Disco-Ball Dresses and Spandex
A dispatch from transgender camp for kids.
By Bedford Hope
Posted Monday, Aug. 2, 2010, at 10:07 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2261929/Image of a child's legs in high heels by Bedford Hope. Click image to expand.The face of a young man in a baseball cap fills the screen at the center of a circle of 30 or so children. "It's Johnny!" they yell, meaning Johnny Weir, the "flamboyant," figure-skating Olympian.* The kids are part of an annual gathering of gender-variant and transgender kids—kids born boys who look and act like girls. Outside of this camp weekend, it's rare for them to hear "how great I think you all are ... being true to yourselves," as Weir tells them. He says he loves the electric-blue spandex suit with the lime-green lightning bolt designed by one boy. He tells a 6-year-old that, no, he doesn't have a girlfriend, but one day he would like to have a family of his own. And, yes, "Bad Romance" was his favorite song to skate to. "I've fallen," he tells them, referring to the ice, not sin. "I've screwed up. The thing is just sparkle so much that nobody notices. Yeah, that's it. Sparkle! We've got to sparkle!"
Welcome to the guarded world of families with gender-variant kids, where a word like sparkle can move you to tears.
