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Fighting for the Rights of Transgender Students
By Gavin Grimm
I was 12 when I first heard the word “transgender.” I learned it through the internet and I knew immediately that it fit my experiences.
But in 2012, there was not much in the way of trans media, and given the lack of affirmation or resources, I stepped away from that term. I was also in a conservative household in a conservative community, and already struggling with feelings of not fitting in.
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No matter what I did to distance myself from the new knowledge I had, it always followed behind me. Sometimes 10 paces back, sometimes just half a step — looming, waiting for its chance to make itself known to the world.
I ran from that feeling until I couldn’t anymore. I had exhausted my other ideas. Tomboy didn’t fit. Lesbian didn’t fit. The more I attempted to find my girlhood within these terms, the more I had to admit that there simply was none. It was a truth I had known since I was 5. I was a boy. And more important, I had access to a transition path that gave me hope of feeling at home in my body.
So I shared with my mother who I was, and she shared that information with the rest of my family on my behalf. Transition couldn’t happen quickly enough at that point. I remember days of euphoria back then.
Affirming trips to Walmart were set against the background of the long drive home from Richmond, Virginia, on nights when I was lucky enough to make the hour and 45 minute ride to the nearest city with a trans support group. That first year was so fraught with emotion. The highs were high and the lows were lower as I became a pubescent teenage boy. A sour mood and headphone isolation were commonplace, but something was different. The lights were on.
I was living a life then where I didn’t have to ask permission to be myself. I didn’t have to hide away a part of myself, or pretend to be something I wasn’t. However tumultuous, it was the first time in my life that I came to the table as a whole person.
I was beginning to believe that I had a future. One I could picture and see myself within very clearly. Before transitioning I never dared dream about what I could do or who I could be, because I thought that meant reconciling how I could fit into the world as a woman. Once I knew I didn’t have to do that, I realized that there may be a future I could feel excited for.
Five years after sharing who I am with friends and family, and four years after filing a lawsuit against my high school for banning me from the boys’ room on the basis of being trans, I have retained my excitement for my future.
My life has unfolded in ways that I could not possibly have predicted. I moved across the country to California, away from everyone and everything I knew, apart from my cat who came with me. I found myself at home with a gathered family of friends and loved ones. A trans support group is only a 45-minute bus ride away. But if I could go and tell my younger self just one thing about my life now, I would share that I have the privilege of speaking regularly in public schools about my experiences as a trans person.
Had I been exposed to a trans narrative as a younger child, I would have known who I was so much sooner. Had I had a school system that celebrated diversity, and amplified the voices of different people in our community, I would not have felt so terrified and alone. And I certainly would not have had to spend my high school career from sophomore year on in a discrimination lawsuit.
Had I had someone who was like me tell me that being trans was beautiful, not something to run from, maybe I never would have run in the first place. So to be able to deliver that visibility on the ground in the community in which I live is one of the greatest honors in my life. Each time I go into a classroom, I leave it with a fuller heart and a bigger smile. Every experience reaffirms my greatest belief in life; education and visibility build a better future. I am so grateful to do my tiny part in the incandescent community of LGBTQ people that I belong to.
Gavin Grimm works on behalf of transgender rights. His lawsuit against a school in Virginia over bathroom access is pending.
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Queer Money Is as Green as Everyone Else’s
By Camille Perri
It wasn’t until I got to a private university in the late 1990s that I learned the phrase for the kind of poor my family was: not sleeping-on-the-street poor, but always-worrying-about-money poor. My-father-worked-two-jobs-poor, but my-mother-still-had-to-remove-items-from-our-shopping-cart-at-the-grocery-store poor. It was called “working class.” Before college, passing as “not poor” had been my way of life, much in the way that trying (and failing) to pass as “not gay” had been my way of life.
The other word I learned in college to define myself was “queer.” The two combined — “working-class queer” — gave me credibility that money couldn’t buy, which was saying a lot considering what money did buy: acceptance, security, affirmation. For me and other working-class queers, the shorthand for participating in this narrative was “selling out” — to cross over the strict line of disjunction between queer culture and corporate capitalist America through personal gain.
