, too. Each day he walked inside the school I saw his confidence grow.

  I learned over the years that at MACADEMY, whatever your particulars, they celebrated you. You could see the love poured into each child, and the high expectations set—expectations that all of the kids at the school, mine included, were eager to meet. “How do you do it, Bishop?” I often asked. “How do you get all these kids to love school and work so hard?” Bishop’s answer still lingers with me: “I assume only the best of each child.”

  I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, children rise—they rise to the highest vibration around them. If there is goodness, a child will find it. If there is strength, that’s what they become. And when there is love, there is always an anchor. Bishop is that highest vibration.

  Penelope (left), proud as a peacock, outside school with his brothers, Cassius and Othello.

  And the children of MACADEMY responded to Bishop’s love with their own form of acceptance. With no formal announcement from us, Penelope’s classmates, over time, began referring to Penelope as “he,” “him,” and “boy.” These three-, four-, and five-year-olds clearly understood more than what we were saying. They read past my half-truths and tapped into something deeper—working out gender as they experienced it firsthand with Penelope, normalizing what they felt, and swiftly moving on.

  I knew this was happening because the news trickled up—moving beyond the circle of kids to the adults in the school, and then eventually to me. One morning during Penelope’s second year at MACADEMY, I was in the middle of my typical hundred-yard dash to get the boys to school on time when I spotted another mom out of the corner of my eye waving to me. With only three minutes to spare before Cassius, Othello, and Penelope would officially be marked absent, I put up my hand, motioning for her to give me a minute. With my other hand, I swatted each of their behinds up the stone steps and through the front entrance.

  “Let’s go, let’s go! Double time, boys. Hustle, hustle!”

  The mom watched this whole scene from a distance, waiting with an even smile on her face until the last of three backpacks disappeared behind the door. With the mad dash finally over, she made her approach.

  “Ms. Patterson, hi there—I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” She looked happy, if a little nervous. “So, it’s the weirdest thing. My daughter, she keeps insisting that Penelope is a boy. For whatever reason, she keeps calling Penelope ‘he.’ ” Hearing this, I planted my feet firmly on the pavement, fastened a smile on my face, and took a deep breath.

  “And you know, I keep telling her that girls can wear pants and have short hair, too.” She said this last part with an air of solidarity. She wasn’t mad or rude—actually, it was an incredibly caring gesture, this expression of girl power. “But she keeps insisting, ‘No, Mom! Penelope is a boy!’ ”

  I waited for her to finish, then smiled again, gave her a reassuring laugh, and left it at “It’s complicated.” Sure, I knew something more was happening. And maybe she did, too. But at that moment, with her standing in front of me waiting for an explanation, I just didn’t have the words.

  A short while later during that same year, the conversation came up again at parent-teacher conferences. Penelope’s teacher, Ms. Rice, explained to us that she repeatedly attempted to quell the classroom chatter whenever the kids brought up Penelope being a boy. “ ‘Girls come in all varieties!’ I always tell them.” Ms. Rice recounted the story to Joe and me with that same sense of feminist good intention I received from Morning Drop-off Mom a few months prior. Her long, bedazzled nails glimmered as she dismissed the issue with one confident motion of her hands. “Don’t worry—Penelope is fine. I got this.”

  It was a testament to the school’s greatness that these teachers and parents were so quick to come to Penelope’s defense—advocating for femininity, for individuality, an
d for the right to be your own version of you. But the irony of those efforts, of course, was that Penelope wasn’t a tomboy, and feminism wasn’t at stake. Penelope was in fact a boy. His classmates knew it—they’d figured it out a long time ago—and they were not about to let the adults confuse what they so fiercely knew to be true.

  Bishop’s love, the kids’ intuition, the parents’ and teachers’ surprising advocacy—these were signs that gave me hope. If the school could champion the individual in such a full and comprehensive way, maybe, I thought, we could finally come out with Penelope’s whole truth.

  Those continuous half-truths I’d been dishing out at school—“It’s complicated” and “It’s just her style,” the tight-lipped smiles and vague responses—had been steadily building up an anxiety that lingered over my body. It was taking shelter in the corners of my subconscious, coming out at night as nightmares, or during the day as defensive reflexes, my not realizing until a conversation was over that I’d been clenching the whole time. It wasn’t until later that I’d start to feel it: the exhaustion of waiting, the nagging obligation to keep up the story, a ridiculous story that I knew would eventually come apart. Penelope as tomboy? It was ludicrous. All the while, the waiting. Waiting for the moment that would finally bring out everything that hadn’t been said, all the words we were saving for another day, another time.

  And so, when Penelope entered his third year at MACADEMY, after a million baby steps, I decided it was time for our family to let the school in on the whole truth.

  * * *

  —

  As Joe and I walked through the tree-lined streets of Crown Heights to meet with Bishop about Penelope, we held hands in solidarity. As much as we loved MACADEMY—respected the staff, the kids, and the administration—we were prepared to remove our children from the school if the next few minutes didn’t go as we hoped they would.

  We walked silently as I gathered my thoughts. Truthfully, I had never felt comfortable talking about trans in large Black circles, circles I’d been in all my life. If we were reading the subtext right, transgender was a topic frowned upon in our communities, discussed only in whispers and behind closed doors—frivolous at best, shameful at worst. It was not something we Black folk talked openly about, rallied around, or championed. And it most certainly wasn’t considered a Black issue, like poverty or gun control or racism. From what I’d experienced, much of Black culture—and West Indian and Latino cultures—were steeped in traditions that see gender variance and homosexuality as sacrilegious and immoral.

