Meet Bobbie Simpson. Photo by R.V. Scheide
Bobbie Simpson, 44, doesn’t remember large portions of her childhood, but she knows she identified as female when she was in grade school.
“I felt my body was not my own since before I was 10,” Simpson explained, peering at me through tinted heart-shaped lenses as we sipped beverages at From the Hearth on Churn Creek Road in Redding last week. “I was always afraid to express how I felt.”
Wearing a loose-fitting azure blouse, an electric purple dress, a two-tone black-and-orange wig parted down the middle, earrings, and fire-engine red fingernail polish, Simpson seemed completely at ease with herself as she recounted her tumultuous youth.
Born a boy, Simpson recalls gravitating toward girls for friendship on the playground at an early age. She got picked on by the boys but didn’t tell anyone.
“I was quiet, I put up with things, I was an easy target,” she said, noting that she attended 14 different schools while she was growing up, thanks to her dad’s job with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. They bounced around from Colorado to Arizona to Hollister to Lewiston to Redding by the time she was 14.
Simpson’s parents weren’t abusive but were unaware of her inner turmoil. She remembers shutting down as if her feelings and actions were disconnected from her body. “I lost large chunks of time, six hours to a day, to six months.”
Going through puberty — what she remembers of it — was a nightmare. Male clothing made her feel uncomfortable. She couldn’t look at her face in the mirror. She vacillated between compulsively washing her hands and not bathing at all. She had one friend, and his house and her home were her only two safe spaces. She grew her hair long and dreamed of dressing up as a girl on Halloween. She never did.
When Simpson was 14, a therapist diagnosed her with Dissociative Identity Disorder. DID, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is not a congenital condition. Instead, it is a serious mental illness caused by severe prolonged abuse, usually during childhood. The Mayo Clinic offers this useful primer on dissociative disorders:
“Dissociative disorders are mental disorders that involve experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions, and identity. People with dissociative disorders escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy and cause problems with functioning in everyday life.
“Dissociative disorders usually develop as a reaction to trauma and help keep difficult memories at bay. Symptoms—ranging from amnesia to alternate identities—depend in part on the type of dissociative disorder you have. Times of stress can temporarily worsen symptoms, making them more obvious.”
When Simpson first entered therapy at 14, she says she had as many as 32 different alternative identities or alters, male and female, many of them young children. She was also diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder, which explained her aversion to mirrors.
Even though Simpson identified as female and was also struggling with gender dysphoria, which is not considered a mental illness, her therapist elected to treat the far more serious condition of DID.
Simpson’s therapist helped her reduce the number of alters and arrange the remaining identities in a system to help Simpson navigate her life. Her therapist compared DID to baking a cake. Everything’s there, you have flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, all the different ingredients in separate bowls, but you can’t mix them together, so you can’t bake a cake.
“But can you function and live your life?” Simpson said. “That’s what’s important.”
By the time she was 18, Simpson was managing her own life relying on a system of alters that includes two female and two male identities. While Simpson feels the Bobbie personality represents her true self, it would be two decades before she socially transitioned to female.
After her father was killed in a drowning accident, Simpson, who had always fantasized about being married with children when she grew up, quickly found herself engaged and married to the woman who’s still her wife today.
“We didn’t tell her about the DID when we first met,” said Simpson, who uses plural pronouns when referring to her alters. “We kept it to ourselves.”
One day Bobbie’s wife noticed she was texting people using feminine pronouns and Bobbie came clean.
“That’s us,” Bobbie told her wife, referring to her alters. “Do you know about multiple personalities?”
Her wife took it all in stride, and today they have two sons, 14 and 8, who attend or have attended schools in the Gateway Unified School District.
Bobbie Simpson and her youngest son.
Several years ago, when the 8-year-old was a toddler, he went through a phase of shedding his clothes as soon as they were put on. On a whim, his parents threw a dress on him and he suddenly stopped shedding his clothing. Today, the 8-year-old occasionally wears a dress or leggings to school. When he first asked his parents for permission to do so, Simpson asked him if he was afraid his classmates would think he was a girl. “I’ll just tell them I’m a boy,” her son said matter-of-factly.
The school has been totally accepting of their son’s gender-nonconforming behavior. One administrator even checked with the parents to make sure their dress-wearing son identifies as a boy. He’s a boy, they confirmed, a boy who just happens to wear clothing decorated with unicorns to school every once in a while.