Brands and consumerism were the straight white patriarchy, whereas queerness was a radical stance against these forces. An activist chant at the time, popularized by Queer Nation and Act Up, stated the distinction with panache: We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping. I was chanting too; I didn’t have any money to buy anything anyway.
I could not have predicted what would happen over the course of the next 20 years. Marriage equality arrived and quickly normalized. With it came marketing campaigns specifically designed to court the queer community: same-sex car ads would air during the Super Bowl, and rainbow gear would become available at all major department stores for both straight and queer customers.
The powers that be figured out that queer money is as green as everyone else’s, and it’s within this increased purchasing power that some queer people are experiencing upward mobility and increased social acceptance. But all this progress hasn’t come without strings.
If you’re middle to upper class and white, and skew conventional, it’s not a bad time to be gay. Everyone else is still largely relegated to the margins. A commerce-driven acceptance of queerness still excludes queers who don’t have money — much like my 20-year-old self.
As for me, you could say I’ve chosen to deal with my traumatic history of poverty by amassing wealth as armor. You could also say I sold out. I wrote novels for more than one mainstream publisher. I married a corporate lawyer. I moved into a condo building with a doorman and an elevator. I’ve even vacationed in the kind of place where they will bring you a frozen drink while you’re in a swimming pool.
Am I still queer? By today’s standards, sure. I live a super gay life, but I’m also fairly easy to digest. I don’t rock the boat too hard. My success, whether I like it or not, reinforces the notion that the best guarantee for equal treatment is the ability to buy one’s way to acceptance. Money is still power.
The ladder of ascension still stands within the existing capitalist and consumerist structure, and it continues to be as true as it ever was that it isn’t accessible to all. Radicalism needs to go beyond what can be bought and effectively sold as queer-branded. Rainbow T-shirts will not save us.
Camille Perri is the author of “The Assistants” and “When Katie Met Cassidy.” She has worked as a books editor for Cosmopolitan and Esquire.
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Why I Left the Mainstream Queer Rights Movement
By Barbara Smith
I have not been active in the organized LGBTQ movement for a long time.
I enthusiastically participated in the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. About 100,000 of us were there from around the country, a good turnout but much smaller than subsequent marches — when being out and proud was less dangerous.
At the second national march, in 1987, I was invited to be one of eight major speakers. It was exhilarating to speak before a crowd of nearly 1 million people.
At the same time, it was devastating to see the vast AIDS quilt on display in one place for the first time, symbolizing so much human loss.
I felt ambivalent about the 1993 march. For me it was overly focused on gays in the military and in presenting our community as an affluent consumer group to win favor from the corporate mainstream. This supposed affluence was not even real except for a privileged sector of largely white gay men.
In 1999 the tight circle of organizers of the Millennium March in Washington reflected how narrow and hierarchical the movement had become.
A group of us established the multiracial Ad Hoc Committee for an Open Process. Ted Beck, Mandy Carter, Chandra L. Ford, Kara Keeling and I wrote an open letter to the march organizers titled “Will People of Color Pay the Price?”
Our efforts at opening up the organizational process were not successful. I did not attend the 1999 march or any subsequent ones. For me the Millennium March was the last straw.
I prefer to put my energy into multi-issue organizing. In the 1970s and 1980s, I co-founded the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group, and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press to give women of color, lesbians of color and even gay men of color a voice.
Three decades later, despite some genuine efforts to increase diversity, especially in progressive movement circles, exclusivity and elitism still divide us. We have won rights and achieved recognition that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago, but many of us continue to be marginalized, both in the larger society and within the movement itself.
One in four people in the LGBTQ community experienced food insecurity in 2017. About 24% of lesbians and bisexual women earn less than the federal poverty line. LGBTQ youth have a 120% higher risk of experiencing homelessness than heterosexual, cisgender youth.
Black men who have sex with men have the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses. People who are transgender, particularly transgender women of color, experience appalling levels of violence, and this violence is exacerbated by poverty and racism.
