Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Ken Copeland sprinkled powder liberally. After two sons, he was almost as deft at diapering as he was at software development. With his little girl, though, he hummed sweeter songs. Sometimes his mind leaped ahead, imagining the giddy slumber parties, the fights over décolletage at prom time, the feel of his daughter’s hand tucked in his arm as he walked her down the aisle in a froth of lace…
Laurie had been sure she was having a girl the first time, so they’d put up wallpaper with a pale-pink stripe and found a floral cover for the changing table. Two boys later, they finally had Grace.
As he pulled the Huggies closer and fastened the tabs, Ken fielded the 2 ½–year–old’s nonstop questions: “Daddy, why are there bumps on the ground?” He explained hills. She giggled, the gap in her front teeth showing, then asked another: “Why is the sky blue?”
He was just starting in on light waves when she interrupted in a small voice: “Daddy, why did God make me wrong?”
Ken pulled back. He looked into his daughter’s thick-fringed hazel eyes, turned as blue as his by the late-afternoon light. “What do you mean? You’re perfect!”
“I don’t have the right parts,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a boy.”
“Oh no you’re not,” Ken said, laughing. “You’re a girl, and you are perfect!”
“No,” she said flatly. “I’m not.”
He resnapped her romper, picked her up, and held her close. A memory cut in, unbidden: Grace as a newborn, delicate as a seashell, but with a stripe of peach fuzz running down her back all the way to her tailbone. He’d wondered then, for half a second, if there were some kind of hormone imbalance. But soon the fuzz fell away.
So would this silliness, he told himself. Grace was just trying to keep up with her brothers.
“Just for Aunt Jane’s wedding,” Laurie insisted, pulling the ivory linen dress over her squirming daughter’s head. “It matches your cousin’s dress.” Laurie had started to dread these battles of will. In their Christmas-card photo, Grace’s brothers grinned at the camera in navy V-neck sweaters. Grace was a tiny sad face above a Peter Pan collar, eyes downcast, fixed on the pleats in her hated brown gingham dress.
The Copelands called a pediatrician for advice. He said they needed to keep their daughter in dresses. Another pediatrician said to let her wear whatever she wanted; she’d sort it out later. They had her tested for chromosomes (normal female, XX) and hormonal deficiencies (none).
At age 4, she insisted on a bowl cut with bangs for her red-gold hair. “Shorter,” she commanded. “Shorter.” On her first day of kindergarten, one of her classmates asked, “Do you think you’re a boy?”
“No,” she shot back, “I’m not stupid.” But she hung out with the boys from that day on, sobbing when the boys went outside for gym class and the girls had to stay inside. Every time she was grouped with the other girls, a weird anxiety clawed at her stomach. You are not one of them, her brain whispered.
She dreaded the bathrooms at school, long horror chambers of white porcelain sinks and metal stall doors. Girls from other grades freaked out when they saw Grace in there, because they thought she was a boy. But she knew that if she went in the boys’ bathroom, kids from her grade would freak out, because they knew she was a girl. One day an older girl said, with maddening kindness, “Buddy, what are you doing here?” Grace gritted the answer between her teeth: “I’m a girl.” The older girl peered closer, skeptical, afraid to be made a fool.
From then on, Grace just held it until she got home.
In the evenings, Laurie and Ken took their Lab for longer and longer walks, comparing notes and discussing any bit of information Laurie could glean. Today, transgender identity is the new civil-rights frontier—on the coasts, at least. A California statute protects a transgender student’s right to choose which bathroom to use, and in February, Facebook added a “Custom” gender menu with more than 50 options. Even pop culture’s in transition, with increasingly prominent transgender writers, actors, photographers, musicians, superheroes (DC Comics created its first openly transgender character), and fashion models (Vogue Daily predicts “unprecedented gender fluidity on the runway” for fall). And in April, the U.S. Department of Education issued a guideline clarifying that Title IX prohibits discrimination again transgender students.
But in 2007, transgender issues hadn’t even made the talk shows yet. Chastity Bono hadn’t become Chaz. Transgender supermodels hadn’t hit the runway.
Now, the professional consensus is almost unanimous. Gender dysphoria—feeling trapped in the wrong body—is a medical condition requiring treatment. But the Copelands couldn’t even find a pediatrician versed in the subject.
