In high school, my very favorite person was named Paige. She had joined our tight-knit little class pretty late along the way but fit in really quickly. We took biology from a man named Dan, and we sat at one of the lab tables in the back. Paige would hold my hand and press her knee against mine under the table.
Another girl was calling me every night at home and talking to me about how her family was coming apart, so I never pursued Paige, who would have been a fantastic girlfriend, but the other girl might have felt betrayed at a time when the world was turning against her, so Paige and I reminded just friends, no matter how much time we spent together or how much time I studied the way her eyes moved or tried to copy the shape of her lips in the margins of my notebook.
One day, Paige said, "Look at that!" and she pointed to a person in one of the classes under ours. They were a little shorter than Paige, unnaturally thin, dressed in baggy khaki pants, a short-sleeve collar shirt with buttons, and a wide, striped tie, not our school tie, which we didn't have to wear to class anymore, but a regular men's tie, but not a new one. It was almost as if they'd gotten the tie from Goodwill or snuck it out of their grandfather's closet. Their hair was cut shorter than mine and parted to the side with some sort of pomade to help keep its shape and an Alfalfa cowlick sticking up in the back.
"That's a woman, but she wants to be a man!" Paige said with a girlish laugh. "Isn't that funny?" She said. There wasn't a thread of hate or fear in her voice. She was delighted to be so near something as unique as a girl who wanted to be a boy, and she wanted me to share in that delight, almost as if we'd seen a shooting star or a white stag together.
"Go introduce yourself." She said, nudging me almost hard enough to push me off the bench in the quad building at school. I'm not big on introducing myself, even now. I especially wasn't then. With my stutter, an attempt to not only introduce myself to a new person but a new kind of person would have probably meant that no words came out at all, or if they did they wouldn't make much sense.
I'd heard of a tennis player who went somewhere in Europe to get a "sex-change" operation, but that was a few years before and quite a way away from St. Andrews Episcopal Day School. The idea that such a person was at my school seemed impossible, but thanks to Paige, it also now seemed magical and something I could learn from.
Paige wanted me to introduce myself to this person so that she could talk to them as well, and then they wouldn't be as lonely as they appeared. I wish I'd done it. It's bothered me quite a bit through the years that I didn't. There were a lot of times when Paige knew the right thing to do, and I didn't.
Once I knew who this person was, I watched them intently in their odyssey through school life. Some of my teammates said very cruel things about them, but even though these boys had a reputation as bullies, they never bullied this person, my white stag; he was too alien, even for them.
People who struggle with verbalization learn to read emotions from people's faces. What I learned from watching the White Stag was that they were never very happy, lived in constant fear of being judged, and were in a constant state of readiness to defend their existence. From what I could tell, they had no friends and no one to talk to. They ate lunch alone, which is the ultimate sign of isolation in high school.
I'd read so many stories about creatures who were the only ones of their kind and how unhappy they were. Often, they were described as monsters, even the ones with no destructive powers like Quasimodo, who was named a monster by the world, even though he was purer of heart than anyone else in the book. Although we had some classmates who acted like monsters, the only people in the entire school who were treated like monsters were the White Stag and a girl named Laurie, who had pronounced autism.
After high school, I didn't see the White Stag for many years until one day, I went to my wife's church, and as we were sitting on a bench talking, the White Stag came out of a car and walked into the sanctuary. "That's a woman who wants to be a man," she whispered in my ear while holding my hand. It haunted me how, twenty years later, these words came up again and again from my favorite and most trusted person. In all those years, our White Stag still walked alone, without a smile, with a look on their face letting you know they were ready to defend their existence.
Transgender high school students have become a political hot topic. I have absolutely no education on the subject. I'm not a doctor or a psychologist. I'm also not a parent to a transgender child. With that in mind, I don't really have an opinion on the best way to handle this situation, except I feel pretty strongly that it should be up to the doctors, psychologists, and families involved, not politicians. If it were your child, that's what you would want.
What I do know is what I felt very strongly every time I encountered The White Stag. No one should be forced to live in isolation like a monster. Everyone deserves friends; everyone deserves a seat at the lunch table and someone to talk to. Nothing led me to believe the White Stag chose to be the way they were. Even though they didn't choose it, they still had to live with it, and it's up to people of faith to make that life as full and as loved as they can make it.
