US, OK: Becoming Katie
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Becoming Katie
By Cary Aspinwall, World Staff Writer
Published: 5/8/2011
BIXBY - The lone memento of Luke Hill's unhappy existence hangs like a specter in his former bedroom, piercing blue eyes haunting from a 12-year-old portrait.
It's Luke at age 4, in a blue silk kimono, a glossy studio snapshot from when the family lived in Japan, during Dad's service in the US Marine Corps.
This is Katie's room now, and the picture of Luke hanging on her wall is the only one she'll allow her mother to display in the house.
Katie asked her mom to destroy the rest. She doesn't want to be reminded of Luke, his miserable existence as a puzzle piece that never fit.
Luke is just a memory in the minds of those who loved him, the blue-eyed ghost in the portrait.
Katie Hill puts on makeup inside her room in Bixby. Photos by ADAM WISNESKI/Tulsa World
Katie is flesh and bone, long hair and limbs, breasts and eyelashes. A happy 16-year-old who believes it's not her fault she was born into the wrong body.
And by burying Luke and becoming Katie, she has righted what nature made wrong.
'A child of darkness'
Jazzlyn Hill gave birth to four sons.
It never occurred to her that one of those boys might someday want to wear a bra or borrow her earrings.
She knew that something was bothering her son Luke, something that caused him to feel isolated from the other children, alone.
He started getting upset about having male body parts by age 4, Jazzlyn explained. She can remember her little boy pointing to his genitals, saying "Off, off!"
In a house teeming with testosterone, Luke never wanted to do typical boy stuff.
His dad, Randy Hill, served as a lieutenant colonel in the Marines and leads the ROTC program at Bixby High School.
"We need to prepare for the fact that our child will probably be gay," Jazzlyn would tell Randy, hoping she could help him adjust to the idea. Randy was a jock, athletic, and wanted a son to play football and catch with.
Luke would never be that boy. He would sit quietly with Crayolas and color.
"Just a lovable, quiet baby child," Jazzlyn said.
One who wanted to wear dresses, play with dolls and stay in the kitchen with Mom.
But so do a lot of little boys. It doesn't always mean they will grow up with gender identity issues.
Hill always felt that she was a girl trapped inside a boy's body. Last summer, she decided to take steps toward becoming Katie Hill.
Then, at age 10, her happy-go-lucky Luke turned into "a child of darkness."
He was depressed; he wouldn't socialize. He cried all the time.
They tried therapy, medications. Nothing worked.
"I couldn't get (Luke) to be happy," Jazzlyn said. "It killed me."
Once a tight bond, Randy and Luke's father-son relationship turned to oil and water.
Randy and Jazzlyn divorced, and things only got worse for their oldest child. They have one younger son, and Jazzlyn has two older sons from a previous marriage.
Luke was good at schoolwork but withdrawn and miserable in all other aspects of life. He wore a bulky black jacket and baggy jeans every day.
Looking back, Jazzlyn thinks he may have been hiding his body.
He was ashamed. Being a boy just felt wrong.
Luke started searching for the answer why.
The science of gender
In some languages, even inanimate objects are assigned genders.
As a society, we assign gender at birth, one of two rigidly fixed options: male or female?
Hill laughs while she tries on a bracelet with her mother, Jazzlyn, at Woodland Hills.
The reality is, some people grow up feeling like they never fit the gender listed on their birth certificate. Often, it starts at a tender age.
"Everybody knows their gender identity by age 3 to 5," said Dr Laura Arrowsmith, director of gender outreach for Oklahomans for Equality. "It's just one of those things we all have. It's born with us. It's not changeable."
Research shows that gender identity disorder may be a cognitive brain variation. A study published last year in the Journal of Psychiatric Research showed that brain scans of female-to-male transgender subjects more closely resembled those of male brains.
But science is still probing why it affects some people more than others - and how it presents itself as early as age 4.
Those with gender identity disorder feel fundamentally mismatched with their anatomic and genetic sex - their inner identity is either the opposite of their birth sex, or they have a sense of gender outside of female or male, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics "Textbook of Pediatric Care."
"It's not a choice. It's not a reaction to bad parenting. It's just the way we are," Arrowsmith said.
Arrowsmith, 61, lived most of her life as a man who felt like a woman. When she told her parents how she felt as a child, they tried to beat the girly longings out of their son.
"We're obsessed with rigid gender roles," she said. "And that's not the way it works, always."
She went to medical school, became a radiologist, married and had children. The feelings never went away.
It's estimated that about 40 percent of transgender individuals have attempted suicide, Arrowsmith said. Before she accepted her own feelings, she tried twice to kill herself.