“Why can’t she just be gay?” Laurie wailed. “I’d know how to handle that!” (Laurie’s sister had come out as a lesbian, and the whole family had switched political affiliations to support her.) But Grace was pretty clear: She was not gay. This was not a phase. She was a boy. She dreaded puberty like it was a hidden pit of quicksand. She couldn’t even stand the pronouns “she” and “her”; she cringed, invisibly, every time one landed on her.
One day, Grace noticed blood and panicked. This couldn’t be happening already. She was only 11! A kid in her sixth-grade class had asked, “Are you gonna get boobs?” and she’d shuddered at the thought. She didn’t want girl stuff flapping around on her body. She didn’t want to bleed or have sex with a guy or bear a child. She just wanted to be who she was.
That night, she was so terrified, Laurie had to lie in bed with her and hold her.
The next day, the doctor diagnosed a bladder infection. Grace hadn’t started after all—but her parents had seen just how scared she was. Laurie gave Ken a long, steady look.
He’d been hoping that puberty would ease the conflict, make it possible for their daughter to live happily as, maybe, a boyish woman. Keep the short haircut, fine. But let the line be drawn. This gray blur of misfit desire meant a life clouded with anxiety, a life he couldn’t imagine being warm and happy.
Laurie didn’t share those fears. She’d done her own agonizing: “I’m her mother; did I somehow cause this?” But she’d also done research and talked to other parents and joined the TransYouth Family Allies email list. That’s where, in 2008, she found out about hormone blockers. After she relayed every detail to Ken, they fell silent, each wondering the same thing.
Should they tell Grace?
Ken was months behind his wife in accepting all of this, and he wasn’t wild about interfering with puberty’s natural course. On the other hand, if they tried to force Grace to be who they wanted her to be, he was afraid they’d lose her altogether. She’d break with the family as soon as she could. And he didn’t even want to think about the stats on transgender suicides.
Laurie’s main worry was that Grace, restless and discontent, might act too impulsively. If she really was lesbian and not transgender, the blockers might suppress the truth.
Could a 12-year-old make this decision?
Did they have the right to make it for her?
At Grace’s best friend’s bar mitzvah, the friend’s uncle saw them horsing around and asked, “Now, who’s this?”
“Grace,” the friend said.
The uncle chuckled. “What’s his real name?”
“No, it’s Grace,” the friend said.
“Ha ha,” the uncle said, trying to play along. “Well, what’s your middle name, then, Grace?”
“Elizabeth,” Grace replied.
As fate and the place cards would have it, the uncle wound up sitting next to Ken and Laurie at dinner. Grace ran up at some point with a dispatch from the fun’s front lines. When she left, the uncle leaned toward Ken. “So you’re the guy who named your son Grace Elizabeth!”
“Yeah,” Ken said, and left it at that. His daughter’s behavior was so typically male, many of her own classmates assumed she was just a boy named Grace. “Why didn’t we pick ‘Chris’ or ‘Pat’?” Laurie would groan. But since family names are often given as first names in Ladue, the name didn’t even seem that improbable.
By now, Ken had taught his daughter how to tie a tie. He was working hard to think of her as a boy. But shifting wasn’t like flipping a switch: boy/girl. It felt like he had two distinct places in his brain where he stored information about boys and information about girls. Once you pin somebody in a category, it’s hard to remove them, he realized. Bit by bit, he was trying to reassign every piece of information about the child he’d thought of as his daughter.
“Dad, what did you think about transgender people before you had me?” Grace asked one evening.
Ken had never skirted hard truths with any of his kids. Besides, Grace had always been able to fend for herself. When she was 4, he’d teased her about something, and she’d tossed back, “Oh, Daddy, you know sarcasm’s lost on me.” (Obviously not, he thought.)
Since then, he and Grace had talked openly about every facet of gender. So Ken didn’t hesitate. “I just thought that they were weird,” he told her. “I thought they were strange.”
When he glanced up, she was sobbing. “You’re the person I trust more than anyone in the world,” she burst, gulping for air, her ruddy cheeks wet. “If you thought that, what does that mean about the people I’m going to meet and what they’ll think?”
She’d hit on the question that still plagued him: Who would Grace find to love her?
Other girls in Grace’s class were wearing training bras now, AAA cup, and giggling about how slippery their shaved legs felt between the bedsheets. Luckily, Grace was a late bloomer with a lean, athletic body. But soon her hipbones would widen and curve. Once that happened, it would no longer be possible to alter her anatomy. Or her destiny.
