17 October 2023 , 00:34
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A transgender teenage girl who felt she had to hide her true self at home fled her militant mum - who went on to blame her English teacher for 'inspiring' her gender transition.
The 14-year-old trans girl, named only as Ren (a name she had asked school staff call her by) had been dropped at Grapevine High School, Texas, one morning, before deciding to head straight to a Greyhound bus station where she used her $150 to travel a far from home as possible.
Ren had been living a separate life at home, where her mum, named only as Sharla, refused to acknowledge her as a girl and instead said she had "gender confusion" and "gender dysmorphia". Meanwhile, Ren's English teacher, Em Ramser, had embraced Ren's gender transition and used her new chosen pronouns during school hours.
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However, when Ramser, 25 during her first teaching job, spotted Ren missing from her chair in class one day, she had a dreaded feeling Ren had gone missing. Ren was in fact 300 miles away on a bus hurtling down a West Texas Highway towards Denver, reports NBC News.
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Without a plan for what she would do after reaching Denver, Ren was unsure of her future but desperately trying to escape Grapevine. However, during a stop in Lubbock, Texas, Ren was removed from the bus by a police officer and taken to a government office where she was made to wait for her mother who swiftly drove her back to Grapevine.
In an NBC podcast entitled Grapevine, Ren's mother Sharla goes on to accuse her English teacher Ramser of 'influencing' her child after finding a book entitled 'The Prince and the Dressmaker' - a story of a prince who enjoyed wearing dresses.
Ren (not pictured) told how she felt forced to run away from home when her mother didn't accept her transition (Getty Images)The novel by Jen Wang tells the story of a prince who keeps his fashion hobby hidden for fear of rejection - however, when his secret is finally revealed, the prince runs away from home, only to return in the end and discover that his mother and father still love him.
It was one of hundreds of books Ramser kept in her classroom library and the book led to Sharla alleging in a complaint to the school principal that Ramser had made Ren read the book, and that its coming-of-age storyline had helped inspire her child to run away.
Ramser told the Grapevine podcast: "No, I didn’t make Ren read it. And also, if you notice at the end of the book, it says you should never run away. The book portrays it as being that your family will always love and support you."
A year after Ren’s attempt to run away, Sharla found women's clothing in Ren’s bedroom, sparking a new round of arguments at home - while her father, separated from Ren's mum, supported his child's decision to live as a woman.
Sharla again contacted her ex-husband claiming Ren was in desperate need of psychiatric care “to help with gender dysphoria." Eventually, when Ren turned 16, she and her father involved the court in her battle to flee her mother's home - with custody eventually being given to her father who supported Ren with her gender identity.
Teens from various areas of Kentucky gather in front of the Kentucky Capitol Annex building earlier this year in a trans-rights protestAmid the custody hearings, a judge in Oregon, where she was to live with her father, directed Sharla and her lawyer to refer to Ren only by her chosen name and female pronouns during court proceedings. In a social media post later, Sharla complained about being forced to call her child “she/her” and said she was “devastated.”
Before signing away custody, Sharla traveled to Oregon in June 2022 to see her child with Ren describing the brief meeting in her bedroom as awkward, claiming her mother repeated "all the things that she’d been telling me for years” about "God and biology."
Three weeks after Sharla gave up custody of Ren — the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees convened a special meeting before conservative candidates backed by a right-wing Christian wireless provider called Patriot Mobile had secured a majority on Grapevine’s school board.
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The school board later published a 36-page proposal banning lessons on systemic racism. It also gave school employees the right to refer to trans and nonbinary students by pronouns and names matching the ones they were assigned at birth — practices known as misgendering and deadnaming. The policy prohibited reading materials or classroom discussions mentioning the possibility that someone’s gender could be different from their biological sex.