Because they live as the most visible example of someone stepping outside of traditional gender roles, Arrowsmith said, they face discrimination at work, at school and in their own families.
Hill shops for clothes at Woodland Hills mall.
To protect themselves, many who go through gender-reassignment surgery decide to "go stealth" afterward - moving to a new place with a new identity after their transition, Arrowsmith said.
There are no concrete statistics on the number of transgender people in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Estimates on the number of transgender people range anywhere from 0.25 percent to 1 percent of the US population.
These estimates may be outdated and don't necessarily account for people who have not yet undergone, cannot undergo (for medical, financial or other reasons) or choose not to undergo gender-reassignment surgeries.
Rather than just two distinct categories, some scientists believe that biological gender occurs across a broader spectrum of possibilities.
Some people are born with male genitals but identify with a female gender, and vice versa. Some are born intersex, with both male and female organs or chromosomes.
Science has documented cases of women who have male chromosomes giving birth. But society gives two defined categories for birth certificates, driver's licenses, clothing styles, bathrooms and sports teams. Even newspaper birth announcements read simply: John and Jane Doe, boy. Sue and Steve Smith, girl.
Hill checks the mirror inside her room in Bixby.
Katie Rain Hill
"I was expecting (Luke) to sit me down and say, 'Mom, I'm gay,' " Jazzlyn recalled.
Instead, at age 15, Luke told her: "I'm not gay, Mom. I'm transgender."
Her reaction: "A trans-what? I had prepared myself for 13, 14 years that my son was gay. And now I'm thinking, 'Rocky Horror Picture Show'?"
They cried.
Jazzlyn's heart ached for her child. She knew this would be a difficult path in life. But she was worried that Luke might kill himself otherwise.
So she did what moms do when they see that the child they love is hurting: They fix it.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked her son. I want to go shopping. I want to buy a bra. I want to get my ears pierced and grow my hair out. I'm not a boy. I'm a girl in a boy's body, he told her.
"If that's what you honestly feel like, I'll stand behind you," Jazzlyn said. "You've just got to give me time."
Although transgenderism was a foreign concept to her, Jazzlyn is a straightforward country girl from Wagoner County who prides herself in accepting people as they are.
One of her sons from her first marriage, Josh, is severely disabled and lives in a group home in North Carolina. Jazzlyn tries to make the best of the hand she's dealt: divorces, illnesses, job changes, dirt bike and football injuries, a son who wants to go bra and panty shopping.
So she made a to-do list, educated herself about transgender issues and took her child to psychiatrists and Oklahomans for Equality, where Arrowsmith runs a health clinic for transgender patients.
Hill tries on her different hats inside her room in Bixby before heading out for the night.
As soon as they bought bras and "cutlets," the silicone pads that would substitute for breasts until hormone therapy could start, and as soon as Jazzlyn committed to helping, the depression lifted.
Before going through this with Katie, Jazzlyn might not have believed in gender identity disorder.
Other parents questioned her decision: What if it's purely a teenage whim?
Kids don't wake up one day and think, "I want to be transgender," Jazzlyn said. It's a long struggle. She witnessed it.
"I told (Katie), 'I know it's not a phase. I know it's really who you are,' " she said. "I've seen it ever since she was 4 years old. This is not something she just woke up and said, 'I want to be a girl now.' "
Jazzlyn didn't understand her name choice, however. So plain, so old-fashioned: Katie Rain Hill.
"To her, that was just the ultimate name," Jazzlyn said.
She completed her transition to living as Katie last summer, after her 16th birthday.
After years of angst, becoming Katie took a legal name change, shopping for clothes, makeup and underwear, and a doctor's evaluation and prescription for hormone shots and pills that would help develop a more feminine physique.
But getting others to accept it might be much tougher, Jazzlyn warned her.
Katie had attended Bixby schools for years as Luke Hill. There was no telling how her classmates would react to the transformation.
"I don't think she realized how hard it was going to be," Jazzlyn said. Her first day of school as a junior in August 2010, Katie told herself: You are pretty. You are smart. Just act like you belong here, like everybody else.
Although its roots are as a rural farming suburb of Tulsa, fast-growing Bixby Public Schools is a modern district with a Safe Team coordinator and zero-tolerance policy regarding bullying. Bixby administrators followed the law and did everything they could to accommodate Katie, educating staff and finding a private faculty bathroom she would be able to use.
But they couldn't control the reaction of her peers. On her first day, the other kids started staring and pointing. Some laughed.
"Like I was disgusting, like I was some monster," Katie said. "I just felt shellshocked, like I was about to barf."
