Beth Walton

bwalton@citizen-times.com

Allison Scott tried to kill herself when she was 10. The Asheville native wrapped a cord from a vacuum cleaner around her neck and choked herself so hard that she passed out.

When her grandmother found her, the embarrassed child lied and said it was an accident. She said she had been playing cowboy and using the cord as an imaginary lasso.

No one questioned the story. Scott’s depression, stemming from confusion over her gender identity, was something that wasn’t discussed in the southern home during the mid-1980s.

Though she would often ask her mother why she was born a boy and why the kids bullied her at school, her father encouraged her to “man up.”

Despite Scott’s affinity for dressing like a girl when no one was watching, she says her dad made it clear: No son of his was “going to be a faggot.”

That sort of hateful speech was widespread in America in the late 1970s and 1980s as the public struggled to understand LGBT communities.

The word transgender - now commonly used amid the fallout over North Carolina's House Bill 2 - wouldn't appear in print until the early 1990s and people who identified with a pronoun other than the one they were given at birth were often viewed as sexual deviants or freaks.

That took its toll on the community who lacked words to even describe what they were feeling, said Holly Boswell, one of the pioneers of the transgender movement who now lives in Black Mountain.

For generations, people lived their life in secret, she said. Now, youth can adopt a pronoun and expect society to get on board.

For many like Boswell, there is no doubt the world is becoming more tolerant. A 2013 Pew Research Center poll of nearly 2,000 LGBT respondents found that an overwhelming 92 percent believe that society has become more accepting of them in the past decade and expect this attitude to grow in the future.

Yet recent events in North Carolina and elsewhere are causing some to reconsider this progress. With the passage of HB2, the subsequent lawsuits and all the talk about who uses what bathroom, the public seems to have forgotten that there are people behind the politics, said Scott, a transgender woman who lives in Asheville.

Just this week a woman paraded through a Target in Ohio carrying a Bible yelling that the large retail chain was "wicked."

Target issued a statement late last month welcoming transgender shoppers and employees to use the restroom or fitting room room that corresponds with their gender identity.

In response, the American Family Association called for a boycott, issuing a petition that now has more than 1.2 million signatures. The group argues Target's policy compromises the safety of the general public by providing sexual predators access to the bathroom of their choice.

The result of HB2 and the public fallout is that the transgender community feels less safe, said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington, D.C.

The legislation requires transgender people to use the bathroom or locker room in schools or other public buildings that match the sex on their birth certificate, and it prevents local governments from passing rules giving protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people while using public accommodations such as restaurants and stores.

Since the law's passage, more complaints of harassment and abuse are coming in, Keisling said. Kids are dreading going to school because the increased attention has resulted in more questioning. "Folks are scared and upset."

It wasn't until the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s that transgender populations could really find each other. Until then, it wasn't safe to be out as a transgender person, she continued. People would have to meet up in gay bars with blacked out windows that were often the subject of police raids.

Now, you can generally live very openly as a transgender, even though many people still don't, Keisling said.

"They have to fit into a society that doesn't think about being trans. There are people who are deeply scared and hiding and I tell you, there are more and more of those over the last six weeks."

No words

Holly Boswell came to Buncombe County in 1976 as a flower child with the intention to survive off the land and ignore the establishment. Then a young man, she settled in Sandy Mush and planned a simple life of gardening.

The only problem was every morning Boswell thought about becoming a woman. She became obsessed with gender, studying anything she could find. There wasn’t much in the card catalog.

In the 1980s, she moved to Montford and started going to clubs dressed as a woman. She met people from all across the spectrum. There were cross dressers and drag queens. There were transsexuals, people spending thousands of dollars on surgery. But there was no word for someone like her, someone in the middle.

"It was the big elephant in the room," she said. "What I finally came up with is there are as many genders as there are people."

Boswell lived much of her life in secret. She would sometimes take part in local theater and play female roles on stage. “That was palpable to people; people could handle that," she said. "The secret was to be a good liar."

In the 1990s Boswell submitted an essay called the “Transgender Alternative” to the Boston magazine "Tapestry."

The piece, which was the first to use the label "transgender," gave a word to the way Boswell was feeling. And the word — her word — became a label used by thousands struggling to find the right pronoun and their space between the he and she binary.

​“It was a relief," Boswell said. "People could speak about themselves in a more transcendent way."

Now 65, Boswell looks like the earth's grandmother. Her skin is dotted with sun freckles. She has pale blue eyes and gray curly hair. Her white and cream colored clothes fit loosely, flowing as she walks. The aged hippy no longer cares about pronouns.

"I spent 30 years as man; 25 as a woman and now gender bores me," she said. "No one is 100 percent comfortable with the gender roles put on them."

Her rallying cry today is as simple as it was when she drafted her landmark essay decades ago: live your truth.