About four years ago, Simpson, while reflecting on her own reluctance to wear female attire in public, and her gender-nonconforming son’s ease in such matters, complained to her wife that she wished she could be more like their son and wear the attire of her choice in public all the time.
“Why can’t you?” the wife said with her typical unconditional acceptance.
Thus began the odyssey of Simpson’s social transition to female at age 40. The couple began making weekly trips to Goodwill, where Simpson picked out blouses and dresses that suited her own sense of feminine style.
“I like shopping, I like clothes,” Simpson said. “I made that first step, I got some shirts, and started dressing up.”
She began by dressing up at home and then graduated to selected public outings. At first, she resisted going to school functions dressed as herself for fear of embarrassing her sons, but they were accepting of her new look as well. Except for one deranged street preacher who followed Simpson and her family around at WalMart muttering Bible verses until an employee intervened, she’s had relatively few uncomfortable encounters.
“I always feel like I’m being scrutinized, but no one has given me a bad time,” she said. “This is my first year fully expressing my true self and in general people have been very kind to me. It’s very liberating. It’s OK to be yourself. This is the way I like to dress. I can do that now. I wish I had done this way earlier.”
Some people can’t accept Bobbie’s true self
Shasta County Board of Education Trustee Authur Gorman leads the local charge against transgender students.
There are, of course, some people in Shasta County who would deny transgender people like Bobbie Simpson any positive affirmation and the relief it might bring to a complex human condition. This applies especially to trans and nonbinary students in the K-12 setting. Last November, a handful of Shasta County school board majorities were captured by candidates who ran against “the woke agenda,” including the Gateway Unified School District, where Simpson’s sons have attended classes, as well as the Shasta County Board of Education.
The so-called woke agenda includes anti-discrimination laws that protect transgender and nonbinary individuals. Leading the charge against them locally is Shasta County Board of Education trustee Authur Gorman, a devout evangelical Christian, and an antivax activist. Gorman’s first act after being elected last November was to advise Shasta County Office of Education administrators, teachers, and employees to break federal and state anti-discrimination laws regarding transgender students.
According to Gorman, it’s OK to not address transgender students by their preferred name, a practice known as deadnaming.
“Gender expression expressed by the student that is fluid does not need to be followed by the staff or anyone in the school,” Gorman said at a board meeting in December. “If you have a personally held belief that is different from the gender issue you are not subject to participate.”
Gorman did not respond to A News Cafe’s repeated requests for comment on this story.
Administrators, teachers, and school employees who believe they have a religious right to harass transgender students by not using their preferred name and pronouns should be advised that Gorman is not an attorney and federal and state law on the use of preferred pronouns in public education is hardly settled, with courts siding both for and against educators who refuse to use preferred names and pronouns.
For example, conservative libertarian legal critic Eugene Volokh notes that even if a “free exercise” of religion argument is accepted by the court, a government institution may still have the right to fire you for not following workplace directions. Those seeking to make a compelled speech doctrine case for deadnaming trans students will have to prove the public’s interest in preventing discrimination against transgender and nonbinary people is trumped by their freedom of expression. That’s a heavy lift according to this legal essay.
Nevertheless, the Republican Party has declared cultural war on the transgender community.
According to the ACLU, more than 100 bills directly attacking transgender people have been introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures since 2020. These bills seek to deny gender-affirming health care to transgender minors, prevent transgender female students from participating in girls’ sports, prohibit transgender people from changing the gender on their driver’s licenses, and block transgender individuals from accessing public restrooms that conform to their gender.
One bill recently introduced in Montana forbids disciplining students who purposely misgender or deadname their transgender peers. If passed, the right to bully transgender students will be codified in Montana state law.
There has also been a flurry of legislation banning minors from attend drag queen shows.
Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Idaho, and Utah have collectively introduced scores of anti-trans bills and there are no signs that Republicans plan to let up on this ongoing crusade. In the GOP’s official response to President Joe Biden’s state of the union speech last week, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that the assault on the transgender community will be front and center as the 2024 campaign season heats up.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is as anti-transgender as they come.