She heard some of the students had called their parents and that their parents wanted them pulled out of Katie's classes.
Katie ran to the principal's office and called Jazzlyn.
"Mom, come get me."
Katie tries not to take it personally when people don't understand what transgender means. She didn't know herself for a long time.
A common assumption is that it's something like a drag queen, or a person who likes to dress up in the opposite gender's clothing on occasion.
Except that for transgender individuals, it's not about the costume or outfit. They genuinely feel like the gender they're born into simply doesn't fit.
"It wasn't my fault," Katie said. "It was just nature handing me something that wasn't fair. I couldn't look in the mirror without wanting to cry."
It's hard to look at a 16-year-old considering gender reassignment surgery and not think: "But she's so young!"
In life experience, yes. In terms of children experiencing gender identity disorder, not really.
Dr William Reiner at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center specializes in pediatric urology and child/adolescent psychiatry. His patients are children born with chromosomal and genital abnormalities that cause reproductive health issues, intersex children and, on rarer occasions, transgender children.
Katie is not one of his patients. Most of his are younger.
Some children start exhibiting gender identity disorder as young as 3 or 4, Reiner said. In many cases, they won't necessarily end up as transgender adults.
Katie Hill poses for a portrait in her living room. Photos by ADAM WISNESKI/Tulsa World
It's simply part of an "extraordinarily" complex journey of humans that scientists believe can be influenced by genetics, environment, temperament and personality.
If children are still exhibiting gender identity disorder by ages 12-13 and into adolescence, they most likely will remain transgender for the rest of their lives, Reiner said.
Pediatricians can give children who have gender identity disorder puberty-blocking hormones to allow more time to decide before their bodies fully develop into mature characteristics of their birth gender. In most cases, doctors recommend waiting until age 16 to let them begin living as the opposite of their birth sex.
But doctors have to weigh that against the anxiety and depression that transgender children often struggle with.
"If you ask what is the right thing to do with children who are transgender, the answer is we don't really know," Reiner said. "What's really important is to listen to the kids and try to figure out what it all means to them."
Standing tall
Becoming Katie Hill meant that she would never have to live unhappily as Luke again.
That didn't mean being Katie would be easy.
Katie's first day of her junior year at Bixby High School upset her so much that she left the district she had attended since elementary school and enrolled in Oklahoma Virtual High School.
Katie heard that some parents called Bixby High School and said they wanted their kids' schedules changed so they wouldn't have classes with her.
"They did not want their kids to be in a room with a child like 'this,' " her mother, Jazzlyn Hill, recalled.
Enrolling Katie at another high school in a different district wasn't an option. Jazzlyn and her ex-husband Randy Hill both work, and no one could drive Katie across town every day to go to another school.
Randy teaches the ROTC program at Bixby High School. He did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Katie planned to finish her high school degree at home, where she felt safe to be herself without taunting and whispering from classmates who used to know her as Luke. But she would have no Spanish class, no prom or school dances, no lunch period with friends.
Hill gets a hug from her boyfriend, Brandon Dumontel. Born Luke, Katie always felt she was a girl trapped inside a boy’s body. Many people confuse the gender identity issue with sexual orientation, leading to questions about their relationship.
An "A" student, she planned to breeze through her coursework and move on to college.
But after months of studying at home, Katie's choice became tolerating isolation or teasing.
She decided she would rather put up with stares and whispers than spend eight hours each weekday at home, alone with nothing but her books and computer for company. She needed human contact beyond Facebook and texting.
At Bixby High School, a Safe Team is in place to protect her and all students from bullies. There are friends, in addition to the stares, and teachers who are fond of her.
And there's Brandon.
Young love
Brandon Dumontel is 18 years old, polite and sweet without being Eddie Haskell.
He's nearly as lanky and thin as his girlfriend, and just a smidgen taller.
Katie and Brandon met at the mall through mutual friends they knew from Camp Anytown, a program of the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice.
Neither has a driver's license, so when they first began dating, Brandon rode his bike seven miles just to see her.
They play video games and go to dances organized by Openarms Youth Project, a community group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens, young adults and their friends. He bought her flowers and a little silver ring.
Katie's relationship with Brandon confounds some people, because most confuse the gender identity issue with sexual orientation.
"He's straight," Katie explained. "I'm not like, an exception. He sees me as a woman."
Katie hangs out with friends Nick Weaver, left, and his sister, Cat Weaver at Tulsa’s Openarms Youth Project. OYP gives a safe place for teenagers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender to hang out and support each other.
It's a common misconception that being transgender is part of a person's sexual orientation, said Dr. Laura Arrowsmith of Oklahomans for Equality.