"We need to recognize that each of us, in our own small way, are makers of our culture," she wrote at the time. "We can exercise that function best by expressing our true selves, not by simply fulfilling our culture's expectations. We are all in transition..."

A hidden journey

Allison Scott’s first memory of wanting to live her life as a female is from when she was 4 years old. Her mother was trying to make a bed and Scott crawled under the sheets. It was a game, and in the toddler’s mind, when her mom pulled the blankets away, she would magically be a girl.

As she neared puberty, Scott would sneak hand-me-down dresses from her cousin. Her favorite was blue with white dots. After school, she would wear them in her room where no one could see her.

Her mother would often find the garments and pretend they weren’t there. It was the late 1970s and the idea of being transgender was all but absent from the lexicon in Asheville, she said.

“(My parents) didn’t know about it. They didn’t have the language. They didn’t know what this was. My mom kept saying, ‘You’re not gay.’”

Scott quickly learned to act the way people wanted her to be. At her dad’s encouragement, she played baseball. She made male friends. She got a crew cut. She adopted male mannerisms. She became so popular she was voted best dressed guy in her high school.

“It was successful for everyone else, but it made life for me like a sell-imposed prison,” she said.

As Scott grew older the world progressed. The Internet came to be and now she could research gender identity.

Using a dial up AOL connection, Scott discovered phrases like “cross-dresser,” “transsexual” and “transgender.”

“It was a great feeling because it finally felt like I had a path to be who I wanted to be,” she said.

Scott quickly started saving her money so she could move to California after high school and begin her transition from a man to a woman. Then, her mom got sick and she stayed home. She started dating a girl. She got married. Her wife got pregnant.

Scott began to “freak out.” She panicked at the thought of being a father. She sat alone in her bathroom in the middle of the night and cried. Her depression resurfaced. She gained 60 pounds. She rarely left her couch. She struggled to find energy for basic tasks.

Scott finally went to see a therapist at 38. She lied and told her wife she had to work late. The guilt stuck with her and that evening she broke down on the kitchen floor, crying and shaking. She spent five hours telling her wife everything. “All I could think was, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I done?’” Scott recalled.

Today, Scott, 41, wears women’s clothes with unabashed pride. Her nails have a clean French manicure. Her makeup is subtle. Her silver jewelry adds a level of class to a purple shirt and jeans.

In 2015, Scott began living her life as a female full time. She let her feminine mannerisms come out naturally. She took hormones. She had facial surgery.

“I didn’t do it to pass (as a woman). I did it because that felt right for me,” she said. “It was no longer like looking at a stranger. I was finally looking at myself and it was beautiful.’”

Becoming a man

What Scott took decades to do took teenager Rory Philbrick just years.

At a downtown coffee shop in Asheville, Philbrick, 18, sips on apple juice and talks about gender theory. He admits the terminology is confusing. He came out as a pansexual transgender male last fall. It wasn’t a decision he made lightly.

For a while he considered himself gender fluid, fluctuating between prounouns. Then, he was a demi boy, someone whose gender identity is only partly male. Today, he wears a “he/him” pronoun button on his jacket and his once long hair is shaved into a trendy Mohawk.

“Gender is a social construct,” said Philbrick who hopes to one day earn degrees in political science and gender studies and work as an advocate for LGBT youth.

For now he is helping plan a prom for LGBT teens. In his bedroom, there’s a clipping from a newspaper posted on the wall highlighting his activism.

“I want the queer community to spread so everyone can have a space so they don’t feel left out, so they don’t feel alone," he said.

Philbrick came out last year after joining the group Youth OUTright, the largest nonprofit agency advocating for LGBT and questioning teens in the region. It was one of the first places he said he felt like he belonged.

Philbrick came to Asheville from Georgia where he was being raised by his father. His family there was full of “hillbillies,” he said, “homophobic, transphobic folks” who laughed at his masculine tendencies.

When he came to Asheville to live with his mom, things weren’t that much better. At Asheville High School he was bullied and the mainstream educational setting was confusing to him as he explored his own gender.

He didn’t know what locker room to use at gym class. Once students circled around him in the hallway after someone threatened to beat him up. He eventually dropped out.

This week was Philbrick’s first day at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, where he has enrolled in a GED course. He wears a black T-shirt that says in bold white block letters: “Inclusive and welcoming. Out and equal.”

On Philbrick’s coat is a second button that has the hashtag "I’ll go with you."

It’s a signal to let others know that you will be there for them, that you can accompany them as they come out, whether that means using the bathroom of their choice or going to talk to a teacher at school, he said. It’s safer to go with someone than to go alone.

These days Philbrick carries his iPhone and earbuds so he can play the song “Spectrum” by Boyinaband to anyone thinking about coming out. The song is about a family that doesn’t accept their child’s gender identity.

“It’s gonna be OK, it’s gonna be OK,” the artist sings. “This issue is temporary so attempt to wait for one more day. There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s them. They’re just backwards. You’re in the future, they’re in the past.”

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