A few months before her 13th birthday, Ken and Laurie told her about the possibility of taking hormone blockers.
When they finished explaining, she looked up, her hazel eyes lit green and shining with relief. Yes, she wanted to try! This changed everything. She hadn’t wanted to “transition” until then; she’d met a few transgender kids, born female, who were just telling people they were male. To Grace, that just seemed lame. “What’s the point in lying to everybody?” she wondered.
Now, it wouldn’t be a lie. In January 2008, she started taking hormone blockers, to be followed by testosterone. Little by little, her body started to feel like hers. Or, rather, his. It was time to change that hated pronoun.
In June 2008, the Copelands flew to Philadelphia for a conference on transgender identity. Ken opened up to a few of the adult participants. “I’m afraid I’m allowing my child to become something that in 20 years he won’t want, and he’ll say, ‘Dad, why did you let me do this?’” he admitted. “And I worry about the emotional health of somebody going through life having to keep track of who knows and who doesn’t know their most intimate secret.”
One of the men nodded. “That’s difficult, having to manage your life and deal with your sets of friends that know and don’t know,” he said. “But it’s so much better than the alternative of living as the person you’re not.”
The words hit home, and Ken’s worries stopped banging around in different directions. As the last bit of wishful thinking dissolved, he turned grim, focused, and resolute. This was not something Grace could avoid or rethink. There was no way to protect him from it.
Gather up all the years of frustration, the deep sense of wrongness that colored a thousand details a day, the parents’ confusion and worry—and set it all aside. Compared to most transgender young people, Grace had it easy. At Spoede Elementary School and Ladue Middle School, kids had questioned her, occasionally prying in a direction that felt “weird, too intimate.” But it wasn’t bullying, just blunt curiosity, and the queries were easy to shrug off. When a boy gave her trouble for being in the guys’ gym class, her friends formed a phalanx. They didn’t quite understand it either (for that matter, neither did Grace), but they knew what friendship demanded. “Back off,” they told the boy, and he did.
The Copelands’ Baptist church had known and loved Grace since her baby days; that didn’t change. One relative did inquire, with urgent, lowered-voice concern, “Have you tried Christian counseling?” But in the end, the only truly daunting prospect was explaining the transition to Grace’s great-uncle, Bill Copeland, a staunch Baptist in his late eighties. For any topic, he had a tough-minded opinion ready in his pocket. Grace braced himself and started talking.
“Do what you need to do,” Bill said simply.
After that, Grace often sought out his great-uncle’s company. The two disagreed on most political topics and argued it out, swords sharp but laughter frequent. As they tested each other’s minds, the mutual respect deepened.
When the hormone treatment took full effect and Grace was ready to change his name, he chose “William.”
The spring before Will was to start ninth grade, Laurie called David Tabscott, his counselor at Ladue Horton Watkins High School, and explained the situation. Will had decided it was too hard to get his friends to call him anything but Grace, so he’d resigned himself to that, but he was still hoping for male pronouns. And he wanted to keep taking gym class with the boys. And he was worried, as always, about the bathroom.
“Why don’t you bring Grace up here, and I’ll get a key and show you every bathroom we’ve got,” Tabscott suggested, his voice easy. This was a first, in his decade at the school, but he wasn’t about to make it an unnecessarily big deal.
When they settled on a single-sex bathroom back by the pool, Grace visibly relaxed.
That September, Laurie called Tabscott again, hoping for a meeting with Grace’s teachers. Crazy busy with the start of the school year, Tabscott organized the meeting and told Laurie she could lead it herself.
“If you say ‘she’ or step over the pronoun, just keep on rollin’,” she told the group. “You can call him Will or Grace. A lot of the kids are used to him from middle school. Just treat him like any other kid.”
And so they did. Later that year, Will started taking testosterone, and it worked like magic: His shoulders broadened; his voice deepened; his hairline straightened; his jaw squared off.
He’d started high school a little shy, but by junior year, he was comfortable enough in his own skin to make everyone around him comfortable, too. In the student information system, his name was first listed as “Grace.” Then the entry became “William,” with no mention of Grace. Then “Grace” showed up in the nickname field.
“For some people, gender seems to totally define who they are,” Tabscott remarks. “For Will, it was, ‘This is who I am, whether I’m Will or Grace.’”
