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November 8 - December 6, 2020
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2013
Sasha couldn’t say whether any of this was because they had Asperger’s, because, of course, they’d never not had Asperger’s. The only mind they’d ever been inside was their own.
“I think I might be … transgender?” she whispered to her therapist the next week. “I don’t think you know what transgender means,” her therapist replied. The bell that had been chiming inside her fell silent. She’s the expert, Samantha thought. It would be another year before she told anyone else.
Five years later, a handsome, apple-cheeked young man named Andrew would look back at that conversation as one of the most validating moments of his life. “It wasn’t that I was expecting Sasha to react poorly, because I know Sasha, and Sasha is easily one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and also one of the kindest,” he recalled. “But taking a risk like that and having everything be okay afterward felt so good.”
“For me at least, genderqueer includes an aspect of questioning,” Sasha explains. “The fact that I was questioning my gender meant that I was genderqueer.”
“I’m trying to get my head around it,” Debbie said two years after that first conversation. “I understand coming out as gay or even trans, but this is harder for me to understand.”
“Who are you attracted to? Do you have sexual feelings for men?” But that wasn’t the issue for Sasha. They weren’t all that interested in having sex with anyone, actually. And anyway, terms like homosexual or heterosexual made no sense if you didn’t identify as one gender or another.
still
Chicago lawyer named John P. Altgeld wrote in an 1884 book called Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims.
Altgeld was part of a movement headed by two prominent reformers, Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop, whose work led to the establishment of the nation’s first juvenile court, in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899.
John J. Dilulio Jr., a political scientist
who was then at Princeton, argued that we were seeing a new kind of juvenile criminal, utterly unlike the misbehaving teens of the past. He called them “super-predators.” “A super-predator is a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim without giving it a second thought,” he explained. And he warned that the numbers of these “fatherless, Godless, and jobless” teens were growing.
“As many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males,” Dilulio wrote in a 1996 article entitled “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours.”
Nationally, 58 percent of all incarcerated African American youths are serving their time in adult prisons.
Online forums seethed with outrage. To the Mother of the 16 year old who set the fire. You call that just joking around? Suppose some kid set you on fire, burned say 90% of your body. Would that be joking around? Your son needs life in prison! For attempted murder!
Many hate crimes, according to Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, a criminal-justice professor at California State University, Stanislaus, “don’t have as much to do with the victim as they do with the offender and their own insecurity—which of course is a lot of what’s going on with adolescents in general.”
“The proponents of hate-crime laws are liberals, and yet they are the ones who are the biggest critics of mass incarceration,” observes James B. Jacobs, director of New York University’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, and an expert on hate-crime laws. “So there are ironies piled on ironies. The remedy here is imprisonment, and prisons are the ultimate incubators of antisocial attitudes.”
“People have different habitats,” he explained. “Some people have it better than others. They grew up in good neighborhoods. Their family has jobs. They have good income. They don’t understand. Their life is so good, they think everybody’s life is good. They don’t understand the struggles people go through. I don’t know where you grew up at, if it’s like a low-income area, where there’s a lot of violence and crime. But if you grew up in a low-income
income area and all you see is crime and drugs? If you have family that does crime? You see it. It has an impact on you. If you’re around it a lot, it’s hard to do good.”
