Girl/Boy Interrupted

He's gotten good at cover-up strategies. While Juan's mom recounted in the family's living room how Juan cried when he had to wear skirts to elementary school, his niece, who, like the other young relatives, don't know he was born a girl, grabbed his shoulders:

"You're a girl?"

"No."

"Why did you wear a skirt on the first day of kindergarten?"

"Why did you wear a skirt on the first day of kindergarten?" he shoots back.

"Because I'm a girl," she answers, seems to lose interest, and bounces out of the room. Did that bother Juan? He nods, eyebrows knit.

On weekends or breaks, Juan flew to transgender conferences. He'd sit on panels of transgender kids. He'd read a poem he penned at Transgender Day of Remembrance. His mother said he'd then go back to school, the monthly Lupron shots at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center sustaining his secret.

"He kind of has this double life," his eighth-grade teacher says. "He's so scared but so brave. I wish he would've [come out]. I'm just scared to death some mean person is going to find out and hurt him with it."

Back at graduation, Juan accepts his diploma and walks out into a congested lobby. A high school hottie in bloom who hasn't seen him for a year hugs him, pressing her body into his side and rocking back and forth. Juan looks a little overwhelmed by the ferocity of her ardor, but doesn't pull away. She kisses him goodbye on the cheek. Out on the sidewalk, a petite bespectacled girl takes a running leap at him that knocks him off balance: "Juan! I gotta hug yoooooou!" A few last hugs and pictures, and Juan climbs into the car and shoots a backward peace sign to a classmate from the window. "I'm going to miss them all," he says.

Done. He pulled it off for three years. Next stop: high school and a whole new set of people to convince. But by the time the first day rolls around, Juan might have a little help from his body to back him up. He got his first testosterone shot the week he turned 14 in May, and the facial hair and low voice are on the way.

Marty chases the Spalding basketball across the asphalt, past the girls on the swings, past his mom Margaret observing from a bench. "I'm trying to shoot from the three!" he yells, before dribbling back to the court, the long late-afternoon shadow of a boy in a baseball hat pattering alongside.

"Would you ever mistake him for a girl?" Margaret marvels. "He looks like a baseball player running out to take his post at second base or something."

Both mothers say they've gotten used to Marty as a boy. They rarely slip on pronouns anymore, and admit that they're sometimes caught off-guard when Marty strips for a bath and they realize he's still a physical girl. When he budded breasts, Janet says she revisited the sadness of losing her daughter.