But sexual orientation is who you want to sleep with; gender identity is who you want to sleep as, she explained. Transgender men and women can be gay, straight or bisexual.
Brandon is a straight teen who grew up with an unstable family situation. He grew tired of the conflict and bounced from one friend's couch to another until he ran out of places to crash.
Jazzlyn knows her heart is too big; she's too understanding. But she couldn't let a nice kid like Brandon live on the streets. So she let him move into her house (with strict ground rules, of course).
Brandon had to leave his friends at Union High School and transfer to Bixby.
Not long after New Year's Day, Katie decided she was brave enough to go back to school.
At first, some students talked loudly about her and spit on her. School officials dealt with it swiftly.
But she prefers it to spending eight or more hours a day by herself. When Katie got her driver's permit, she ran to one of her favorite teachers, Mrs. Jurkiw, to show her: "Sex, F." Validation, on a blue-and-white card.
Katie and Brandon planned to go to Union High School's prom with two of their friends from the Openarms Youth Project. The tickets were about $30 cheaper than Bixby's prom, and they felt more welcome, Katie explained.
"I didn't want to go with all those people," she said.
Hill buys a soda with her boyfriend, Brandon, at Tulsa's Openarms Youth Project.
Some of the kids still talk about Katie and Brandon behind their backs, how Brandon is dating "it."
This hurts Katie's feelings, because she's a person, not an "it." A real live girl, who found a deep purple prom gown with golden sequins on eBay. It would double as her gown for the Oklahomans for Equality Gala.
She hoped they could find Brandon a tuxedo with a matching purple vest.
"He drooled when I first put on my dress," Katie said.
Reality check
In the TV movie version of life, Katie would have passed her driver's license test on the first try so she could drive herself to work and to the mall with friends in the new car her father bought her.
She would have been the belle of the ball at the prom, possibly crowned queen with her rail-thin frame and startling cheekbones.
But this is real life. She fails her driving test - twice.
Her family's beloved Shih Tzu dies. She gets sick and misses the prom.
The white Saturn coupe her dad bought her is parked on the lawn, undriven.
She's not talking to her dad. He slips and calls her Luke or "him" sometimes, Katie said.
To Katie, referring to her in the feminine is a big deal. It means something to her.
She goes to school every day in the same place her father works, but she won't talk to him.
Jazzlyn said Randy has complained to her: "I don't understand; I didn't do anything to him."
That's just it, she told him. You're not accepting it. "I don't think he's ashamed of her; he just doesn't know how to talk to her," Jazzlyn said.
She tries to soften Katie's attitude toward him: We've all got faults, you know.
"He's still your dad," she reminds Katie. "I know he loves you."
Even as a young child, Katie pictured herself as a woman when she fantasized about her grown-up life.
Hill laughs with fellow transgender outreach members, Hellen Johnson, right, Violet Fenn, left, and Jen Lillie, center left, at the Equality Gala.
"In my dreams, I would have long, black hair; beautiful, white sparkling teeth; and perfect green-blue eyes like my mom and dad," she said.
The piercing blue eyes, in the lone remaining portrait of Luke in the Hill home, those are her father's.
The driver's seat
Katie was tested for female chromosomes or the presence of female reproductive organs to determine whether she might have been born intersex, but all the tests came back negative.
"This isn't a choice. If it was, I swear to God I wouldn't have chosen this," she said.
Her birth certificate is the only remaining document listing her as "male." She was born on Mother's Day.
House Bill 1397, signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin in April, makes it possible for Oklahomans who've had gender-reassignment surgery to change the gender listed on their birth certificate.
Oklahomans for Equality maintains that Katie will be the first openly transgender teen to graduate from high school in the state.
She'll turn 17 this week. In the next few years, she hopes to take the final step of having gender-reassignment surgery to complete her physical transformation to a woman.
People seeking gender-reassignment surgery typically must first live for at least one year as the opposite gender, complete a year of hormone therapy and then receive approval from at least three qualified medical professionals.
The surgery costs about $20,000 and is not typically covered by insurance. Many Americans go to Thailand for the procedure, where it's less expensive and quite common. But the travel expenses are steep.
Katie likely will have to work for years to pay for the surgery; her family currently can't afford it.
Until then, she'll go to school, work at a fast-food restaurant in Bixby, and obsess about spending time with Brandon.
She'll try for a third time to pass her driving test, and Jazzlyn will sigh and hope for the best.
Isn't that all any parent can do at this point?
Buy a sturdy car and insurance, teach them how to drive safely, give them maps - and one brave day, hand them the keys.
Katie will get in the driver's seat and adjust the mirror.
