“This is how I feel, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you"

by Rob Howard
Associate Editor

“Mom I need to change my life, I’m a girl, I’ve always been a girl. I need to change my life and be who I really am,” said six-year-old Jasmine Bridges to her mother Haley three years ago. Jasmine chose her name after her dramatic coming out.

Jasmine had been showing signs of severe mental illness and unrest. It got to the point that she was so severely depressed that she was hospitalized for two weeks. Shortly after she came home from the hospital, Bridges says, “We were just sitting at the dinner table.” A song came on the radio. “The hook,” she says, “was ‘change your life.’” Jasmine’s coming out changed both their lives.

That evening, Bridges sat down next to Jasmine. “I told her it was alright, that many people feel this way. ‘Let’s look online and see if we can find other kids that feel the way you feel.’

“She’d been trying to tell me for years. It was kind of a breaking point. We went over to the computer and searched for transgender children. We immediately found videos by Jazz Jennings. It was neat because Jazz has the same skin color as my daughter [Jasmine is half-Hispanic]. She got so excited, she said, ‘This is it, this is how I feel, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you.’”

Bridges says, “A lightbulb came on in my head that trans adults start out as trans kids.”

Haley Bridges had worked for 15 years in the social justice field, “doing everything from opening homeless shelters to disaster relief.” At the time Jasmine came out, Bridges was taking a break from that work, and owned a Yoga studio.

Jasmine needed so much attention at the time that Bridges shut down the studio. “I fell back on what I’ve been doing for most of my life. I had to do what was my passion. I started connecting with other people and figuring out how much interest and how much need there was [to help and understand trans people] here in KC. The answer was, ‘Yeah, there is a huge need here.’”

So, driven by her daughter’s needs, and rapidly learning about the transgender community, Bridges and a group of core supporters founded TrueGender, a Kansas City non-profit that provides medical gap funding for trans children and adults and education for the broader community about trans lives and issues.

Children are coming out as transgender even as young as three or four. It’s not a sexual issue, it’s discovering who they are. One of the standard treatments for children is providing puberty blockers that block the irreversible changes that puberty brings to children. They can cost $3000 a month, says Bridges. Similarly, gender affirmation treatment, including surgery, can be very expensive.

In addition to helping with transition bills and puberty blockers, probably 50 percent of TrueGender’s work will be educational in nature. As an example, they have developed posters for doctors’ offices that ask, “How can I tell if my child is gender non-conforming?”

Bridges stressed the importance of education. Parents need to understand and accept their transgender children. “The most important thing we need to address is the support, or lack thereof from their parents,” she says. “Because they are pretty much the gatekeeper to their child’s wellness. If they accept their child, there are plenty of agencies that will come to their support.

“If they fail to support, trans children have an 85 percent higher ideation of suicide.” She says it’s particularly important that both parents in a two-parent family be supportive. If only one parent is supportive, the chances of suicidal ideation are as high as if there is no support. She quoted a study that said, among trans youth 16-24 with depressive symptoms, only four percent of those with strongly supportive parents attempted suicide. Without supportive parents, it rises to 57 percent.

TrueGender started in March this year, so they are mainly focused on fundraisings, recruiting a board of directors, and getting their non-profit tax status, as well as their beginning efforts at education.

Bridges hopes that if people have a non-gender-conforming child, or if they are trans themselves and need resources, will contact TrueGender at www.truegender.org. They also welcome donations, which can be made on the website.

Copyright The Gayly - 11/16/2016 @ 12:28 p.m. CST. All rights reserved.