“I’m the first woman to lead my state,” crowed Sanders, the former Trump White House press secretary. “He’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
According to Sanders, who, like most members of the religious right, believes gender doesn’t exist outside the biblical male/female binary, you’re a member of the woke mob if you accept the current scientific consensus that gender identity occurs on a spectrum and involves more than just the biological sex at birth.
As the Scientific American pointed out in an article titled “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia,” the study of human sexuality isn’t limited to who has XX chromosomes and who has XY chromosomes. Thanks to the fields of genetics, neurobiology, and endocrinology, we’ve gained more knowledge about “the body and the brain and the hormones betwixt” and how these elements shape who we are.
As this knowledge has come to be accepted, more people have recognized they are transgender or nonbinary. The Pew Research Center reports that 5 percent of young adults under 30 in the United States say they are transgender or nonbinary. In total, transgender and nonbinary adults comprise 1.6 percent of the population; 44 percent of those polled by Pew said they know a transgender or nonbinary person, up from 37 percent in 2017.
Another Pew survey found that 64 percent of Americans agreed that transgender people should be protected from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces. At the same time, the number of adults who unscientifically claimed that gender is determined at birth rose from 54 percent in 2017 to 60 percent in 2022.
These seemingly conflicting results are reflected in a 2021 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health of nearly 10,000 transgender and nonbinary adults. The study found that individuals who socially transitioned as children and adolescents benefitted from expressing their true gender identity just as much as the vast majority of individuals who transition as adults like Bobbie Simpson.
However, individuals who transitioned as children and adolescents were also far more likely to have been bullied and harassed in the K-12 setting, especially in regions hostile to transgender rights. Bullying and harassment can cancel out any positive gains made from socially transitioning as a child or an adolescent, although the study cautions that fact alone should not be used to prevent transgender minors from socially transitioning.
For transgender individuals, changing personal names and pronouns along with clothing and hairstyles is part of the nonmedical social transitioning process. Affirming the transgender student’s new gender identity, including using the student’s preferred name and pronouns, reduces the anxiety and discomfort caused by gender dysphoria, now known as gender incongruity, the sense that your gender identity doesn’t match your genitalia. It leads to better mental health outcomes than transgender students who are rejected by their family, friends, and schools and have higher drug addiction and suicide rates than most other demographics.
That’s why federal and California state law prohibits discrimination against transgender students in public K-12 schools, colleges, and universities, including purposely misgendering or deadnaming a trans student by not using their preferred name and pronouns.
Ten years ago, this writer was as skeptical as anyone about the emerging transgender rights movement and its freshly minted vocabulary featuring exotic terms like cisgender and slippery-sounding general neutral pronouns such as ze, hir, and hirs. I didn’t really get it until 2016 when I was substitute teaching at a local high school and a student approached me before I took roll call.
She was a trans girl and she wanted me to know that the name on the roll was not her preferred name. She gave me the feminized version of her original name. When I read her name during the roll call, I could see her beaming from across the room. I could tell that little bit of affirmation meant the world to her.
Ever since that day, I’ve considered myself a transgender ally.
Bobbie Simpson showing off some of her earliest shopping finds.
During the pandemic, Bobbie Simpson’s sons were on hybrid learning schedules that required Simpson to come into school once a week to meet with teachers. Simpson used the meetings to facilitate her social transitioning, introducing teachers, staff, and parents to Bobbie for the first time. As she has discovered on almost every step of her transgender journey, the rejection she feared in advance never materialized.
“The staff were just great,” Simpson said.
Female students of all ages were intrigued by Simpson’s attire. Once when she wore an outfit featuring tropical floral patterns, a young girl asked, “Why do you dress like that?”
“Have you seen Moana?” Simpson said, referencing the popular 2016 computer-animated musical set in Polynesia.
Before Bobbie began publicly expressing herself as female four years ago, such responsibilities were handled by Rich, one of Simpson’s four alternative identities or alters. Rich is Bobbie’s birth name and it remains her legal identity, so he formerly took care of official business. Fred, Bobbie’s second male alter, is the strong silent type, the protector. Nicole is the fact-gathering librarian—Simpson’s past employment includes stints as a library clerk.
Bobbie is the empathetic caretaker of “the little ones” and the dominant or “front” personality. This arrangement or system of alters is common in people with DID. It enables them to function in the real world. You can read more about Simpson’s alters on her personal blog.