She will like what she sees.
Becoming Katie
By Cary Aspinwall, World Staff Writer
Published: 5/8/2011
BIXBY - The lone memento of Luke Hill's unhappy existence hangs like a specter in his former bedroom, piercing blue eyes haunting from a 12-year-old portrait.
It's Luke at age 4, in a blue silk kimono, a glossy studio snapshot from when the family lived in Japan, during Dad's service in the US Marine Corps.
This is Katie's room now, and the picture of Luke hanging on her wall is the only one she'll allow her mother to display in the house.
Katie asked her mom to destroy the rest. She doesn't want to be reminded of Luke, his miserable existence as a puzzle piece that never fit.
Luke is just a memory in the minds of those who loved him, the blue-eyed ghost in the portrait.
Katie Hill puts on makeup inside her room in Bixby. Photos by ADAM WISNESKI/Tulsa World
Katie is flesh and bone, long hair and limbs, breasts and eyelashes. A happy 16-year-old who believes it's not her fault she was born into the wrong body.
And by burying Luke and becoming Katie, she has righted what nature made wrong.
'A child of darkness'
Jazzlyn Hill gave birth to four sons.
It never occurred to her that one of those boys might someday want to wear a bra or borrow her earrings.
She knew that something was bothering her son Luke, something that caused him to feel isolated from the other children, alone.
He started getting upset about having male body parts by age 4, Jazzlyn explained. She can remember her little boy pointing to his genitals, saying "Off, off!"
In a house teeming with testosterone, Luke never wanted to do typical boy stuff.
His dad, Randy Hill, served as a lieutenant colonel in the Marines and leads the ROTC program at Bixby High School.
"We need to prepare for the fact that our child will probably be gay," Jazzlyn would tell Randy, hoping she could help him adjust to the idea. Randy was a jock, athletic, and wanted a son to play football and catch with.
Luke would never be that boy. He would sit quietly with Crayolas and color.
"Just a lovable, quiet baby child," Jazzlyn said.
One who wanted to wear dresses, play with dolls and stay in the kitchen with Mom.
But so do a lot of little boys. It doesn't always mean they will grow up with gender identity issues.
Hill always felt that she was a girl trapped inside a boy's body. Last summer, she decided to take steps toward becoming Katie Hill.
Then, at age 10, her happy-go-lucky Luke turned into "a child of darkness."
He was depressed; he wouldn't socialize. He cried all the time.
They tried therapy, medications. Nothing worked.
"I couldn't get (Luke) to be happy," Jazzlyn said. "It killed me."
Once a tight bond, Randy and Luke's father-son relationship turned to oil and water.
Randy and Jazzlyn divorced, and things only got worse for their oldest child. They have one younger son, and Jazzlyn has two older sons from a previous marriage.
Luke was good at schoolwork but withdrawn and miserable in all other aspects of life. He wore a bulky black jacket and baggy jeans every day.
Looking back, Jazzlyn thinks he may have been hiding his body.
He was ashamed. Being a boy just felt wrong.
Luke started searching for the answer why.
The science of gender
In some languages, even inanimate objects are assigned genders.
As a society, we assign gender at birth, one of two rigidly fixed options: male or female?
Hill laughs while she tries on a bracelet with her mother, Jazzlyn, at Woodland Hills.
The reality is, some people grow up feeling like they never fit the gender listed on their birth certificate. Often, it starts at a tender age.
"Everybody knows their gender identity by age 3 to 5," said Dr Laura Arrowsmith, director of gender outreach for Oklahomans for Equality. "It's just one of those things we all have. It's born with us. It's not changeable."
Research shows that gender identity disorder may be a cognitive brain variation. A study published last year in the Journal of Psychiatric Research showed that brain scans of female-to-male transgender subjects more closely resembled those of male brains.
But science is still probing why it affects some people more than others - and how it presents itself as early as age 4.
Those with gender identity disorder feel fundamentally mismatched with their anatomic and genetic sex - their inner identity is either the opposite of their birth sex, or they have a sense of gender outside of female or male, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics "Textbook of Pediatric Care."
"It's not a choice. It's not a reaction to bad parenting. It's just the way we are," Arrowsmith said.
Arrowsmith, 61, lived most of her life as a man who felt like a woman. When she told her parents how she felt as a child, they tried to beat the girly longings out of their son.
"We're obsessed with rigid gender roles," she said. "And that's not the way it works, always."
She went to medical school, became a radiologist, married and had children. The feelings never went away.
It's estimated that about 40 percent of transgender individuals have attempted suicide, Arrowsmith said. Before she accepted her own feelings, she tried twice to kill herself.
