And while my relationship with Andy and our circumstances demonstrated the practical reasons for access to marriage, it also reinforced the broader importance summed up in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion of the Court. Even facing death, Andy wanted our relationship affirmed and celebrated by our community and society. He likely should have passed away days before our wedding, but he held on for that simple but common desire to have our love recognized.
I felt grateful to have experienced the kind of love we were celebrating that night and in awe of the significant step forward we had just made as a country. And as darkness fell in Lafayette Square, the colors projected on the north side of the White House grew in their intensity. It was a moving sight. If the Court’s decision earlier in the day had been a tangible embrace of equality by our government, that evening’s display reflected a symbolic one.
Somewhere in Kansas, or South Carolina, or Utah, a young LGBTQ kid opened up their computer that night. They may have just heard anti-LGBTQ slurs around the dinner table. They may have just been called names in their neighborhood. But on that Friday night in June 2015, they went to sleep after seeing the White House—the ultimate symbol of our democracy—light up like a rainbow.
The ground was shifting beneath our feet; you could almost feel it.
CHAPTER 12
There was that word again. “History.”
It’s not often you know that you’re witnessing history when it’s happening, but that realization was unmistakable in 2015 and 2016. Our community’s progress would have seemed unimaginable just a decade before. But because of the tireless work of advocates and activists and the quiet courage of everyday LGBTQ people, “the arc of the moral universe” was bending toward justice. As broken as our politics can seem, our community proved that we can still do big things in this country, that when we advocate from a place of passion and authenticity, change will come.
In the months ahead, the progress continued to roll in: enhanced protections for transgender students, the removal of the ban on transgender service members in our nation’s military, and the release of protections in health care that Andy had fought for throughout our relationship.
In a much-anticipated move, the Obama administration made clear that the Affordable Care Act’s ban on discrimination based on sex included discrimination against transgender people, including for transition-related care. For the first time ever, transgender people would be afforded clear nationwide protections in federally funded health-care programs and institutions. And while that didn’t impact every single health-care provider, it included most insurance plans and hospitals.
Flipping through the pages of the regulation with my colleagues, our hearts filled with pride as we realized that Andy and his work were referenced by name several times throughout the lifesaving document. When I got home, I looked up at the urn of Andy’s ashes and the picture of him that sat right next to it. “I’m so proud of you, Bean,” I said. “You did it.”
As was the case when Andy shepherded through Washington, D.C.’s local health-care nondiscrimination policy, now, even in death, cancer hadn’t taken away his voice. He had passed away, but he was still saving others’ lives.
But despite these historic steps forward, we were still a long way from full nationwide equality. Progress isn’t always linear and can often elicit a dangerous backlash, one that often targets the most marginalized within a community. Violence against LGBTQ people, particularly trans women of color, appeared to be ticking up. In 2016, at least twenty-two trans people were killed in the United States, the most lives lost on record in a single year up until that point.
I routinely met LGBTQ people facing discrimination, couples like Jami and Krista Contreras in Michigan whose six-day-old baby had been denied care by a pediatrician simply because Krista and Jami were a same-sex couple. People like Diane, a transgender factory worker who was forced to place a humiliating sign outside of the women’s restroom if she was using it, as if she was a threat to others.
“People won’t even park their cars next to mine in the parking lot,” she told me. “I’m completely isolated.”
While same-sex couples could now legally marry in all fifty states, D.C., and the U.S. territories, LGBTQ people in a majority of states were still at risk of being discriminated against in the workplace, housing, and public spaces. In a majority of states, gay workers could be legally married but then could potentially be fired for placing a picture of their spouse on their desk. More and more transgender people could gain access to health care to live their authentic lives but could be denied access to even the most basic necessities for doing so. In every case, transgender people, and particularly trans people of color, face the brunt of this discrimination.
Soon enough, Senator Merkley held to the promise he made at CAP to introduce a comprehensive LGBTQ nondiscrimination bill. In an ornate room just off the floor of the U.S. Senate, flanked by the first openly LGBTQ senator, Tammy Baldwin, civil rights leader Representative John Lewis, and other elected officials, Senator Merkley and openly gay Representative David Cicilline introduced the Equality Act.
The room was packed with reporters and activists. Cameras lined the back wall across from a lectern with a sign that read “Equality Forward.” The LBJ Room, named after the former president who had signed the Civil Rights Act into law in the 1960s, was filled with light from three big windows that looked out onto the expansive lawn just in front of the Capitol, and right in the middle of the central window was a view of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Empowered by our historic progress, our movement was now shifting to a bolder strategy, demanding full federal equality. The Equality Act would be one of the most extensive civil rights bills introduced since the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed in 1991, and it was introduced with more congressional cosponsors on day one than any LGBTQ legislation in history, a sign of the rapidly shifting public opinion.
Nowhere was the need for these explicit and irrefutable protections more evident than in North Carolina. As gay people became a less effective boogeyman for anti-equality forces, extreme politicians began to turn their attention to transgender people. In early 2016, the city council in North Carolina’s largest city, Charlotte, adopted an LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance much like the laws passed in Delaware, several other states, and more than one hundred cities.
An important but by no means extraordinary step by the city council was quickly and disingenuously used by anti-LGBTQ politicians in the North Carolina state legislature and by the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, as an excuse to push for a so-called “bathroom bill,” legislation that would restrict access to restrooms in public buildings, such as schools, airports, and government offices, to the gender marker on a person’s birth certificate.
The practical impact of the bill would be similar to the almost-added amendment we thankfully avoided in Delaware during the fight for our positive nondiscrimination bill. By limiting restroom access in public buildings based on a person’s birth certificate, the bill would ban the vast majority of the trans community—most of whom have not been able to update the gender marker on their birth certificate—from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity in many core areas of life.
In an almost laughably extreme move, the governor called the state’s legislature in for a special session specifically to regulate where trans people could pee. Calling a special session is required when a legislature has adjourned for an extended period of time and is usually utilized for emergency situations such as a natural disaster. But these legislators could see that the clock was ticking on their political ability to legislate discrimination against trans people. Soon, public opinion would change so much that it would become politically impossible.
It’s no surprise that antitrans extremists have targeted bathrooms. Every fight for civil and human rights over the last several decades has included cont
roversies about restrooms. It’s partly because we all feel vulnerable in those spaces, so it is easy to instill fear in people.
But it’s also more calculated and sinister than that. Access to a restroom is necessary everywhere: in schools, in workplaces, and in public venues. These so-called bathroom bills are nothing more than an attempt to legislate transgender people out of public life.
In March 2016, the North Carolina legislature met in their special session and, in a matter of hours, passed the antitransgender bill, which Governor McCrory signed into law that night. The law, infamously known as House Bill 2, or HB2, wasn’t just a bathroom bill; it also included a laundry list of harmful policies. Cities could no longer pass any LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections. Civil rights protections for other identities were undermined. And localities were forbidden from setting their own minimum wages.
The reaction from around the nation was swift and furious, particularly in regard to the section of the law that required state facilities to discriminate against transgender people. Businesses began to boycott. Conventions and concerts started to pull out. Athletic associations made clear they wouldn’t locate events in the state. And within weeks, North Carolina was hemorrhaging jobs and economic activity.
But more than anything else, the bill hurt real people. Transgender public school students, many of whom were already using restrooms consistent with their gender identity in school, were now faced with being in violation of state law if they continued to do so.
Just a month after passage of the law, I flew down to North Carolina with a film crew from CAP to interview an eighteen-year-old transgender boy about HB2. Finn Williams lived just outside Durham, North Carolina, and had come out to a supportive family a few years before. After coming out, Finn had gone to four different schools trying to find one that would both allow him to use the boys’ restroom and combat the bullying he experienced. In denying Finn access to the boys’ restroom, he was told that he would make the other students uncomfortable.
“Just being me shouldn’t make other people uncomfortable,” Finn told us.
He eventually dropped out of high school entirely instead of facing the constant bullying from peers and humiliation by his school. And now the North Carolina legislature had mandated effectively the same treatment Finn had experienced for the thousands of transgender students statewide.
After finishing up with Finn, we traveled to Charlotte and met with a member of the city council, a trailblazing out lesbian woman named LaWana Mayfield who had helped lead the charge for the city’s now-banned LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance. After wrapping up our discussion, and just before we left for the airport, I popped into the women’s restroom at the Charlotte government center, where we’d interviewed Councilwoman Mayfield.
I had avoided public restrooms while in the state, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I went in and, just like everyone else, peed. After washing my hands, as I stood alone in the bathroom, I took out my phone and snapped a selfie.
I posted the photo on Instagram and Facebook with the caption:
Here I am using a women’s restroom in North Carolina that I’m technically barred from being in.
They say I’m a pervert.
They say I’m a man dressed as a woman.
They say I’m a threat to their children.
They say I’m confused.
They say I’m dangerous.
And they say accepting me as the person I have fought my life to be seen as reflects the downfall of a once great nation.
I’m just a person. We are all just people. Trying to pee in peace. Trying to live our lives as fully and authentically as possible. Barring me from this restroom doesn’t help anyone. And allowing me to continue to use this bathroom—just without fear of discrimination and harassment—doesn’t hurt anyone.
Stop this. We are good people. #repealhb2
I posted the picture and caption to underscore for my own friends the simple fact that this wasn’t an abstract issue. This was a law banning real people like me from public restrooms. I didn’t think much of it as I set my phone to airplane mode and took off for Colorado, where I would be speaking at an HRC event in Denver.
As we took off, I looked back at North Carolina knowing I could return to my supportive bubbles, but for so many transgender North Carolinians like Finn, HB2 was an everyday reality. They couldn’t escape it.
By the time we landed and I turned on my phone, my Facebook notifications had exploded. At first hundreds of people had shared my photo. Then, a few hours later, thousands. Then ten thousand. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Then fifty thousand shares.
Soon the media started calling. BuzzFeed posted a viral piece: THIS TRANS WOMAN POSTED A SELFIE TO CHALLENGE NORTH CAROLINA’S BATHROOM LAW. Mic.com called it the “Best Selfie Ever,” a story Yahoo News reposted. Another article called it an “illegal” selfie. Teen Vogue described it as a “powerful political move.” MSNBC featured the picture and read the caption on Chris Hayes’s primetime television show.
The post filled with comments. Some were great, with the initial wave reinforcing the harm of HB2 and the points I made in the text of the post. Other supportive comments, though, missed the point and began to focus on my appearance as, at least in the picture, a “passable” trans woman.
When I first posted the selfie, thinking that it was going to be limited to my friend network, I posted the picture along with the text to reinforce the realness of the law. But as it spread, the post soon became less about the text and more about the picture itself. Several comments read variations of the same thought: “Of course you belong in the women’s restroom, look at you.”
I had seen this and tried to push back on that same narrative in Delaware.
And now I tried to use the platform I was given to stress that this wasn’t about how I, or any trans person, looked. It was about who we are. Civil rights shouldn’t depend on appearance. And the fact of the matter is that those most impacted by laws such as HB2 are the trans people who aren’t like me, particularly gender-nonconforming trans people and trans people of color.
Part of me considered stepping back from the stories, but I worried that my message was being lost. I feared that my words were being drowned out by the “vulnerable cuteness of [my] doe-eyes accented with white eyeliner,” as one writer put it. I certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to have her thoughts overshadowed by her appearance and femininity. So I decided to try to counter that takeaway, to utilize the opportunities for interviews to provide nuance to the reactions. But of course, participating in the stories only perpetuated the attention.
Each story pointed people back to my personal social media accounts. The positive comments were quickly overwhelmed with a flood of hate.
I had witnessed firsthand in Delaware the emotions that the bathroom conversation stirred up in people, but nothing I had experienced quite prepared me for this. The topic of trans bathroom access was contentious, but the actual sight of a trans woman in a women’s bathroom was explosive. For many who viewed my picture, it was the first time they had ever knowingly seen any kind of image of a trans woman in a women’s bathroom. The political climate and increased violent rhetoric had only ratcheted up the passions.
My social media accounts were filled with threats. The dark web, the underground websites that have become home to “alt-right” trolls, filled with conversations about gang-raping me or murdering me. In the days after the post, my workplace was forced to heighten their security protocol because of the threats that were coming my way.
The most common message wasn’t a threat so much as a violent request, frequently appearing as three letters: “kys.”
Kill yourself.
Message after message told me to take my own life. My phone would illuminate every three seconds with the same message. Again and again.
“kys.”
“kil
l yourself.”
“fucking die u ugly monster.”
“kill yourself.”
“kys.”
“kill yourself you look like a man.”
“it.”
“kys.”
“it.”
“you are disgusting and worthless.”
Eventually, I turned off the notifications, but every so often I would log on to report and delete some of the most violent and hateful comments. I didn’t want young trans kids who followed my social media accounts to see them. I even thought about taking down the picture or setting my accounts to private, but then the haters would have won. I resolved to keep it all up, even if I was miserable.
My parents were instinctually nervous about all the attention, but given their limited use of social media, they had no idea of the hate that was coming my way. I couldn’t bear to tell them. I felt completely alone, and honestly, I just wanted Andy. I just wanted him to say “I love you.” I just wanted him to hold me, to reassure me. I wanted him to tell me that I was beautiful and that he was proud of me.
The thought of suicide had never crossed my mind. Even in my harshest or hardest moments, I always felt lucky to be alive. Watching Andy fight to live only reinforced how lucky I felt to be alive and to be continuing to fight. But as the messages continued flooding in, I just wanted to escape it all. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Standing in my hotel bathroom in downtown Denver, just an hour before I was set to speak before five hundred people at the HRC Mile High Dinner, my heart began racing and I started to hyperventilate. I knew the stories would diminish in a matter of days and the negativity would cease, but after being told to kill myself thousands of times for days, the thought of suicide somehow became a rational thought in my mind for the first time ever. It was a way to end it right now, to escape the deluge of hate. Wrapped in my bath towel, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and began to cry.
Tomorrow Will Be Different Page 25