opinion

What about LGBT kids?

Calin is 17, slight, with a close-cropped haircut and delicate features that suggest he's younger than his years.

He's smart, well-spoken, and can describe the despicable things that have been done to him in the calm, firm voice of a survivor.

Calin is transgender — born with female anatomy, he identifies as male — and in foster care at a residential placement center. He's one of hundreds of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Michigan children in the state's care who seem completely overlooked in decisions about state adoption policy.

Earlier this month, the state Legislature passed a law, promptly signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, allowing adoption agencies the right to refuse service to prospective LGBT adoptive parents. It was a preemptive move designed to dilute last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.

Some faith-based adoption agencies, which account for about half of the $20 million Michigan spent last year on adoption services, threatened to close shop otherwise. It was a threat lawmakers couldn't ignore. Because the law passed, those agencies say, they'll stay in business.

But none of them — state lawmakers, those adoption agencies — seem to realize there are kids like Calin.

In the child welfare system, neither sexual orientation nor gender identity must be considered when placing a child in foster care. So finding a safe home for an LGBT kid is a hit-or-miss prospect.

Take LGBT families out of the mix, as Lansing did this month, and it becomes even harder.

"We're taking young people who have few options, and giving them fewer options," says Jerry Peterson, executive director of the Ruth Ellis Center, a Highland Park-based youth social services agency.

Statewide, there are more than 13,000 kids in care. About 2,200 of those kids are seeking adoption.

Conservative estimates suggest 5% to 10% of kids in care are LGBT, but Peterson believes — as a 2014 study on foster kids in Los Angeles County found — that it's as much as one in five, about twice as many as in the population as a whole.

When a placement fails, it's hard for the child.

"Not only have these young people been rejected by their families of origins, they have been rejected by five or six foster families as well, if they come out while in care, and the families say you can't live in my home," Peterson said. "I struggle with a child welfare system that claims to have the safety and well being of the child as paramount concern, when in fact the system perpetrates trauma over and over again by refusing to acknowledge who they are."

Adopted as an infant by a family member, Calin, which isn't his real name, says he suffered years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his adoptive mother. Before he knew he was trans, he came out as a lesbian. He says his mom didn't respond well. She started taking him to church more often, and told him he risked going to hell. She took away his phone and computer, wouldn't allow him to spend time with friends. And the physical abuse continued.

When Calin realized he was trans, he thought things might get better. He'd always acted like a boy. Knowing he was trans, Calin thought, might help his mother make sense of him.

It didn't. Increasingly isolated, in despair, he attempted suicide, taking so many pills he went into acute kidney failure and came close to causing permanent damage. But after he got home from the hospital, things seemed OK. His mom, he thinks, was scared she'd lose her child.

Then it got much, much worse.

There was an argument, over a cell phone Calin pays for himself. Calin says his mother pushed him into the bathtub, trying to take it from him. He said she hit him, scratching his face, and when he climbed out, his uncle tripped him, pinning him on the ground, slapping his face and choking him.

The police came. Calin went to the hospital.

And his mother left him there.

In a court hearing, he listened as a social worker testified that his mom had said she didn't care what happened to him, that she wouldn't take him home.

Now he's in care, waiting to age out of a system that isn't built to accommodate kids like him.

For Calin, adoption isn't the goal. He says he's not scared of his mother any more. But he can't go back home. Calin dreams of starting his own business, maybe in California, where he believes he can find acceptance. He turns 18 early next year. The end of this — and the beginning of adulthood — is in sight.

But he knows what he has lost.

"Sometimes, I wish I could be in foster care, with a foster family," he said. "For the simple fact that you still get to be a kid."