Eleven-year-old Crystal is a geography nerd, loves making candy bracelets, and plays the trumpet, all pretty typical interests for her age. She is also transgender.
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Her story is now being told in the short documentary Crystal: Story of a Girl From Texas, which has played at film festivals and just went live on YouTube (the video is embedded in this story as well).
Her mother, Beth, decided to take Crystal and her cisgender brother out of Texas after the state outlawed gender-affirming care for trans minors (in 2023), having previously threatened to investigate families who supported their trans children for supposed child abuse. Seeking a more affirming and safe environment, they moved first to Illinois and are now looking for a home in New England. Crystal’s father, likewise supportive, has stayed in Texas for work.
Beth — the family’s keeping last names and exact locations confidential — knows there might be repercussions to coming out with Crystal’s story. But, she says, it’s the right thing to do.
“I was taught to stand up to bullies,” Beth tells The Advocate. “I was taught to speak up and to not stand by whenever someone is being hurt. I have a hard time staying quiet whenever I see people being hurt.”
Those bullies include right-wing politicians such as Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed the gender-affirming care ban into law and ordered the investigations (most of the latter are now blocked by courts). Donald Trump is on the bullies list as well, of course.
Beth connected with Michelle Mower, the director and producer of the documentary, in 2022 when Mower was making a series of ads for Mothers Against Greg Abbott, who was then running for reelection (he won). “We wanted to certainly feature a mother who had a transgender child, because even in 2022 when we filmed that, we knew that [the ban] was going to be,” Mower says. Some Democrats wanted to take Beth and Crystal out of the ad campaign, which Mower did not do, and that convinced her to make the film, as she realized that even liberals don’t always understand the situation of families with trans children.
“I had never met a transgender child that I know of prior to meeting Crystal, and after working with Beth and Crystal on that commercial, I obviously fell in love with Crystal because it's impossible not to fall in love with her,” Mower says. The filmmaker also understood “that Crystal’s just a little girl, like any other little girl,” she says.
The documentary, made when Crystal was 10, depicts her love of feminine clothes and her pink bike, along with her obvious intelligence and her passion for geography. In the film, her father says he knew he had a daughter when she told him. Beth recalls, both in the film and her Advocate interview, that Crystal knew she was a girl early on.
“We finally figured out what was going on by the time that she could talk,” Beth says in the interview. For one thing, Crystal wanted “blingy shoes,” but Beth was reluctant to buy them because she worried Crystal would be bullied for wearing them.
“So I pushed back on a lot of it for quite some time,” Beth says. “You know, we would make concessions, where she was able to get blue or black shoes, and we would get hot pink shoelaces, or she would have some bright, colorful socks that made her feel good.” But right before Crystal entered kindergarten, her parents got her into counseling and talked to doctors and a psychologist about her identity. The decision to affirm her “was not an overnight decision,” Beth says. “It was a long, drawn-out thing.”
She also makes clear what gender affirmation means for a child Crystal’s age: social only, letting her wear the clothes she wants to and use her chosen pronouns, allowing her to talk honestly to her doctors, and generally recognizing her as the girl she is.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Crystal's brother, now 10, is "ride or die" for her, Beth says, and she also has supportive grandparents. Mower recalls the reaction to them when screening the film for a largely LGBTQ+ audience in Los Angeles last year. “When it gets to the point where Beth’s mother-in-law and father-in-law, who are just [the most] Texas salt of the earth people you could find, get on-screen and you hear them with their Texas twang saying, ‘Well, I will do anything I can to get rid of those idiots up in Austin,’ the whole place went nuts. They absolutely love seeing this. This older Texas couple basically say that they support their transgender granddaughter and that they’re going to fight for her by doing everything they can to get rid of the people who are trying to make her life harder. And really, they were the stars of the film in Los Angeles.”
Beth and Mower push back on the notion, held mostly by right-wing Christians, that supporting trans people and affirming their identity is somehow against God’s will. “The number one thing God told us to do was to love one another,” says Mower, the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister. “Love one another. And you don’t have to understand what Crystal’s going through, but you do have to love Crystal. … Too many people who are religious leaders and political leaders who call themselves Christian are doing real, irreparable harm to children like Crystal.”
Beth adds that anti-trans activism is a perversion of Christianity. “I am so cool with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,” she says. “I am not cool with this Jesus from Mar-a-Lago.”
“This is not something that we chose for our daughter, or anything like that,” she continues. This is just who she is, and she is thriving as long as we support her in being her best self. Even throughout all of this, she’s still making straight A’s and making friends and happy, and she’s gotten really big into candy these days, making all these bracelets and key chains and everything else. And she’s in band. She plays the trumpet. She's still a geography nerd. I think she should play Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader with Trump. Because I think she wins.”
“She would wipe the floor with Trump if he ever played that game with her,” Mower adds.
They note that we need to educate not only Republicans, though, but even some Democrats. “There are people in the party that are willing to sacrifice us for some other thing,” Beth says. “I think that there’s an importance in focusing on willingness to discuss policy, but we’ve got to take people off the table. People are not debatable.”
Crystal smiling on her pink bike Courtesy Park Place Productions
Crystal smiling on her pink bike Courtesy Park Place Productions
