The Crying Game

Growing up on the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona, little boys play basketball, torture their younger sisters, and try to emulate their fathers.

Everson played with dolls and wore his mother's makeup.

Not much has changed for Everson since elementary school. Two years ago, at 15, Everson got his own cosmetics, accentuating his pouty, pink lips with a thick border of lip liner. He grew his hair long, plucked his eyebrows pencil-thin, and started wearing clothes made for teenage girls.

Now, as "Francessica," a 17-year-old doe-eyed, pre-op male-to-female transgender with a bony frame and wavy black hair, living with her parents and six siblings just north of Window Rock, Arizona, she turns tricks with straight guys on the "rez." The men pick her up hitchhiking, paying $30 for a blowjob from a girl they never know is actually a boy. But Francessica prefers to hitch rides with truckers heading west on Interstate 40, all the way to Los Angeles, where she can spend a couple weeks making three times as much as she does on the Navajo Nation.

She goes back home the same way, to a family she says is apathetic and cold. (They refused to talk for this story.)

Sometimes, though, Francessica wishes the semi would take a detour south to Phoenix.

"Nobody here has any money," Francessica says, standing on the banks of a vast but shallow pond near her family's home in the shadows of sacred Frog Rock. "I've given away more freebies on the reservation than I want to."

Francessica wants to move to a big city where other Native American "T-girls" work the streets, like Albuquerque, Denver, Minneapolis, and especially Phoenix, once she's finished with high school.

Her transgender friends, Demetria and Alisa (formerly Donovan and Darrelvon, respectively; all three asked that only their first names be used), plan to do the same.

Demetria graduates in May from Many Farms, a boarding school about an hour away from her parents' house in the village of Sawmill. Alisa's got another year after that. And Francessica's got two years left at Navajo Pine High School.

All three say they want a college education. But they've resigned themselves to working on the street to make ends meet.

"The queens in Phoenix make so much money," Demetria says, as a gust of wind makes the below-freezing air blowing off the pond feel even colder. "[Working as a prostitute] isn't what I really want to do, but I don't want to struggle, neither."

Being raised on the reservation -- where comparisons to the Third World are apt until you notice the satellite dishes and new Ford F150s -- has made them despondent and reckless.

The Navajo Nation is littered with dilapidated houses, squeezing families of a dozen or more into two-bedroom shanties falling apart from the foundation up. DirecTV gets disconnected fast, and the new trucks are often repossessed not long after they're purchased.

There's no gaming on Navajo land, to mitigate the financial circumstances -- although it's coming in the next year or two -- but there is an under-the-table economy: rugs and jewelry, sold but not declared.

Alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant, even though the rez is "dry," with liquor possession and distribution having been outlawed here since 1977. If the girls can't score booze from the bootleggers, they pursue other options.

"We'll drink whatever we can up here," Francessica says. "Cough syrup, Listerine, hairspray."

And, of direct consequence to girls like Francessica, Demetria and Alisa, while the Navajos (as well as most other North American tribes) once respected and revered transgenders -- medicine men used to refer to them as "chosen people" who could share their wisdom living as both a man and a woman -- that romantic folklore of ubiquitous tolerance is no more. Homophobia, along with Western Christian conservatism, has crept into the Navajo Nation, as well as other tribes in Arizona -- Apache, Pima, Tohono O'odham, Hopi.

Francessica's parents are no different, their daughter says.

"My parents are embarrassed of me. They hate me," she says. "They just want me to turn 18 so they don't have to take care of me no more and they can kick me out."

Compounded, conditions on the rez make the girls (they call themselves "queens," "TGs" or "T-girls") flee for the mean streets of Phoenix, where they believe urban attitudes will treat them more kindly -- and profitably.

There are some who have been there already, who made that long journey from the reservation to the city. They, too, heard older queens "glam it up a bit," says Crystal Mattias, a Tohono O'odham transgender who worked as a prostitute for four years. She's now an administrative assistant at a medical clinic in San Carlos, on the Tohono O'odham reservation near Tucson.

It doesn't take long to see that working on the street isn't such a glamorous life.

"When you leave the reservation and come to the city to work the street," Mattias says, "you lose yourself. You get your spirit stepped on."

Even worse, some have been shot, stabbed and beaten to death. Two confirmed murders a few years ago -- and rumors of more, according to some girls who used to work on Van Buren -- have scared many off the street.

And a local Native TG outreach agency -- the only one in the country -- has given others some small hope that there are options besides working as prostitutes. A Native American transgender beauty pageant earlier this month rallied support for the queens, even from the mainstream gay community, which in the past hasn't exactly co-existed harmoniously with the T-girls.

One former bartender at a central Phoenix gay bar says the staff used to refer to the Native American queens as "WeHopis" -- "as in, 'We hoping we can get a ride home,' or, 'We hoping we can get laid,'" he says.

The jokes turned into violence, and, according to Phoenix police, there have been dozens of reports of assaults and threats between gay men and the Native American TGs in the past several years. The action's calmed considerably, as the TGs have left the streets. The Native American Pathways Prevention Project and its outreach coordinator, Trudie Jackson, deserve much of the credit.

But just as the project is making headway, it could be shut down by the end of the year. A large chunk of the project's federal grant money expires on December 31.

Which is bad news for girls like Francessica, Demetria, Alisa, and other Native American transgenders emerging from their fractious homes back on the rez and migrating to Phoenix, looking for something better.

"Most of the girls come to the city looking for inner peace," Crystal Mattias says. "But they won't find it so easy."

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Transgenders have a long, celebrated history in Navajo culture. That much is agreed upon by Tribal Council members and anthropologists alike.

But perceptions have changed.

Wesley Thomas, an anthropology professor at Indiana University-Bloomington, has written a half-dozen essays on Native American gender and sexual identity, published in academic journals from institutions including UCLA and the University of Illinois.

As a Navajo born and raised on the reservation in Crownpoint, New Mexico, Thomas' focus has been the historical and present-day role of transgenders in Native American culture, particularly his own tribe.

"I became interested in the topic when I noticed some Navajo men dressing up as women, dancing in traditional winter ceremonies," Thomas says. "I wanted to know why."

While he's found that most every other American tribe has issues with homophobia and intolerance for its own transgenders, who just like Navajos are moving to urban areas "looking for safety and security," Thomas says it's the Navajo Nation that is least tolerant.

Thomas, who is gay but coyly says that's not a term used in his culture, is well-known (and largely disliked) in Window Rock and throughout the Navajo reservation. Most of the politicians and medicine men familiar with Thomas vehemently disagree with his interpretation of the history of transgenders in Navajo society.

The basic story, though, is not disputed.

Navajo male-to-female transgenders were once referred to as "nadleeh," which literally means "a constant state of change." According to Thomas, they were well-regarded by their community for centuries, appointed by medicine men as "chosen people," having the benefit of living life as both a man and a woman.

They've also been known as "two-spirits," a convenient Western term that became popular -- at least academically -- in the 1980s.

The story of the nadleeh originated not long after Navajo creationism. First Man and First Woman, the Navajo version of "Adam and Eve," were separated by a river, as the story goes, after a disagreement between the two over women's liberation. Each gender kept to its own side of the river, and after some time, men were forced to appoint some of their own to perform the so-called duties of women, such as cooking and cleaning.