Because they live as the most visible example of someone stepping outside of traditional gender roles, Arrowsmith said, they face discrimination at work, at school and in their own families.
Hill shops for clothes at Woodland Hills mall.
To protect themselves, many who go through gender-reassignment surgery decide to "go stealth" afterward - moving to a new place with a new identity after their transition, Arrowsmith said.
There are no concrete statistics on the number of transgender people in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Estimates on the number of transgender people range anywhere from 0.25 percent to 1 percent of the US population.
These estimates may be outdated and don't necessarily account for people who have not yet undergone, cannot undergo (for medical, financial or other reasons) or choose not to undergo gender-reassignment surgeries.
Rather than just two distinct categories, some scientists believe that biological gender occurs across a broader spectrum of possibilities.
Some people are born with male genitals but identify with a female gender, and vice versa. Some are born intersex, with both male and female organs or chromosomes.
Science has documented cases of women who have male chromosomes giving birth. But society gives two defined categories for birth certificates, driver's licenses, clothing styles, bathrooms and sports teams. Even newspaper birth announcements read simply: John and Jane Doe, boy. Sue and Steve Smith, girl.
Hill checks the mirror inside her room in Bixby.
Katie Rain Hill
"I was expecting (Luke) to sit me down and say, 'Mom, I'm gay,' " Jazzlyn recalled.
Instead, at age 15, Luke told her: "I'm not gay, Mom. I'm transgender."
Her reaction: "A trans-what? I had prepared myself for 13, 14 years that my son was gay. And now I'm thinking, 'Rocky Horror Picture Show'?"
They cried.
Jazzlyn's heart ached for her child. She knew this would be a difficult path in life. But she was worried that Luke might kill himself otherwise.
So she did what moms do when they see that the child they love is hurting: They fix it.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked her son. I want to go shopping. I want to buy a bra. I want to get my ears pierced and grow my hair out. I'm not a boy. I'm a girl in a boy's body, he told her.
"If that's what you honestly feel like, I'll stand behind you," Jazzlyn said. "You've just got to give me time."
Although transgenderism was a foreign concept to her, Jazzlyn is a straightforward country girl from Wagoner County who prides herself in accepting people as they are.
One of her sons from her first marriage, Josh, is severely disabled and lives in a group home in North Carolina. Jazzlyn tries to make the best of the hand she's dealt: divorces, illnesses, job changes, dirt bike and football injuries, a son who wants to go bra and panty shopping.
So she made a to-do list, educated herself about transgender issues and took her child to psychiatrists and Oklahomans for Equality, where Arrowsmith runs a health clinic for transgender patients.
Hill tries on her different hats inside her room in Bixby before heading out for the night.
As soon as they bought bras and "cutlets," the silicone pads that would substitute for breasts until hormone therapy could start, and as soon as Jazzlyn committed to helping, the depression lifted.
Before going through this with Katie, Jazzlyn might not have believed in gender identity disorder.
Other parents questioned her decision: What if it's purely a teenage whim?
Kids don't wake up one day and think, "I want to be transgender," Jazzlyn said. It's a long struggle. She witnessed it.
"I told (Katie), 'I know it's not a phase. I know it's really who you are,' " she said. "I've seen it ever since she was 4 years old. This is not something she just woke up and said, 'I want to be a girl now.' "
Jazzlyn didn't understand her name choice, however. So plain, so old-fashioned: Katie Rain Hill.
"To her, that was just the ultimate name," Jazzlyn said.
She completed her transition to living as Katie last summer, after her 16th birthday.
After years of angst, becoming Katie took a legal name change, shopping for clothes, makeup and underwear, and a doctor's evaluation and prescription for hormone shots and pills that would help develop a more feminine physique.
But getting others to accept it might be much tougher, Jazzlyn warned her.
Katie had attended Bixby schools for years as Luke Hill. There was no telling how her classmates would react to the transformation.
"I don't think she realized how hard it was going to be," Jazzlyn said. Her first day of school as a junior in August 2010, Katie told herself: You are pretty. You are smart. Just act like you belong here, like everybody else.
Although its roots are as a rural farming suburb of Tulsa, fast-growing Bixby Public Schools is a modern district with a Safe Team coordinator and zero-tolerance policy regarding bullying. Bixby administrators followed the law and did everything they could to accommodate Katie, educating staff and finding a private faculty bathroom she would be able to use.
But they couldn't control the reaction of her peers. On her first day, the other kids started staring and pointing. Some laughed.
"Like I was disgusting, like I was some monster," Katie said. "I just felt shellshocked, like I was about to barf."
