By Margaret Stohl, Advisory Board Member, Facing History and Ourselves, Los Angeles, CA
This spring, I had the opportunity to be the guest judge of Facing History and Ourselves’ “To Kill A Mockingbird” inspired essay contest. As a Young Adult novelist, I get to do things like this from time to time; it’s the best part of the job. (Though the contest is over, you can still read the top seventeen essays from the thousands of entries at the Facing History site and I suggest you do; they’re remarkable.)
As I read through those same seventeen essays, I kept thinking of Emily Dickinson’s advice to “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant,” because as it turns out, there is nothing quite so sharp as the slant of a particular teen’s recounting of their own journey of hard-wrought, harder-fought, personal identity. No two are alike. I remember feeling those angles as a teen, and I remember writing them; I suppose we are all our own Scouts, our own Ponyboys, and Holden Caulfields.
In the essays I read, some of these slants sharpened themselves in the traditional provinces of American childhood; a soccer-loving Massachusetts girl who was told soccer was a boy’s sport, or a boy with learning differences who fought for intellectual respect.
Some were honed within the now sadly familiar landscape of American racial prejudice; a Florida girl whose family was treated like terrorists after 9/11, an African-American girl who was stopped by police for taking a walk in her suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood with her family, whose classmates re-enacted a lynching for social media.
There were slants cut from a rising awareness of social injustice: a Missouri girl watching as books referencing Barack Obama were removed from her Catholic school library. And a rising awareness of hyphenated cultural identities, such as the stories of an Asian girl whose parents want her to have only Asian friends, or a Korean girl who sees the beauty in the differences between her parents’ cultural life and her own.
As I read on, what struck me about all of the above, not to take anything away from any of these seriously gifted teen authors (all of whom should, by the way, get in touch with my agent, Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company, because they all have Voices with a capital V and Futures with a capital F) was that they fit within the familiar Mockingbird paradigm: each teen wrote as either the Tom Robinson of their unique historical moment—one author literally calling himself that, in a moment of hateful bias from an adult teacher—or as the Scout, i.e., the teen witnessing the books being removed from their parochial school library, by the Town. As expected.
Then I read an essay with a slant that cut me personally in an altogether different way. It was called “Congratulations, it’s a Mockingbird,” and it came from Cicada Scott, a trans student from Colorado, who in one sentence aptly deconstructed the entire Mockingbird paradigm altogether. Not expected.
Cicada wrote, “This is where To Kill A Mockingbird hit me the hardest; because being trans is like being at once Tom Robinson and Scout. I watch as my community fights for its rights, and know in my heart it’s a losing battle, but hope for societal acquittal anyways. Day in and day out I battle with discrimination, but only understand the gravity of it when I look at it from an outside angle.”
As the mother of Kay, (born Kate), the only openly trans fifteen-year-old at even our progressive Santa Monica school, I see my child live those words every day. Like Cicada, my child identifies outside the gender binary, not as male or female. As Cicada describes it; “(W)hile I call myself trans, I like to think that it’s not because I’m transitioning between genders, but that I transcend them altogether.” Or, as Kay says, “On a scale of one to ten, one being boy and ten being girl, I’m…the smell of the air just before it rains.”
The old paradigms and pronouns and roles don’t work so neatly for kids like Cicada and Kay, but then, little does. What gender will your language be in Spanish class, where you have to pick one? What bathroom will you use when the one all-gender bathroom is too far to get to between classes? What will you do when the substitute divides your class into boys vs. girls for an activity? What will you do when your teachers misgender you and no one corrects them, or cycles through he-she-it? (It’s the “it” that really sticks.) What will you do when your classmates misgender you and no one corrects them, either? Or when you want to go to your beloved summer camp but suddenly realize you don’t know if you belong at the boys’ lake or, across the highway, at the the girls’ lake?
There are answers to all of those questions, and hopefully there are families and schools all across the world working on getting to them, just like mine is. The answers, of course, lie in training and more than that, in trying. And that camp? There’s now a gender sensitivity cabin at either lake. Pick the lake that feels right to you. This is the work of our trans families, the work of the modern day Atticus Finches of the trans community.
Every day is a battle for everyone, but not everyone has an Atticus in their corner. Because I am haunted by my own version of Maycomb, Alabama (as I’ve written about here, I always feel the need to speak out as the parent of an agender child. It’s a compulsion; I have to, or in my own mind, I’m returning to the Town. So my husband and I share the role of the Atticus in our family, and believe me, it’s exhausting, but it’s also more than a privilege—it’s a joy.
But for my child, who is, like Cicada, cast simultaneously in the role of Tom and Scout, their embattled gender identity is more often less of a joy, and much more exhausting. While I want to take on the world for them every day—whether or not it’s just making sure the thirty thousand people who follow me on twitter know that North Carolina won’t let my child pee in peace—Kay, who is one of those followers, tells me they are too young and too depressed to think about, as they said to me, the number of people who want them dead.
That’s what it feels like to be Scout and Tom at the same time.
And if it seems melodramatic for a trans teens to compare themself to Tom Robinson, consider this: more than half of all children with non-conforming gender identities will try to take their own lives by the age of twenty, and calls to Trans Lifeline have doubled since HB 2—North Carolina’s transphobic “Bathroom Law”—passed.
Never has it been more important to cultivate the concept of allyship for a generation. Allyship and authorship. Cicada Scott concludes her essay with hope for change, noting “We are making steps, but just baby steps—it’s time that we, too, took control of our own stories.”
I agree, Cicada. I hate baby steps just like I hate the way Mockingbird ends, and I always have.
So here’s my advice for you, one writer to another.
Go out there and change the story. Write your own ending. Keep transcending more than just your gender; transcend the old paradigms, too.
Because I promise you—you can and you will. In fact, I’m pretty sure you already have. And that’s an even bigger honor than winning Facing History’s 2016 essay contest, whether you know it yet or not.
You don’t have to be the Tom Robinson and the Scout Finch, not really. Not either. You’re the Harper Lee in this paradigm. No, wait—you’re the Cicada Scott.
So I’ll just say this: “Congratulations! They’re a Cicada.”
Margaret Stohl is a New York Times #1 Best Selling Author. She co-authored the young adult novel, “Beautiful Creatures,” to prove that “To Kill a Mockingbird” is still relevant to teens today. She is inspired by the power of literature to help young people explore differences, define their identities, and take control of their own stories.