"He? She? Whatever!"

As on any other autumn afternoon, the yellow-helmeted Cougars doused their faces in the water fountain and strolled onto the football field for practice. But the sideline chatter at this suburban campus outside Sacramento, Calif., was anything but casual. Over the summer Center High School's onetime journalism teacher, baseball coach and enthusiastic gridiron announcer had changed from David Warfield to Dana Rivers--and lost her job as a result. Even the jocks were in shock. "He? She? Whatever!" said Fidel Ramos, a hefty linebacker. "They shouldn't fire her." Sophomore Kevin Owen agreed: "It's not his fault he has a disease." And Gentry Stroud, a 16-year-old basketball star, lamented the departure of "a cool teacher. Just because you change how you look, it doesn't change your brain."

It has been Trying Times at Center High ever since the news broke last month that Rivers, 44, a popular and award-winning teacher, had been relieved of her duties by the local school board. Some 200 teachers and students staged a protest, chanting, "Two, four, six, eight--we demand a reinstate." Television trucks bristling with satellite dishes surrounded the tidy campus. And last week dissident parents served three school-board trustees with election-recall petitions. "I'm overwhelmed," says Rivers. "I expected an uneventful transition."

Rivers, who has taught at Center High since 1990, began taking hormones last January, and in May notified school authorities that she was suffering from "gender dysphoria," a medical condition in which a person believes himself or herself to be psychically of the opposite sex. She said she would return to class in the fall dressed as a female, in preparation for a sex-change operation next year. "If you are gay or lesbian, you can make a choice whether to tell people," she says. "I don't have that luxury."

Other California teachers have changed genders with little fuss--including a performing-arts teacher at Red Bluff High School, 150 miles northwest of Sacramento, who became a woman. In June the school board seemed to accept Rivers' decision, noting in a letter to parents that "although some board members hold personal values that differ from those of this individual," the job of a tenured teacher with good performance evaluations is protected by antidiscrimination laws. But school policy requires parental waivers before children can take sex education or even watch R-rated films. And board president Scott Rodowick says Rivers was instructed that if students were to ask about the sex change in class to "tell them to go home and talk to their parents."

Instead, Rivers took several students aside to explain her transition from man to woman, according to parents who objected that their religious and moral standards had been violated. In all, four parents filed formal complaints, assisted by the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento-based firm that often represents Christian conservatives. Passions were further inflamed when Rivers gave an interview to the student newspaper, discussing her childhood belief that she would grow up to be a woman, her three failed marriages and recovery from alcoholism, her psychiatric and hormone therapy and her fear of rejection by students. "I'm not some freak," she told the newspaper. "I have been a good teacher, but my best days are ahead of me."

The teacher--who now dresses in floral skirts, paints her nails pink and wears her hair shoulder-length--hoped to cushion the shock with her explanations. "My transformation should not be traumatic for students," she says. "But it is a tragic lesson if I am burned at the stake for who I really am." Now teachers are pitted against administrators, and children against parents. Some colleagues pooled to buy Rivers a $50 gift certificate from a dress shop, but others are "tired of the Dana Rivers Show," says art teacher Marc Allaman. Still, Allaman defends Rivers' "First Amendment right to answer questions from students honestly." At one school-board meeting, Nancy Mackarness, an evangelical Christian, complained it was inappropriate for Rivers to have discussed her sex change with Mackarness' 16-year-old daughter Lindsey in a private conversation at school. But as soon as Mackarness finished speaking, Lindsey jumped up to tell the board she disagreed with her mother and stood behind Rivers.

In the next few weeks a three-member administrative panel, set up under state regulations, will consider Rivers' appeal. At issue will be fundamental questions of free speech, due process and parental rights. But also, perhaps, a matter of common courtesy. "I could have walked into school on Aug. 31 without telling anyone," Rivers says. "How rude would that have been?"