These statistics show it is not possible to achieve justice in a vacuum. Marriage equality and celebrity culture will not solve it. Neither will political agendas focused on unquestioned assimilation. Gaining rights for some while ignoring the violation and suffering of others does not lead to justice. At best it results in privilege.
Unless we eradicate the systemic oppressions that undermine the lives of the majority of LGBTQ people, we will never achieve queer liberation.
Barbara Smith is a black feminist author and activist.
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The Science of Gender Is Rarely Simple
By Julia Serano
Most anti-discrimination policies intended to protect transgender people are centered on gender identity, a term that originated in the field of psychology and that has been used for over half a century to refer to individuals’ deeply held understanding of what gender they are. It may or may not align with the sex assigned at birth.
Opponents of transgender rights have increasingly worked to shift conversations and policy language away from gender and toward biological sex.
This effort can be seen in the commentary of anti-LGBTQ groups, feminists who exclude trans women and recent Trump administration decisions designed to limit transgender people’s access to health care, homeless shelters and other accommodations.
As a trans woman, I find these developments distressing. But they also offend me as a scientist.
I was drawn to science as a child. I remember devouring books about dinosaurs, outer space, geology and evolution. In high school, I took extra science classes as electives. I majored in biology in college, went on to get my Ph.D. and spent 17 years doing research in developmental biology and genetics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nonscientists sometimes equate the profession with the pursuit of cold, hard facts. But what actually makes science fascinating is that every answer we find inevitably leads to many more questions. And almost without fail, the more we learn about nature, the more complex it turns out to be.
Gravity seems pretty straightforward: If you drop your keys, they fall to the floor. But to truly understand gravity, you need Einstein’s theory of relativity, with all of its counterintuitive ramifications — like the bending of light and slowing down of time near black holes.
Similarly, sex also seems straightforward. Every person superficially appears either female or male. But once we look beneath the surface, things are far more complicated.
While there are tangible biological sex characteristics — chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormones and secondary sex characteristics — they do not always fit neatly into male or female classifications, or align with one another within the same individual, as is the case for intersex people.
Gender expression, gender identity and sexual orientation also vary within individuals across cultures and throughout history.
The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian activist group, recently published an article titled “Trump transgender policy is simple and scientific: ‘Sex’ means biological sex.” The article not only ignores current thinking in the field of biology, but it also falsely implies that science yields simple answers. History shows otherwise, as scientific research has repeatedly revealed nature to be far more diverse and complex than we initially believed.
I was drawn to science as a child because I was curious about how the world works and excited to have my previous presumptions called into question. Those who now invoke science in support of their biases and prejudices do it a grave disservice, and science-minded people everywhere must speak out against it.
Julia Serano is a writer, performer, trans-bi activist and biologist.
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Coming Out to Myself, for Myself
By Mandana Mofidi
At 9 years old, I was unable to dodge a speeding car heading directly at me. The impact separated me from my bike and sent me flying in the air before landing face-first into concrete. My nose was broken and my four front teeth shattered, along with my jaw. But the pain and embarrassment of my new face — a crooked nose and a toothless smile — didn’t come close to what I felt when I discovered I was a lesbian at 13.
I can still feel the hot wave of shame I felt when I found myself attracted to my classmate, Carly. The burning sensation toward her so excited and repulsed me that I never spoke of it. My younger sister, Monica, changed all that by reading my journal and outing me to our mother when I was 17. Being outed felt similar to getting hit by a car.
Not being in control of my own coming out had a lasting impact on my development as a lesbian: I never really came out to myself.
I didn’t know how to find ownership or have pride. I hoped it would just happen to me, find me by some magical grace. Maybe a lover, a friend, society or even legislation would grant me the self-acceptance I needed.
I surrounded myself with the illusion that accolades would help me gain acceptance. I looked for affirmation in achievements: good grades, a great university, the perfect job, scholarly awards, a dream apartment.