  Though MACADEMY had never given us any reason to question their support, I knew we were venturing into uncharted territory. Since we first walked through their doors, they had demonstrated their devotion to our kids, nurturing their minds and their spirits, making them feel pride in their history and culture. But how deep did that devotion go? Would it stop at transgender? At what point might some religious or moral filter get in the way?

  “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God”—Deuteronomy 22:5. We had heard statements like this before, and they stung like hell.

  The knot in my stomach tightened as Joe and I joined Bishop in her office, taking seats at her desk. Wearing her characteristic coiled bun and a new Barack Obama T-shirt I’d never seen before, she looked across at Joe and me serenely, with her hands clasped casually on top of some papers.

  A couple of days before the meeting, Joe and I had sent her a version of the letter we’d given to friends and family announcing Penelope as a boy. We figured it wise to give her some time to process the news on her own before we discussed it face-to-face.

  “Bishop,” I began, mustering my strongest authoritative voice. “I know this might go against what you believe, but Penelope has asked to be recognized as a boy.” I figured I’d get straight to the point. “We respect everything you’ve done for our kids. But we need more. Going forward, we’re asking everyone at school to refer to Penelope as ‘he.’ ”

  Bishop blinked back at us, shifting her weight in her chair. Then she unclasped her hands, placing her palms on the desk, and leaned forward.

  “I read your letter,” she said softly. “And I was very moved.”

  Bishop smiled then, warmth radiating from her kind eyes. “Penelope is a prophet. And I’m with him on this journey.”

  After that, the knot in my stomach released, along with all the tension that filled the room. I thought Bishop might quote the Bible, as many had done. We thought she might say something like “I’m sorry, Ms. Patterson and Mr. Ghartey. Although we’d like to help you, we are a God-abiding community and we cannot, in the name of God, support such views.” But instead, Bishop sided with humanity. She placed herself next to the child and a family in need—and by doing just that, she aligned herself with the highest force of all—the God of Love. “I am with him”—the words every parent hopes to hear. That afternoon we understood, definitively, that Bishop would accept the whole person, and would go with her students wherever they were journeying.

  “If Penelope had asked us to call him Love, we would have called him that,” Bishop said months later to a news crew working on a story about the early acceptance of transgender. The fact that Bishop had chosen the word “love” in relation to transgender, and to Penelope, told me how purely she saw people.

  * * *

  —

  The first step, for all of us, was breaking the silence. Once that’s done, you can begin to fill the space with something good—good information, good dialogue, good feeling, good progress. Soon after our conversation, Bishop organized a staff meeting to discuss the very new topic of transgender to her very eager team of teachers and administrators. And she and her staff started learning together, speaking collectively about what transgender meant for their school. Addressing Penelope’s identity was at the core of the school’s values: not counting out one single child. Letting nothing—not race, gender, economics, or anything else—deter a child’s potential.

  In the days and weeks that followed our conversation in Bishop’s office, teachers came up to me with tears in their eyes relaying their support and reconfirming their love—for all of us, and most deeply for Penelope.

  Issues continued to spring up from time to time, there were classroom scuffles and the occasional playground upset. At one point, it even came to my attention that a family had decided to take their child out of MACADEMY because Penelope was there. I knew that scenarios like that might play out again—in a school of a hundred families, it’s impossible for everyone to think the same way. With such a polarizing topic, I knew there were bound to be people who didn’t agree.

  But even in those extreme circumstances when others backed away from us, we had our community holding tight. MACADEMY had proven itself to be the greatest example of what acceptance could look like. It continues to be for Penelope and his classmates, what my parents’ school had been for all the little Black boys and girls who walked through its doors: a haven, a safe space, a place for them to rise to the highest vibration.

  I often replay our journey with MACADEMY whenever I need a reminder. A reminder of the abundance of good in the world, even when there is so much that is ugly—particularly for a family that looks like ours. The school, from the very beginning, illustrated what’s possible. It showed us all the wonderful things that can happen when we push past our fears and assumptions and speak—even in the most unlikely places, and even when there is so much to lose.

  MACADEMY surprised us, protected us, loved us, and through it all, always allowed Penelope to carry on happily oblivious, free to concentrate on the more important things. Things like the stories and lyrics he so liked to compose:

  I might be a ninja

  But I got a heart

  I might be tough

  But I got a hea
rt

  I’m like that

  From the start

  My legs are hard as steel

  But I’m not despicable

  —PENELOPE GHARTEY, age six

  EIGHTEEN

  The Widest Sense of We

  Had I not created my own world,

  I would have certainly died in other people’s.

  —

  ANAÏS NIN

  ON THE EVE OF 2015, I told my family that going into the new year, we were trying something new. We were going on a mission to find others who looked and lived like us—who embodied the world we wanted to create. Humans were not meant to survive on their own; we needed each other, I thought, to recognize ourselves. Because although I was showing Penelope as best I could that he was good enough, I knew that “we can’t be what we can’t see,” as the wise Marian Wright Edelman once said. My showing Penelope was different from his seeing it firsthand.

  “Listen up, family!” I said to a row of skeptical faces that New Year’s Eve in our mountain house. “This year we need to find transgender friends. Period!” I knew it sounded forced and maybe a little awkward, but we would never go back to that old world, the one in which there were only two ways to be: male or female. What we needed was to move ourselves forward.

  We all need community, people who reflect who we are and who we want to be. And we needed a village to raise Penelope as boy—a queer community of believers who understood where we were coming from, who understood the nuances. I wanted to be surrounded by folks who embodied our new understanding, immersed in their stories and experiences, so that Penelope could truly feel what it was like to be placed at the center. So he could feel the joy of being of the majority—the things that made him “different” in the other world rendered blissfully boring in a new one.