“Most of the time I feel comfortable as myself, Bobbie,” Simpson said. “A lot of people around town recognize me.”
Photo of Bobbie Simpson’s alter identity, Rich.
Simpson’s transgender female status should be viewed as separate from her Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis. The discomfort from gender incongruity she has experienced since childhood is no longer considered a mental illness and has been greatly reduced by expressing herself as a female. Although Simpson suffers from dissociative amnesia and can’t remember large portions of her childhood, it’s highly probable that repeated bullying and harassment by her peers ultimately led to her DID diagnosis.
Earlier this year, a lesbian parent Simpson met at school informed her that the new majority on the Gateway Unified School District Board of Trustees, comprised of Cherrill Clifford, Elias Haynes, and his wife Lindsi Haynes, had fired the district’s superintendent and intended to replace him with Bryan Caples. Caples, who has been fired from the three superintendent positions he’s held during the past decade, ran against Shasta County Schools superintendent Judy Flores and the woke agenda last year and was soundly defeated by double digits.
Concerned that Caples, if hired by Gateway, might not protect the rights of transgender students as well as the rights of her two gender-nonconforming sons (the oldest son prefers “sparkly” feminine footwear) Simpson showed up at last month’s regularly scheduled Gateway board meeting to make her feelings known to the board and the public.
The meeting was packed, standing room only, as Simpson made her way to the podium. While a few audience members gave the woman with stubble showing through her makeup the side-eye, no unkind words were heard.
“My name is Bobbie Simpson,” she said. “I’m transgender and I have two sons in the Gateway District. I don’t want Bryan Caples to be the superintendent of this district.”
This month, Simpson attended the Shasta County Board of Education meeting, where trustee Authur Gorman, who advises teachers and staff to break state and federal anti-discrimination laws by deadnaming trans students, was in attendance. Her speech was not recorded but Simpson has recreated it to the best of her ability below.
“My name is Bobbie Simpson,” she said. “I have two students in the Gateway District. Since I was young I have not felt right in my body. Adolescence and puberty were a very awkward time for me. I respect all life and liberties protected by law. People should be able to express themselves however they like, as long as it does not harm others.
“The reason I dress this way is because it is comfortable. It feels right and it is who I am. I heard mention of restricting which bathrooms students are able to use. Look at me and tell me that I belong in a male-only space. No. I would not be comfortable nor would I feel safe. I would like to remind you that regardless of district policy, the right to choose which facility a person uses based on how one identifies or is most comfortable is protected by the California civil code. That is section 51 (b), according to the ACLU of California’s website.
“Regarding what is taught in classrooms, I feel that it should be focused on academics and it should be accessible to all students regardless of how they express themselves,” she finished.
At From the Hearth, Simpson still seemed astonished that her tribe, transgender people, remains under attack.
“I don’t know why some people can’t be nice and treat people with respect,” she said. “How do you get to pick someone else’s name; someone else’s identity? Why should you get to tell me or my son what we’re called?”
Simpson isn’t seeking perfection with her transition. She’s not taking any hormones and she’s not contemplating any surgical procedures. She has a naturally heavy beard that requires constant grooming to keep the stubble from showing.
“I hate facial hair, but I hate shaving too,” Simpson joked. “I decided to just socially transition, no medication or surgery. I have the support of people who care about me, my wife, my kids, my in-laws.”
Family support is often absent in the transgender world and Simpson is well aware of her good fortune. She and her wife remain happily married after 26 years together. They live in a comfortable home with their children and Simpson’s in-laws. Simpson currently does remote IT work. She says she’s a Sing Tao Buddhist, but the family occasionally attends Pilgrim Congregational Church. Simpson’s mother moved to the area two years ago and has started referring to her son as Bobbie.
Pronouns are fairly fluid in the Simpson household, given that Simpson has four alters, two of them male. The boys still refer to Bobbie as Papa. Bobbie Simpson often falls into the habit of using plural pronouns.
“The biggest block with some people is they don’t think of us as people,” she said. “Once they get to know me … well, here we are!”
Simpson said she intends to keep speaking out in support of transgender civil rights.
“I’ve decided to be an open book,” she said. “I’ll talk about anything DID or trans. I have no problems talking about it.”
She has no intentions of mimicking the opposition’s hate and bigotry.
“I like kindness,” she said. “I would rather kill them with kindness.”
