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Today’s diversity read is one I had been looking forward to since meeting the author at one of the biannual SCBWI conference LGBTQ meetings a year ago. It doesn’t exactly fall into any of my categories, but boy, is it … Continue reading →

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In November 2009, Ariel Levy, a New Yorker writer, wrote an essay about the runner Caster Semenya ("Either/Or"). She was South African, a world champion, a "natural." She had a body built for speed, a body, Levy tells us, that got some whispers started:

Semenya is breathtakingly butch. Her torso is like the chest plate on a suit of armor. She has a strong jawline, and a build that slides straight from her ribs to her hips. “What I knew is that wherever we go, whenever she made her first appearance, people were somehow gossiping, saying, ‘No, no, she is not a girl,’ ” Phineas Sako said, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin. “ ‘It looks like a boy’—that’s the right words—they used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ Some even asked me as a coach, and I would confirm: it’s a girl. At times, she’d get upset. But, eventually, she was just used to such things.” Semenya became accustomed to visiting the bathroom with a member of a competing team so that they could look at her private parts and then get on with the race. “They are doubting me,” she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.

I remember reading this story front to back the day that issue of The New Yorker arrived. I felt compassion—that's what I felt—for a young athlete who was working hard and running fast and doubted. For a human being who'd had nothing to say about the nature of the body she'd been born with, who was living out the dream she had, who was being dogged and thwarted by questions. Caster Semenya was a runner. She had committed no crime. And yet there was her story—in headlines, in gossip. What were her choices, after all?

Later this year, I.W. Gregorio, a beloved physician, a former student of one of my dearest friends (Karen Rile), a joyous presence at many book launches and festivals, and a leading voice in the We Need Diverse Books initiative that has packed rooms at the BEA and the LA SCBWI, will launch a book called NONE OF THE ABOVE. This YA novel is about a high school runner—a beautiful girl with a boyfriend, a popular teen—who finds herself having this conversation with the physician who has examined her:

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"So, Kristin," Dr. Shah said, "In that ultrasound I just did I wasn't able to find your uterus – your womb – at all."

"What do you mean?" I stared at her blankly.

"I want you to think back to all your visits to doctors in the past. Did anyone ever mention anything to you about something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS?"

"No," I said, panic rising. "What is that? It's not some kind of cancer, is it?"

"Oh, no," Dr. Shah said. "It's not anything like that. It's just a...a unique genetic syndrome that causes an intersex state - where a person looks outwardly like a female, but has some of the internal characteristics of a male."

"What do you mean, internal? Like my brain?" My chest tightened. What else could it be?

Dr. Shah's mouth opened, but then she paused, as if she wasn't sure whether she should go on. I was still trying to understand what she'd said, so I focused on her mouth as if that would allow me to understand better. I noticed that her lip-liner was a shade too dark for her lipstick. "Kristin. Miss Lattimer," she said. Why was she being so formal all the sudden?

"I think that you may be..." Dr. Shah stopped again and fingered nervously at the lanyard of her ID badge, and at her awkwardness I felt a sudden surge of sympathy toward her. So I swallowed and put on my listening face, and was smiling when Dr. Shah gathered herself and, on the third try, said what she had to say. 

"Miss Lattimer, I think that you might be what some people call a 'hermaphrodite.'"

What do the words mean? What does the diagnosis tell Kristin about who she really is? How will it change her life, what medical choices does she have, who will love the "who" of her? These are the questions Gregorio sensitively and compellingly addresses as this story unfolds—bit by bit, choice by choice, reckoning by reckoning. It takes a physician of Gregorio's knowledge and skill to tell this story. It takes, as well, a compassionate heart, and Ilene has that in spades. Ilene has not written this story to exploit. She has written it so that others might understand a condition that is more common than we think, a dilemma many young people and their parents face.

We Need More Diverse Books, and None of the Above is one of them. I share my blurb for Gregorio's book here, and wish her greatest success as her story moves into the world.

Like the beloved physician she is, I.W Gregorio brings rare knowledge and acute empathy to the illumination of an anatomical difference—and to the teens who discover, in the nick of time, the saving grace of knowing and being one’s truest self. A book unlike any other.

— Beth Kephart, author of Going Over and Small Damages

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For the second time my artwork is part of Robert’s Snow: for Cancer Cure, a distinctive fundraiser consist of online auctioning more than 200 original pieces of art created on wooden snowflakes.
I received my wooden snowflake in the mail over the summer, right at the time I was finishing illustrations for a book and before my annual trip to visit my family in Mexico. But at last, late in August I was able to work in my snowflake.
I had been looking forward to the work, for I had a specific idea for this year. I was going to use one of my book characters as inspiration, Little Night, a book I painted while learning about the fierce fight for life of two Mexican families, the Varilla Cruz Family, and Asuncion’s’ family, whose mothers and one of the children were dealing with cancer and poverty.
The other part of my idea was that I wanted to create a music box—something new for me, but that I have seen before in the work of some of my artist friends.

At last the auction will begin this Monday, and as Little Night: See Me Shine, a music box, is about to be available for bidding, it came to my attention that the description posted by the Danna- Farber foundation has led to confusion about what my snowflake is and does. Here is the question that has prompted: Does Little Night: See Me Shine glow in the dark?

It does not. My snowflake is a music box. You twist the base of piece, and it cranks the mechanism that begins a broken tune. While the tune plays, the figure of the babe standing atop of the box turns around. The music was originally a popular Christmas song, but I altered the tune by taking apart the mechanism and breaking some teeth of the steel comb.
To give a further insight of how I make my snowflake, I put together this video that I created with the help of my artist fiends. My husband and son were the photographers, my friend Miguel Martinez created the music, and another friend of my provided the recording of the music box sounds.



And so why call it “See me Shine” if it does not shine?
I would say that the shine is in the eye of the beholder. My snowflake is a wish. A wish I have from my own child, my beloved son, as well for the Varilla Cruz children and Asuncion’s kids, which are five and have nobody else in the world but their mother. My wish for all of them is that they shine.
When I showed my writer’s group my snowflake and we discussed the name of my piece, one of them, my friend Jim, sent me this writing by Marianne Williamson, which tells it all so right:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And so here is my wish for everybody: Shine.

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