QuoteAnd then there is the story of Tracy Isabella (Izzy) Gonzalez, a 20-year-old transgender girl. Until she was 18, Gonzalez lived as a boy in a nice house in Riverside County. But when she finished high school, Gonzalez announced what she'd known all her life - she wanted to live as a woman.

"My parents said, 'That's not going to happen in our house,' " Gonzalez said. "When they saw me in the girl mode they turned their back on me."

Tossed out of the house, Gonzalez said she "did what I saw in the movies and hit the streets for prostitution." Eventually, she ended up on a bus to San Francisco and landed at Larkin Street. On Friday she graduated from a job training program, but her parents weren't there to see the ceremony. She can barely keep in touch with them by phone.

"I call them and tell them how things are going in San Francisco," she said. "They say, 'Great, now I have to get back to work.' Basically I have been cast out of my family."

This happens too often in our society.  Not as much as from the society I grew up in.  It's getting better for young transsexuals today.  Today a young person can sue his or her parents for gender discrimination under the conditions described in this post.  If I was this young person or she came to me for counseling that would be my advise to her.  Sometimes to get a person's attention you have to hit them where it hurts the most, the pocket book. 

It's not our fault we were born in the wrong body.  Yet we get persecuted as if we were criminals.  In my growing up it was against the law for me to go in public dressed as a woman.  I could be arrested and in some states serve as much as 20 years in prison for it. 

A simple birth defect that causes more than half afflicted with it to commit suicide before our 30th birthday.

I do what I can do to educate the public but I can't do it alone.

Oweena Scott PhD