"I was ten when it started. It freaked them out, I guess. . . . When I started dressing as a woman, they didn't know what to do. Then they decided they couldn't have that kind of thing going around.

"They started making up rules, like, you can't dress in a way to interrupt class, so no long hair or makeup. The teachers were rude. I had to use the boys' restroom or the nurse's restroom, but if the nurse wasn't there, then I didn't go at all."

Using the restroom was particularly challenging because the nurse's office was so far away from her classes. "They give you three minutes between classes, so I'd have to race from one side of the building to another. The teachers were like, `What took you so long?'" Her teachers often disciplined her for being late to class.

She wouldn't go to gym. "I'd skip. I had to use the boys' locker room; I'd have to shower in the boys' shower." 

The school put her in a special education class. "They didn't know what to do," she recalled. "They said it was for my own safety."

She was attacked physically once. "I got beat over the head with a bottle in gym," she reports.

Verbal threats were much more common. "Mainly guys would be coming up to me, saying, `What's your problem?'" she said. They'd be, like, `What are you going to do, faggot? You still a man? Going to kick your ass.'"

And she was often sexually harassed. Many of the boys who threatened her also came on to her sexually, knowing that their advances were unwelcome. "That was mainly the problem, guys who wanted to hit on me," she told us.

When she entered the foster care system during her junior year, she moved through a number of placements and schools. "They moved me from shelter to shelter. They're like, `We don't want to confuse the other kids.'" She told us that she was scheduled to move to another placement at the end of the month.

"A lot of them refuse to take transgender youth," she said. "For the past seven years I've been dressing as a woman. But they're like, `You have to cut your hair, you can't put makeup on.' Sometimes they tell me I can't wear a bra."

"The shelters are separated. They put me in the men's shelter. The other kids say, `She's supposed to be over with the women.'"

Some of the shelters have their own schools, so she often attended school under the same conditions that she faced at the shelters. "The rules were the same as the shelter. I couldn't talk about my life with the other kids. It was the same rules about dress and everything." At one shelter, she chose not to attend school at all. "I knew the principal wouldn't let me dress the way I dress," she explained.

From September to December 1999, however, she attended a regular public school that was generally respectful of her gender identity and her privacy. "The only people that knew were the principal, the counselor, and the nurse," she explained. "They were good with that part."

She also appreciated the fact that the school put the name she uses on her records and her school identification card. "They put my girl name on my ID. That was cool. They put it as my middle name," with the boy's name she was given at birth abbreviated as a first initial. "They put my girl name on everything-like, `[D. Anika.]' It was a really good school."

The other students accepted her as female until some of her classmates saw an old piece of identification. "They looked through my purse and found a picture of me as a boy," said Anika. Until that time, she said, "I used the female dressing room and everything. It was impossible to find out until they looked through my purse.

"The girls kept my picture, they hid it from me. Guys started coming up to me, they said `faggot' and stuff."

Anika felt that school officials placed the burden of addressing the harassment on her by asking her to take the lead in educating her peers about gender identity issues. "They wanted me to go in front of all the kids," she recounted. "They told me, `We have a few gay students who are also willing to go talk to them.'"

School administrators failed to appreciate the pressure she would feel from such a request, she told us. "I just chose not to tell my personal business," she explained.