“She’s very self-aware of what’s going on. She doesn’t like being made to go to the clinic,” Smiley said. “Natashia’s kind of holding back and that’s not like her.”
Smiley said Natashia is not being bullied, and that her classmates don’t even know she’s transgender.
“No one would know that Natashia is actually a boy, no one would know,” Smiley said.
Six years ago, Smiley gave birth to identical boys. Now, she has a boy and a girl after last year, Smiley said her then-son asked something that shocked her: ” ‘When’s the fairy going to come and take my penis away?’ I had no idea what to say.” This led Smiley to take Logan to a school psychologist and a gender specialist before getting the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. “She went from Logan to Natashia just like that, smoothly, very smoothly,” Smiley said.
The Eaton City School Dstrict issued a statement on the bathroom issue: “The school respects the rights of transgender students and also respects the rights of all students, including basic expectations of privacy. Ultimately, this difficult issue will be decided not by the Eaton Board of Education, but by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. When clear direction is provided by the courts, our school will follow that direction.”
Smiley said she doesn’t want the district to delay. “This is a child. And she’s not going to school to sexually assault someone or anything like that. She’s going to school to learn. It doesn’t matter where she goes to the bathroom. … She is who she’s supposed to be. You can’t make someone be who they’re not.
She has this whole back story of before she came to us as Natashia, she picked out the name, she knew exactly how she wanted to spell it so it’s her, it’s who she is, and every parent needs to realize that with their kids.”