When sophomore Tony Leppert, 16, started telling his friends and family to start referring to him using male pronouns, like “he” and “him,” the transgender sophomore faced some pushback.
“I’ve had people look at me and tell me they are never going to use my preferred name/pronouns because I will ‘never be a man',” he said. “It's definitely been hard but if it means I might be comfortable with myself someday then it’s totally worth it.”
The challenge of coming out transgender in a conservative Indiana suburb 20 miles from Indianapolis was eased for Leppert by the community he found at school. Fishers High School, with a student body of 3,300, has an active LGBTQ club and two new single-stall bathrooms for transgender students. This is the right environment, advocates say, for the 19 percent of the student body who identified as transgender in a survey of 2,000 students.
[For more of this story, written by Hannah Faith Sullivan, go to http://womensenews.org/2016/05...in-trans-acceptance/]
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