Self-acceptance is critical to establishing healthy, adult relationships, especially those that break from convention. When my girlfriend of two years asked me to hold her hand in a restaurant, I couldn’t. This reduced her to curses and tears; the relationship ended not long after.
I was finally able to break my pattern of destroying relationships after going to a meditation retreat that inspired me to go sober and celibate, and to begin therapy. The shame I’d carried gradually shifted and dissolved. I didn’t need to hide anymore. I held my own hand and came out to myself.
I’ve learned that being out is a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year effort. It challenges me at the most innocuous times, like when the technician drawing my blood for a routine test innocently asks if I have a boyfriend, or when my cousin in Iran questions why I’m not married to a man yet.
Some days are easier than others, but now I am as prepared as ever to keep coming out.
Mandana Mofidi is executive director of audio at G/O Media.
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Did the ‘T’ Fall Off of ‘LGBTQ’?
By Cecilia Gentili
A short time ago during a meeting, I was asked by a gay man if we should keep the “T” in “LGBTQ.” I gagged and quickly asked him, why should we do that? I was then bombarded with an array of explanations — everything from “gender is different from sexuality” to “the needs of the ‘T’ community are different.” Add gasping to my gagging.
But this is not a new conversation or a new question. Years ago, after helping achieve the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York in 2011, the Empire State Pride Agenda disbanded, proclaiming its successes in furthering the LGBTQ agenda.
But what came across as “mission accomplished” made many people feel left out. Forgotten. There was still so much to do to further our acceptance as transgender, gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people.
Gays and lesbians mostly got what they wanted — legalized gay marriage, for example — but we were on our own. Out of these events, many trans-led organizations were created, and significant work has been done — including New York state’s passage this year of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act and city funding for LGBTQ programs.
But these were not LGBTQ efforts for the trans community; they were efforts by the trans community for trans rights. It was us scraping money for a bus to Albany and rationing the pizza for meetings.
Where has all that money gone? All those donors? Toward climate change? Or Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign? Who knows. What I do know is that it is not going to young transgender executive directors trying to build up our communities. So I wonder: Did the “T” actually fall off the acronym?
Call me an optimist, but I refuse to believe that’s the case. I want us to continue to be a family, complete with the dysfunctions, differences and disagreements that all families have.
My most important mentors in government advocacy are white gay men, and they have been very generous with me.
But now is the time to broaden those connections, to have the “G,” the “B” and the “L” communities support the “T” community — as the “T” has done since the early days of activism. As we commemorate 50 years of Stonewall, we should remember that we were all standing up together on that day. We should continue to do so now.
Cecilia Gentili is the founder of Transgender Equity Consulting.
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Reckoning With Religion’s Role in LGBTQ Youth Homelessness
By Carl Siciliano
As a young man, I spent several years as a member of the radical Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin.
In 1986, I made my home with a handful of other volunteers and several dozen homeless people at Saint Joseph House in New York City, just off the Bowery, in the Lower East Side. Our community, which was dedicated to Jesus’ message of peace, nonviolence and love, engaged in resistance against President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms race and military interventions in Central America, and every day fed hundreds of homeless men.
That Halloween, I came down for breakfast to find several of my openly gay co-workers poring through copies of a Vatican document, just published in The New York Times. They were clearly in anguish, clutching their hair, sighing, saying, “I cannot believe it, this is so horrible.” They were reading a letter to the world’s bishops from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who two decades later would become Pope Benedict XVI.
The letter, titled “Homosexualitatis Problema,” Latin for “the problem of homosexuality,” was the Vatican’s first major response to the LGBTQ rights movement, and especially to nascent efforts within the Catholic Church to treat LGBTQ people with openness and understanding. And the response was crystal clear: No such openness could be tolerated. Its language severely upped the ante of hostility. Some theologians had proposed that the condition of being homosexual was morally neutral, or even good. “No,” was the letter’s response: “It is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”
As for the efforts of LGBTQ Catholics to find spaces of acceptance in the church: They were to be henceforth forbidden.
