A World Where We Have to Hide Our Hearts

Something I’ve often wondered is why people sometimes mistreat each other. Sometimes it’s ignorance; other times, it’s lack of compassion. Another possibility is that some people may hate others simply because they are different. But why do some people hate others because they are different? We are taught at a young age not to make fun of other people because they are different, to try to imagine how the other person feels, to try to “put yourself in the other person’s shoes.” Not literally wear the other person’s shoes, of course, but to try to imagine yourself in their position.

In October of 1998 at the Georgian Country Day School in Carrolton, Georgia, 15-year-old Matthew “Alex” McLendon was expelled because he refused to wear boy’s clothing. While most students of the school were willing to accept his feminine appearance and mannerisms, others in this rural conservative western Georgia community of about 20,000 weren’t. Alex withdrew from school under pressure, leaving his friends wondering what threat they had supposedly been protected from.

After a school board meeting on October 6, Alex was “invited to withdraw” or face expulsion. Most of Alex’s classmates-including some boys-wore bows in their hair in protest until ordered by the principal to remove them. Some quoted their school handbook, which urges acceptance of “diversity in opinion, culture, ideas, behavioral characteristics, attributes or challenges.”

“Alex wasn’t causing any problems. She got along well with everybody,” said classmate and friend Meaygan Denkers. “She wasn’t trying to change anybody to be like her or anything.” It’s apparent from Meaygan’s statement that she considers Alex a girl and feels Alex should not have been forced to leave.

“Alex represents something that’s way beyond the experience and the comfort zone of the very conservative people we live with,” said Lori Lipoma, Meayghan’s mother and a drama teacher at the school. “I really think we all lost something very precious that night.”

School officials would not discuss the case.

“We make no comments on students,” said Rex Camp, chairman of the board of the school, where tuition is more than $5,000 a year for the 50 or so high school students. Kindergarten and elementary school students are in a separate building, but one parent of a six-year-old expressed concern at the board meeting about Alex’s effect on younger children.

“I believe in sexual standards in society, and I want my child in a school that holds the same sexual ethics I do,” said Craig Neal.

I wonder what those “sexual ethics” are. How do the actions of a 15-year-old affect a six-year-old who probably doesn’t even realize that there’s something wrong with Alex? The six-year old probably thinks Alex is a normal girl and has no idea what is going on, if he or she even has contact with Alex. They aren’t even in the same building.

Alex, who speaks in a soft, feminine voice, began cross-dressing two years ago and considers himself “95 percent girl.”

It is apparent that many people would mistreat someone based on their gender identity or their sexual orientation. I must point out at this point that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things. Gender identity is how one views oneself and how one wishes others to do so, either male or female. It does not relate to sexual orientation, nor does it necessarily relate to the gender one physically is. Sexual orientation defines the gender of the people one finds attractive (to put it one way); for example, one who identifies oneself as male and is sexually attracted to females is considered to be heterosexual. Two often confused terms associated with gender identity disorder are “transsexual” and “transvestite”; a transsexual is a person whose gender identity doesn’t conform with their physical sex, a transvestite is a person who wears clothes society deems appropriate for the sex opposite to their gender identity.

“I’m not homosexual,” Alex said to a reporter for the AP wire service. “I just look like a girl and I dress like a girl.

At the Georgian Country Day School-where Alex said he enrolled to get a better education-he struck up a friendship with Meayghan and was soon invited to spend nights over at her house. The first couple of times, Meayghan’s mother popped in on them unannounced just in case.

“They’d be sitting there doing hair, or painting nails, and I said to myself, ‘This is a girl,’” Ms. Lipoma said.

A few weeks into the school year, he and his father were called to a meeting with school officials. They said that parents had complained and that he had to dress like a boy, Alex recalled. He refused and was sent home. A special board meeting followed.

Under the law, a public school would have had to show that Alex was disrupting education or undermining safety. A private school has more leeway.

As Alex said, “School is supposed to be preparing you for life. Parents are trying to protect their kids by covering their eyes. It’s going to be a real shock for some of these parents when their kids get out into the real world.”

Personally, I think the kids are the ones who would be shocked, not the parents; the parents have presumably seen and experienced more than the kids and they know what’s out there. It is said that people fear the unknown; if the proverbial wool is pulled over the kids’ eyes, they will remain ignorant and become fearful when they learn for themselves what is out there. We must learn to be more accepting of other people, regardless of their behavior and appearance; we should remember some of the things we were taught as children: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

As the song Reflection from the Disney movie Mulan says: