 |
Click to Enlarge |
© Associated Press, 1998
Feminine Boy forced out of Private Georgia School
by Dan Sewell
30 October 1998
 |
Photo - Associated Press |
CARROLLTON, Ga. - Patrick Nelson had heard there was a cross-dressing boy
enrolled at his high school. But darned if he could figure out just who it
was.
"I looked for him the first couple of weeks.
The honest truth - I didn't even know," Patrick said.
One day, he was talking about the mystery
to a friend, who smiled and pointed to the pretty blonde at the desk next
to his.
"I said, 'No way, that's too weird!'" Patrick
recalled. " Then I thought about it, and I said, 'So what's so weird about
that?'"
But while Patrick and his friends were willing
to accept Matthew "Alex" McLendon's feminine appearance and mannerisms, others
in this rural conservative western Georgia community of about 20,000 weren't.
And so 15-year-old Alex withdrew from school
under pressure, leaving supporters of the popular, easygoing student wondering
what threat they had supposedly been protected from.
"Alex wasn't causing any problems. She got
along well with everybody," said classmate and friend Meayghan Denkers. "She
wasn't trying to change anybody to be like her or anything."
After a heated meeting of the board of the
small, private Georgian Country Day School on Oct. 6, Alex was "invited to
withdraw" or face expulsion. Alex, who had enrolled in September after attending
public school, was cited for wearing a tongue ring, but had been called before
school authorities earlier about his female dress, makeup and hairstyle.
Most of Alex's classmates - including some
of the boys - wore bows in their hair in protest until ordered to remove
them by the principal. Some indignantly quoted their school handbook, which
urges acceptance of "diversity in opinion, culture, ideas, behavioural
characteristics, attributes or challenges."
"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
students are in a separate building, but one parent of a 6-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 that I
do," said Craig Neal.
Alex, who speaks in a soft, feminine voice,
began cross-dressing two years ago and considers himself "95 percent girl."
Larry Harmon, a Dade County, Fla., psychologist
who counsels parents in sexual identity, said such feelings appear to fit
a rare condition called gender-identity disorder. He said it doesn't necessarily
imply homosexuality, and it's difficult to know how many youngsters have
it and why.
"I'm not homosexual," Alex said. "I just look
like a girl and I dress like a girl. It wasn't anything flamboyant, not sequins
or anything. But because I'm a guy...."
He enrolled in night school but quit in less
than a week because he didn't feel the courses offered would help his education
goals. He hopes to pursue a career in fashion merchandising and modelling.
Alex said Thursday he's looking into the
possibility of home-schooling.
"I do wish I was still at the Georgian School,"
he said.
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 at her house. The first
few 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,'" Lipoma said.
A few weeks into the school year, he and his
father were summoned 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.
A special board meeting followed.
Under the law, a public school would have
to show that Alex was disrupting education or undermining safety. A private
school has more leeway.
Alex's mother died when he was young. He said
that his cross-dressing initially caused a rift with his father, but that
the older man stood with him in the dispute with the board. Mack McLendon
declined an interview.
"School is supposed to be preparing you for
life," Alex said. "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."
© 1998 Time Inc. USA
TIME Magazine, Nov 9, 1998
CROSS-DRESSING TEENAGER
MUST LEAVE, SAYS A SCHOOL
Fifteen-year-old Alex McClendon was the classic new kid in town, When the
lanky 5ft.5in. freshman sashayed into Georgian Country Day School in Carrollton,
Ga., heads turned to gaze at her blond coif and perfectly made up face. Beyond
the look, the popular Alex had a flair for style. Nothing could come between
her and the Calvins that were her daily uniform. Nothing except the board
of trustees at her private school, who "invited" Alex to withdraw.
It wasn't just her pierced tongue that rankled,
but something she had taken greater pains to conceal: the fact that she is
technically and biologically a he.
He was born Matthew McClendon, and "Alex" is
just a preferred middle name, like the preferred female persona he has worn
for the past two years.
After an initial double take, Alex's peers
didn't pay much heed to their cross-dressing classmate. But Alex engendered
quite an outcry from others in his conservative rural community. Parents
of kids in younger grades complained that Alex was negatively influencing
their children. After a closed-door session, the school demanded that Alex
either start dressing like a boy or leave.
Alex, who says he is not gay but "95% girl,"
chose to leave. Dozens of classmates -- biological boys included argued that
the school was violating Alex's rights and donned hair bows in solidarity.
But the protest was little comfort for the teen. "It really took a lot of
guts for me to be confident enough to be who I am, and then this happens,"
he says. Alex, whose future plans include home schooling and a sex-change
operation, says he originally went to private school to get a better education.
This wasn't the lesson he expected.
© 1998, Washington Post Company
What are gay-bashers afraid of?
by William Raspberry, Columnist for the Washington Post
Washington, November 2, 1998
Just what is it they
are afraid of? The question occurs to me whenever I hear of assaults on
homosexual men and women. It occurred to me last month when some young
Wyomingites, apparently motivated by anti-gay hate bias, beat Matthew Shepard
to death.
And it occurs to me now that Matthew "Alex"
McLendon has been driven out of his Carrolton, Ga., high school for dressing--and
apparently for being--like a girl.
You know the sad case of Shepard, the 21-year-old
University of Wyoming student who was lured from a local bar, pistol-whipped
and left tied to a fence outside Laramie. He died without ever regaining
consciousness.
Now, let Dan Sewell of the Associated Press
tell you about 15-year-old Alex.
Patrick Nelson had heard there was a cross-dressing boy enrolled at his high school. But darned if he could figure out just who it was.
"I looked for him the first couple of weeks. The honest truth--I didn't even know," Patrick said.
One day, he was talking about the mystery to a friend, who smiled and pointed to the pretty blonde at the desk next to his.
"I said, 'No way, that's too weird!'" Patrick recalled. "Then, I thought about it, and I said, 'So what's so weird about that?'"
Plenty, it turns out, at least in the minds of the people who run the small, private Georgian Country Day School. After a meeting of the school board, Alex was given an ultimatium: Withdraw or face explusion.
Not for cross-dressing, of course. Not for being gay. Alex says he's not homosexual. No, the boy was cited for wearing a tongue ring.
A classmate and friend in whose home Alex occasionally had spent the night said her pal (whom she still thinks of as female) was good-natured and harmless, not causing any sort of problem.
The friend's mother, a drama teacher at the school, said she popped unannounced into her daughter's room the first couple of times Alex stayed over, just to be on the safe side.
"They'd be sitting there doing hair or painting nails, and I said to myself, 'This is a girl,'" she said.
Granted Alex's aberrant dress might have a
posed a problem for school officials trying to maintain a dress code, it
strikes me as a problem that could have been handled in a high school of
50 kids. That is, if anyone wanted to handle it. Instead, the officials reacted
as though to a threat, and I ask again: What could they have been afraid
of?
What are gay-bashers afraid of? What are the
benevolent, let-us-fix-you, born again homophobes afraid of? What are those
of us who consider ourselves enlightened, but who still get a little uneasy
in the presence of the obviously gay, afraid of?
Surely, we don't fear for our physical safety;
we don't imagine that people like Matthew Shepard or Matthew McLendon are
going to beat us up or rape us. We don't think they are going to tempt us
into homosexuality. I don't even see how we can look at some girlish boy
and see sin. What are we so afraid of?
The fear may be waning. Shepard is dead, of
course, and one Wyoming man was heard to say that, as a gay man, he should
have expected such treatment. But the outpouring of students at the University
of Wyoming shows another--I suspect more typical--view of things.
Similarly, while officials at the Georgian
school were having their conniptions over young McLendon, the boy's schoolmates
where rallying in his defense. Most members of his class--including some
of the boys--wore bows in their hair as a token of protest.
Can it be that we are, in spite of ourselves,
raising a generation of young people whose heads are on just a little bit
straighter than our own? Can they have been listening to the tolerance we
preach and ignoring the bigotry we try to mask?
The Georgian Country Day School handbook
admonishes the students to accept "diversity in opinion, culture, ideas,
behavorial characteristics, attributes or challenges."
You suppose those kids actually take it seriously?
Nothing more about Alex was in the press.
If Alex reads this, we would really like to know how things turned out.