After reading the letter, we commiserated about the alarm and terror we felt.But finally, we had to put the document aside. We hadn’t any more time to consider being labeled by our church leaders as disordered and evil; hundreds of homeless men were waiting for us to feed them.
Thirty-three years later, I still experience the tethering of religious condemnation of LGBTQ people with homelessness, as I manage the Ali Forney Center, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBTQ youth. Over 1,400 youths walk through our doors each year. By far the most common reason they cite for their homelessness is their parents’ rejection and hostility, borne of religious beliefs.
Indeed, a 2010 study by San Francisco State University found that parents who identify as “strongly religious” are significantly more likely to reject their LGBTQ children.
As a Christian, I see this phenomenon of judgment and rejection as a betrayal of Christ’s message of God’s unfailing parental love. If we can recognize that 40% of all the unaccompanied homeless youth in our nation are LGBTQ, then we are compelled to answer an urgent question: How can we encourage all churches to foster loving protection, rather than cruel rejection?
I pray that religious institutions will consider how homophobia and transphobia create a climate that endangers LGBTQ youths.
Carl Siciliano is the founder and executive director of the Ali Forney Center, dedicated to homeless LGBTQ youth.
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Stand Up for the Most Marginalized Among Us
By Asia Kate Dillon
I want to respectfully acknowledge that the land on which this essay was written is the occupied territory of the Lenape people.
As I reflect on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, I am drawn into remembrance of those who came before: Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, all the trans women, femmes and people of color who started the queer revolution long before I was born.
A question that Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, posed in a conversation I was honored to be a part of was, “Where do you stand on the power scale?”
I understood that she didn’t just mean a job title or position; she meant that even as a queer trans person, I still have light skin, which means I benefit from the invention of whiteness, and white supremacy. Acknowledging that does not negate my innate talents, my hard work, my worth or my own marginalization as a queer person.
Victims of anti-transgender violence in the United States are overwhelmingly transgender women of color who live at the dangerous, and too often deadly, intersections of transphobia, racism, sexism and criminalization, which often leads to high rates of poverty, unemployment and homelessness.
Transgender people in the United States, especially transgender women of color, experience fatal violence at a disproportionate rate.
Black Trans Lives Matter. Validating this message means challenging all the people who benefit from the invention of whiteness and from white supremacy, self-identified nontrans men in particular (both straight and gay among you). Be the first person in a room to say what pronouns you use and ask others what pronouns they use.
If you accidentally refer to someone by the wrong gender, just correct yourself. Don’t spend time feeling bad or apologizing, which makes the moment about you instead of the other person.
Stonewall’s legacy, and the next iteration of queer rights, demands that we center, uplift and support those most marginalized, most disenfranchised, who experience the most backlash from progress, in order to create systemic change.
It is these people who can see the forest for the trees, who have blueprints for the solutions that will build our intersectional future, who started the queer revolution long before I was born, simply by being visible.
Asia Kate Dillon is an American actor, best known for roles in “Orange Is the New Black” and “Billions.”
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One Closet, Two Secrets
By Laura Bullard
At 22, I was the youngest regular at the local pub by 30 years. It had taken me close to a year to earn my seat, but Joe, the bartender, would see me walk in, cut an empty can in half with his pocketknife to make an ashtray, and place it on my table with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and a rocks glass of bourbon filled to the brim, no rocks.
The brimful rocks glass is an alcoholic secret, and when you find a bartender who knows it, you tip well. It saves you two to three trips to the bar. It saves them two to three pours. It keeps your count low. Respectable, even.
I’d recently dropped out of a small evangelical college after surviving the first three major traumas of my adulthood: an assault, a wildly mismanaged disciplinary hearing and the soft edge of a thought that I might be more interested in women than men.
The ensuing decade was an exercise in avoidance, and my memories of it are not linear. In sexuality and in addiction, trauma refracts, warps and obscures. The absence of desire and the presence of fear are disparate and distinct. Drunk, I couldn’t see a difference.