At Starbucks, Will and Laurie take turns reminiscing. How he loathed those dresses. How she tried to buy him a penis.
“I was in New Orleans with my sister, and I saw a sex shop on Bourbon Street and went in to ask,” she says. “There were some you could actually pee out of!”
Will winces. “It wasn’t right. It was like a dildo.”
“I was learning too, honey.”
“Well, you make it sound like I was picky!”
“And then he did all the research,” she says, turning to me, “and he found the right one.”
“There are prosthetics that look realistic and can be used for sex and stuff,” he explains, “and I’m getting one of those. It uses medical adhesive.”
I expected to avoid the question of genitalia altogether; activists excoriated Katie Couric for broaching that topic. But Will seems more comfortable with clinical issues than with the touchy-feely stuff. “There are two surgeries,” he volunteers. “One results in a regular-size but not really functional penis. And it requires really extensive surgery, with a skin graft and big scars, and I don’t know that it looks so real. The other surgery creates a very small penis that works but is hardly big enough for sex. So neither of those are something I’m interested in.” (He’s never bothered with “packers” that simply create a bulge: “It’s basically like a lacrosse ball in your pants. I feel like if anyone’s looking that hard at my crotch, that’s freaky anyway.”)
The bathroom thing, incidentally, sorted itself out in junior year. “I’d had a separate bathroom, but it was all the way at the end of the hall, and I just got tired of it and started using the boys’ bathroom,” Will says.
“Didn’t you go in with one of your friends?” Laurie says.
“I was walking with one of the guys, and he had to go. I said, ‘I’ll wait,’ and he said, ‘Just come in,’ and I think I just decided… There are still people it would be awkward to see in there, but—” He shrugs. You can only worry so long.
Will thinks going from female to male is easier—not surgically, but socially. It’s always been sexy for a woman to sleep in her boyfriend’s big shirt, I note; less so for a man to slip into a negligee. Parents often cherish tomboys, relieved that they’re not going to slick on fuchsia lip gloss at age 7.
Still, both Will and Laurie wish his transition had happened earlier, gone faster. The Copelands and another couple started a support group called TransParent—which meets regularly at St. Louis Children’s Hospital—so other families can have more information than they did.
“But I also think you are such a great guy,” Laurie says, her voice soft with affection, “and I just wonder if what you’ve been through has made you what you are.”
“I don’t really care,” Will tells her cheerfully.
He doesn’t care about all the politically charged language, either. “I just feel like I’m a guy. People don’t say ‘xe.’ I think ‘they’ is a more likely substitute, for people who feel like they’re in the middle and don’t identify as male or female.”
He strains to understand that middle. It’s the rationale for hormone blockers, after all: You’re buying a little extra time for a distinct gender identity to crystallize. “But for me, it was never a question,” he says. “I don’t know how you couldn’t know. I mean, gender is a spectrum, there are people who are more toward the middle and maybe there are people… I don’t feel the need to be supermasculine all the time, but based on how persistent and serious I was, I would guess I’m pretty far masculine.”
He has lived with a foot in each camp, though—in a society that divides gender into only two camps. I’m curious how he defines “masculine” and “feminine.”
“Masculine is tough and strong and sporty,” he says, “and feminine is frilly and likes clothes and painting nails.” His mouth quirks at the absurdity of his answer. “I don’t think it matters, really. The core of it is just who you see yourself as.”
He thinks a minute. “There’s definitely more drama with girls, more overanalysis. When my best friend and I are hanging out, it’s just playing a video game. We don’t need to be talking all the time. With girls, if they hang out with each other I know they are, like, talking or making brownies or watching a girly movie. Just interacting with them—everything is such a bigger deal. Which I think is part of the overanalysis thing.”
I ask what his sexual orientation is.
“Yeah. I like girls.” Yep, there it is: the bemused look of a straight man drawn to something that confounds him. When he started dating, he told his mother he just didn’t understand girls.
“Get used to it,” she said. “You never will.”
Will looks at the crowd—almost 300 kids, faculty members, and parents in Whitfield School’s auditorium—and reminds himself to speak slowly, not in a nervous rush. Senior Michael Alverson, who’s been Will’s best friend since kindergarten, is to introduce him. Famous for avoiding any opportunity for public speaking, Alverson does a lightning-round introduction: “Thank you for being here, and without any delay, here’s Will Copeland.”
