Bill Plaschke writes: he steps into his new world, one filled with transparent hope and absent of suicidal despair, there is only one occasion when Jake Hofheimer dares to look back.
It is when he is coming to the plate for the New Roads School baseball team.
Behind him, a dozen or so teammates inevitably will be rattling the chain-link dugout fence with cheers of encouragement, their clatter showering over him like a beautiful symphony.
It is the sound of belonging. It is the sound of freedom.
“C’mon boy!” they shout. “You can do it, man!”
Hofheimer, a 17-year-old junior second baseman and outfielder, is a transgender male who celebrates in the truth that he has finally found his team.
“When they’re banging on that fence and calling my name, that’s when it hits me,” Hofheimer said. “I’m just one of the guys.”
Until he enrolled in the small Santa Monica prep school nearly three years ago, Jake was Emma, a girl whose feelings of being trapped in a hostile body led to depression and a suicide attempt, by hanging. When he arrived at New Roads in the middle of his freshman year, with family support and classmate awareness, he changed his first name, began living life as a boy, and decided the natural next step would be on a playing field…
He doesn’t throw well, so they position themselves closer to catch his tosses. He is still figuring out how to hit, so they loudly cheer for him when he’s batting as if trying to coax the ball to hit the bat…
His mother Lisa, who works for a private charitable foundation, and father Josh, a lawyer, picked up on oddities that they later learned were clues.
One night, Jake looked at his mother and said, “Mommy, I think God is sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl.”
Later, Josh and Lisa were having trouble convincing Jake to wear a dress to temple…