Eleven years ago, I met a woman on the Chinatown bus from Manhattan to Boston. We spent the four-hour trip huddled close, our arms not quite touching. She invited me to visit her in Cambridge the following weekend, and I rode the train out to see her, buzzed. I willed myself to believe my feelings for her were platonic, and when the afternoon took a romantic turn toward evening, an electric fear shot up my spine (not unlike the zaps I felt at the base of my skull during my first week sober — I worried they were precursors to seizures). I wouldn’t see her again for eight years.
By the end of my 20s, I was mostly housebound, hiding away in my little apartment by the ocean. I would call friends at night, pouring teacups full of the kind of bourbon that comes in big plastic bottles, and “catch up” until it became difficult to respond without slurring. Then, I’d hang up and keep drinking until it became difficult to stand. Then, I’d pour a nightcap.
I decided to ask for help because I realized I was no longer scared of death, and that scared me. It was more of a wild stumbling back from the edge of a cliff than a grand gesture of self-care. Addiction is not a thing that can be suffered forever — it will always break its container in one way or another. Desire is like that, too.
Within six months of that first sober day, the woman I’d met on the bus called me after almost a decade of silence. I asked her if she’d like to visit me. Three weeks later, at 29 years old, I went on my first queer date. I kissed her. It was my first sober first kiss.
I’m not sure I stepped out of the closet so much as the closet crumbled around me. To stop lying about the drinking, I had to stop lying entirely. The progressive nature of addiction demands a continuous kind of healing, a decentering of shame, one day at a time. I was sober the day I asked the woman from the bus to marry me. When she said yes, I poured two rocks glasses full of sparkling water, no rocks.
Laura Bullard is a journalist and fact-checker. She writes about the interplay between identity and power.
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Nothing but Possibilities as a ‘Neither/Nor’
By Kate Bornstein
In March I turned 71, and I have been analyzing gender since I was 4. In 1952, in my nursery school, we had to line up by gender, and the line for the boys looked like no fun at all.
So off I toddled to the girls’ line, where I stood until the teacher gently made me line up with the “other little boys.”
I spent the next three decades of my life studying boys and men and acting like them, all the while knowing I wasn’t male. At the time there was no other choice but to be a woman, so I figured I was meant to be one. After a lifetime of dodging the issue, I finally woke up in Trinidad, Colorado, on May 1, 1986, after what was then called “sex reassignment surgery” and cried with relief. I was a woman.
I was lucky to find some of the few lesbians who were willing to regard me — a newly minted, self-appointed woman — as one of them.
After a couple of years of studying women, the women I was trying to be told me I wasn’t one of them, not really. It came down to three criteria, they said: I didn’t know what it was like to be on the short end of misogyny all my life; I had a leftover sense of male privilege and entitlement; and no matter that it was no longer an outie but a shiny new innie, it was still a penis.
So I said to heck with it, you win. I’m not a woman, and I know for some of you that means I can’t be a lesbian. And I realized that by being “not-man/not-woman,” I was nothing. There was no word or place for me in the binary gender system.
At first, it scared me. But it didn’t take me long to enjoy my outsider status. As neither/nor — as nothing — my life was starting to make sense.
When it comes to gender and sexuality, I am nothing but possibilities. What’s more, it turns out that these days I’ve got a nonbinary family: lots of people who are neither men nor women. All of us are virtually nothing in the eyes of a culture that sees two and only two.
I’ve heard ageist speculation that nonbinary gender identity is a fad of “the young.” Nah, it’s been going on for a long time, and now there’s a more robust and accessible vocabulary to address it. Recent surveys have shown that 50% of millennials believe gender to be a spectrum, and it seems that over 35% of the members of Generation Z know someone who uses a gender-neutral pronoun.
My own gender is a continuum that stretches from a 4-year-old who stood in the wrong gender line to the 71-year-old who just doesn’t capitulate to binaries anymore. It’s a Pride time of year, and I’m proud to be a loving auntie and granny to thousands of nonbinary people around the world. That’s a whole lot of nothing going on, and it makes me positively giddy to think what that might mean for the future.
Kate Bornstein is a performance artist, actress and writer.