She heard some of the students had called their parents and that their parents wanted them pulled out of Katie's classes.
Katie ran to the principal's office and called Jazzlyn.
"Mom, come get me."
Katie tries not to take it personally when people don't understand what transgender means. She didn't know herself for a long time.
A common assumption is that it's something like a drag queen, or a person who likes to dress up in the opposite gender's clothing on occasion.
Except that for transgender individuals, it's not about the costume or outfit. They genuinely feel like the gender they're born into simply doesn't fit.
"It wasn't my fault," Katie said. "It was just nature handing me something that wasn't fair. I couldn't look in the mirror without wanting to cry."
It's hard to look at a 16-year-old considering gender reassignment surgery and not think: "But she's so young!"
In life experience, yes. In terms of children experiencing gender identity disorder, not really.
Dr William Reiner at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center specializes in pediatric urology and child/adolescent psychiatry. His patients are children born with chromosomal and genital abnormalities that cause reproductive health issues, intersex children and, on rarer occasions, transgender children.
Katie is not one of his patients. Most of his are younger.
Some children start exhibiting gender identity disorder as young as 3 or 4, Reiner said. In many cases, they won't necessarily end up as transgender adults.
Katie Hill poses for a portrait in her living room. Photos by ADAM WISNESKI/Tulsa World
It's simply part of an "extraordinarily" complex journey of humans that scientists believe can be influenced by genetics, environment, temperament and personality.
If children are still exhibiting gender identity disorder by ages 12-13 and into adolescence, they most likely will remain transgender for the rest of their lives, Reiner said.
Pediatricians can give children who have gender identity disorder puberty-blocking hormones to allow more time to decide before their bodies fully develop into mature characteristics of their birth gender. In most cases, doctors recommend waiting until age 16 to let them begin living as the opposite of their birth sex.
But doctors have to weigh that against the anxiety and depression that transgender children often struggle with.
"If you ask what is the right thing to do with children who are transgender, the answer is we don't really know," Reiner said. "What's really important is to listen to the kids and try to figure out what it all means to them."
Standing tall
Becoming Katie Hill meant that she would never have to live unhappily as Luke again.
That didn't mean being Katie would be easy.
Katie's first day of her junior year at Bixby High School upset her so much that she left the district she had attended since elementary school and enrolled in Oklahoma Virtual High School.
Katie heard that some parents called Bixby High School and said they wanted their kids' schedules changed so they wouldn't have classes with her.
"They did not want their kids to be in a room with a child like 'this,' " her mother, Jazzlyn Hill, recalled.
Enrolling Katie at another high school in a different district wasn't an option. Jazzlyn and her ex-husband Randy Hill both work, and no one could drive Katie across town every day to go to another school.
Randy teaches the ROTC program at Bixby High School. He did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Katie planned to finish her high school degree at home, where she felt safe to be herself without taunting and whispering from classmates who used to know her as Luke. But she would have no Spanish class, no prom or school dances, no lunch period with friends.
Hill gets a hug from her boyfriend, Brandon Dumontel. Born Luke, Katie always felt she was a girl trapped inside a boy’s body. Many people confuse the gender identity issue with sexual orientation, leading to questions about their relationship.
An "A" student, she planned to breeze through her coursework and move on to college.
But after months of studying at home, Katie's choice became tolerating isolation or teasing.
She decided she would rather put up with stares and whispers than spend eight hours each weekday at home, alone with nothing but her books and computer for company. She needed human contact beyond Facebook and texting.
At Bixby High School, a Safe Team is in place to protect her and all students from bullies. There are friends, in addition to the stares, and teachers who are fond of her.
And there's Brandon.
Young love
Brandon Dumontel is 18 years old, polite and sweet without being Eddie Haskell.
He's nearly as lanky and thin as his girlfriend, and just a smidgen taller.
Katie and Brandon met at the mall through mutual friends they knew from Camp Anytown, a program of the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice.
Neither has a driver's license, so when they first began dating, Brandon rode his bike seven miles just to see her.
They play video games and go to dances organized by Openarms Youth Project, a community group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens, young adults and their friends. He bought her flowers and a little silver ring.
Katie's relationship with Brandon confounds some people, because most confuse the gender identity issue with sexual orientation.
"He's straight," Katie explained. "I'm not like, an exception. He sees me as a woman."
Katie hangs out with friends Nick Weaver, left, and his sister, Cat Weaver at Tulsa’s Openarms Youth Project. OYP gives a safe place for teenagers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender to hang out and support each other.
It's a common misconception that being transgender is part of a person's sexual orientation, said Dr. Laura Arrowsmith of Oklahomans for Equality.