Will cuts to the chase, too: “I was born with a male brain and a female body.” A slideshow plays behind him, flashing photos of a little redheaded girl; a little redheaded boy with identical features; the girl in an oversize navy blazer and trousers; the boy with soft, curvy bangs. As the child grows into her teens and a male identity settles on her face and body, Will outlines his transition, his parents’ support, and how, after the blockers and testosterone, he “no longer lived in fear of growing up and becoming a woman.”
Then Michael surprises his Whitfield friends by taking the mic. He describes how, on their first day of kindergarten, Will introduced himself as Grace, and how, yeah, that was weird, but he didn’t think much more about it. They became such good friends that his parents “sat the 6-year-old version of me down and tried to explain: ‘You know Grace is different, right?’ And I said, ‘Guys, I know. Grace is Grace.’”
Will returns to the mic, cuffing Michael lightly on the shoulder, and asks for questions. “I want you to feel comfortable asking anything. I’ve probably heard it before, so you can’t offend me.” He scans the bleachers. “C’mon, be brave.”
What if somebody didn’t have such supportive parents, a young man asks. A girl wants to know if he was ever bullied. A mother says she thinks people struggle with the link between transgender identity and sexual orientation, and he says there is no link; you can be transgender and straight or transgender and gay. A boy asks whether Will plans to be this outspoken in college.
“That’s a good question,” Will replies. “I’m not exactly sure yet.” He says that “at Ladue, everyone’s known me since I was a little girl in a dress. I’m excited for college, in that I’ll get to be Will; no one will know.” Except a friend from Ladue is going to the same college…and other kids from St. Louis…and now Frontline wants to interview him for a documentary… There’s no real anonymity these days, and Will knows it. He’ll have to feel his way every time he meets someone.
After the assembly, kids crowd around him, shaking his hand. The group’s too big for privacy anyway, so I sidle closer to eavesdrop on their questions.
A pretty young woman is telling Will she has friends at the university he’s chosen. With studied casualness, he urges her to look him up if she’s ever on campus.
At the Olivette Diner, a waitress brings Ken his bacon-and-egg sandwich and Will his sausage-and-egg sandwich without even asking. They have breakfast here together almost every morning. Ken leans back in the green vinyl booth and notices the changes in his son: the lean muscle, the bigger bones, the confidence, the ease. Will fits neatly, now, into the guy compartment in Ken’s brain.
They talk about college: Will’s been accepted to Tulane University and invited to be one of 15 Altman Scholars, focusing on international studies and business. When the elation wears off, they talk about other shared interests: physics and politics, squash and rock climbing.
Will’s brothers are “kind of girly,” he tells me later. “Well, not girly, but my oldest brother was always in theater and never played any sports, and the middle brother is just sort of nerdy, a computer-science major at Rolla. Really, really skinny.” He grins, well aware he’s stereotyping. Irony threads through any discussion of gender these days.
Ken’s decided there’s something wired into human beings, at least those of his generation, that needs to put somebody in a gender box with hard sides—like the old Samsonite suitcases that could bounce on the tarmac and still wouldn’t snap open and spill their contents.
“Remember the Saturday Night Live skit where everybody was obsessed with whether Pat was a guy or a girl?” he asks me. “When you meet somebody, one of the very first things you try to do is determine what their sex is, because it determines how you interact with them, what the social norms are with them. And when you see a big girl with masculine hands and a big Adam’s apple, it looks ‘wrong,’ and you have an immediate aversion.”
Assumptions are loosening fast, I point out. Ken speculates about current attitudes, how they’d break out. “I’d say 50 percent of people still think people who are transgender are freaks,” Ken says reluctantly. “A lot of people who are transgender do have emotional problems, and I think it’s mainly because they’ve gone through such anguish in puberty, growing into a body that’s basically not their self-image. So they have all kinds of emotional issues later, and I think it’s those emotional issues that other people key in on.”
Will, on the other hand, is turning out to be one of the least neurotic people on the planet. Ken’s no longer worried about his emotional health, or a life condemned to loneliness and constant anxiety.
“Maybe by the time he’s 35,” he says, “it won’t even matter.”
Click here to read about Kris Kleindienst and Jarek Steele. One changed gender; the other changed orientation. But they're still together.