But sexual orientation is who you want to sleep with; gender identity is who you want to sleep as, she explained. Transgender men and women can be gay, straight or bisexual.
Brandon is a straight teen who grew up with an unstable family situation. He grew tired of the conflict and bounced from one friend's couch to another until he ran out of places to crash.
Jazzlyn knows her heart is too big; she's too understanding. But she couldn't let a nice kid like Brandon live on the streets. So she let him move into her house (with strict ground rules, of course).
Brandon had to leave his friends at Union High School and transfer to Bixby.
Not long after New Year's Day, Katie decided she was brave enough to go back to school.
At first, some students talked loudly about her and spit on her. School officials dealt with it swiftly.
But she prefers it to spending eight or more hours a day by herself. When Katie got her driver's permit, she ran to one of her favorite teachers, Mrs. Jurkiw, to show her: "Sex, F." Validation, on a blue-and-white card.
Katie and Brandon planned to go to Union High School's prom with two of their friends from the Openarms Youth Project. The tickets were about $30 cheaper than Bixby's prom, and they felt more welcome, Katie explained.
"I didn't want to go with all those people," she said.
Hill buys a soda with her boyfriend, Brandon, at Tulsa's Openarms Youth Project.
Some of the kids still talk about Katie and Brandon behind their backs, how Brandon is dating "it."
This hurts Katie's feelings, because she's a person, not an "it." A real live girl, who found a deep purple prom gown with golden sequins on eBay. It would double as her gown for the Oklahomans for Equality Gala.
She hoped they could find Brandon a tuxedo with a matching purple vest.
"He drooled when I first put on my dress," Katie said.
Reality check
In the TV movie version of life, Katie would have passed her driver's license test on the first try so she could drive herself to work and to the mall with friends in the new car her father bought her.
She would have been the belle of the ball at the prom, possibly crowned queen with her rail-thin frame and startling cheekbones.
But this is real life. She fails her driving test - twice.
Her family's beloved Shih Tzu dies. She gets sick and misses the prom.
The white Saturn coupe her dad bought her is parked on the lawn, undriven.
She's not talking to her dad. He slips and calls her Luke or "him" sometimes, Katie said.
To Katie, referring to her in the feminine is a big deal. It means something to her.
She goes to school every day in the same place her father works, but she won't talk to him.
Jazzlyn said Randy has complained to her: "I don't understand; I didn't do anything to him."
That's just it, she told him. You're not accepting it. "I don't think he's ashamed of her; he just doesn't know how to talk to her," Jazzlyn said.
She tries to soften Katie's attitude toward him: We've all got faults, you know.
"He's still your dad," she reminds Katie. "I know he loves you."
Even as a young child, Katie pictured herself as a woman when she fantasized about her grown-up life.
Hill laughs with fellow transgender outreach members, Hellen Johnson, right, Violet Fenn, left, and Jen Lillie, center left, at the Equality Gala.
"In my dreams, I would have long, black hair; beautiful, white sparkling teeth; and perfect green-blue eyes like my mom and dad," she said.
The piercing blue eyes, in the lone remaining portrait of Luke in the Hill home, those are her father's.
The driver's seat
Katie was tested for female chromosomes or the presence of female reproductive organs to determine whether she might have been born intersex, but all the tests came back negative.
"This isn't a choice. If it was, I swear to God I wouldn't have chosen this," she said.
Her birth certificate is the only remaining document listing her as "male." She was born on Mother's Day.
House Bill 1397, signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin in April, makes it possible for Oklahomans who've had gender-reassignment surgery to change the gender listed on their birth certificate.
Oklahomans for Equality maintains that Katie will be the first openly transgender teen to graduate from high school in the state.
She'll turn 17 this week. In the next few years, she hopes to take the final step of having gender-reassignment surgery to complete her physical transformation to a woman.
People seeking gender-reassignment surgery typically must first live for at least one year as the opposite gender, complete a year of hormone therapy and then receive approval from at least three qualified medical professionals.
The surgery costs about $20,000 and is not typically covered by insurance. Many Americans go to Thailand for the procedure, where it's less expensive and quite common. But the travel expenses are steep.
Katie likely will have to work for years to pay for the surgery; her family currently can't afford it.
Until then, she'll go to school, work at a fast-food restaurant in Bixby, and obsess about spending time with Brandon.
She'll try for a third time to pass her driving test, and Jazzlyn will sigh and hope for the best.
Isn't that all any parent can do at this point?
Buy a sturdy car and insurance, teach them how to drive safely, give them maps - and one brave day, hand them the keys.
Katie will get in the driver's seat and adjust the mirror.
She will like what she sees.