“The Rosa Parks of the trans bathroom debate”: Gavin Grimm and the racialization of transgender civil rights

ABSTRACT

Gavin Grimm, a white transgender boy from Virginia, successfully sued his school board in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board and helped secure the right for trans and gender nonconforming students to use public school bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities. His 2021 victory was the culmination of a long legal battle that began in 2014, when the Gloucester County School Board (GCSB) passed a resolution that segregated bathrooms on the basis of “biological gender.” This essay considers the two GCSB meetings at which this resolution was debated as instances of “ordinary democracy,” where local practices of deliberation not only set policy but also sustain community and produce shared opinion. Drawing on Black trans scholarship that proposes the transitivity of Blackness and demonstrates how Blackness is made present in the service of whiteness, I examine how the discussions at the GCSB meetings strategically mobilized civil rights rhetoric and histories of racial segregation to debate Gavin’s entitlement to public space. Blackness, I argue, is invoked and disavowed as a condition of possibility for modern white trans identities and a resource for vernacular articulations of the scope of trans rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Bathroom bills
• ordinary democracy
• school boards
• Black trans studies
• Gavin Grimm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I follow the lead of scholars like GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer, who contend that “trans” is “an intentional move to hold space for a range of gender expansive people—who may identify as trans, transgender, and/or transsexual, and who move through the world as men, women, nonbinary people, agender people, and other non/gendered positionalities.” (GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer, “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship,” Peitho 22, no. 4 (Summer 2020).) As I will describe later in this essay, Black trans scholarship posits “trans*” (with the asterisk) as not only an identity label, but also an analytic, a method, or an optic, with “ontological, ideological, and epistemological ramifications.” (Kai M. Green, “Troubling the Waters: Mobilizing a Trans* Analytic,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 66–67.)

2 I refer to Gavin (and other young people) by first names throughout this essay for two reasons: first, using Gavin’s first name is a humanizing gesture, reminding us that although he is the subject of community controversy, policy debate, media attention, and legal decisions, he is still a private citizen and, most importantly, a minor. Second, as a trans young person, Gavin’s first name is a site of identity construction and agency; I seek to preserve his right to self-expression through naming by using that name here. Joshua Block, “‘All I Want to Do Is Be a Normal Child and Use the Restroom in Peace,” ACLU, October 21, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbtq-rights/transgender-rights/all-i-want-do-be-normal-child-and-use-restroom-peace.

3 James Hohmann, “Please, Go On,” Washington Post, July 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/please-go-on/gavin-grimm-on-a-watershed-moment-in-the-fight-for-transgender-rights/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=please-go-on; Steve Vladeck, quoted in Ariane de Vogue and Chandelis Duster, “Supreme Court Gives Victory to Transgender Student Who Sued to Use Bathroom,” CNN Politics, June 28, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/28/politics/gavin-grimm-supreme-court/index.html?mc_cid=72e51f8eb9&mc_eid=1c68b5882b.

4 Janet Mock, “Gavin Grimm,” Time, April 20, 2017, https://time.com/collection-post/4742687/gavin-grimm/.

5 Gil Kaufman, “Laverne Cox Called Out Gavin Grimm During the Grammy Awards: Who Is He?,” Billboard, February 13, 2017, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/grammys/7686420/laverne-cox-called-out-gavin-grimm-grammy-awards-who-is-he; Laverne Cox and Jessie Heyman, “It’s Not About Bathrooms: Laverne Cox on the Attack against Trans Rights,” InStyle, March 6, 2017, https://www.instyle.com/celebrity/laverne-cox-gavin-grimm-anti-trans-bathroom; “The 30 Most Influential Teens of 2016,” Time, October 19, 2016, https://time.com/4532104/most-influential-teens-2016/; Nancy Gibbs, “The 100 Most Influential People in the World 2017,” Time, April 20, 2017, https://time.com/magazine/us/4748217/may-1st-2017-vol-189-no-16-u-s/.

6 Sari Staver, “Pride 2018: Grimm Recalls ‘Isolating’ Experience in Trans Bathroom Fight,” The Bay Area Reporter, June 21, 2018, https://www.ebar.com/news/news//261542; Davis Burroughs, “Gavin Grimm Gifted College Scholarship,” Dogwood, June 25, 2019, https://vadogwood.com/2019/06/25/gavin-grimm-gifted-college-scholarship/.

7 See, for example: Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Erica Meiners, For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

8 Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, “The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 488.

9 Amber L. Johnson and Lore/tta LeMaster, Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2020), 3–4.

10 Lore/tta LeMaster and Michael Tristano Jr., “Performing (Asian American Trans) Femme on RuPaul’s Drag Race: Dis/orienting Racialized Gender, or, Performing Trans Femme of Color, Regardless,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 16, no. 1 (2023): 5–6; “Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Beauty,” New York Daily News, December 1, 1952.

11 Evan Mitchell Schares, “The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn: Whiteness in the Cultural Wake of Dying Queers,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–25; Joe Edward Hatfield, “Blake Brockington’s Rhetorical Afterlife: Fugitive Black Trans* Data and Queer Kairotic Methodology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (New York: Routledge, 2022), 114–21.

12 V. Jo Hsu, “Irreducible Damage: The Affective Drift of Race, Gender, and Disability in Anti-Trans Rhetorics,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2022): 63. See also: Liam Randall, “Irreversible Damage: Trans Masculine Affectability and the White Family,” in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (New York: Routledge, 2022), 273–80.

13 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5. See also: Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76; Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); E. Patrick Johnson, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Roderick A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); Daniel C. Brouwer and Charles E. Morris, III, “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 160–84; Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

14 Lisa B. Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here Is Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 204.

15 Marco Dehnert, Daniel C. Brouwer, and Lore/tta LeMaster, “Anti-Normativity under Duress: An Intersectional Intervention in Queer Rhetoric,” in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (New York: Routledge, 2022), 319.

16 Rosemary R. Philips, “The Battle over Bathrooms: Schools, Courts, and Transgender Rights.” Theory in Action 10, no. 4 (October 2017): 100–17; Jo Wuest, “The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics: Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases,” Politics & Gender 15 (2019): 336–60; Zein Murib, “Administering Biology: How ‘Bathroom Bills’ Criminalize and Stigmatize Trans and Gender Nonconforming People in Public Space,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 42, no. 2 (2020): 153–71; Suzanne E. Eckes, “The Restroom and Locker Room Wars: Where to Pee or Not to Pee,” Journal of LGBT Youth 14, no. 3 (2017): 247–65.

17 Erin J. Rand, “PROTECTing the Figure of Innocence: Child Pornography Legislation and the Queerness of Childhood,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 3 (2019): 251–72; Erin J. Rand, “Fear the Frill: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Uncertain Futurity of Feminist Judicial Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 72–84. See also: Marouf Hasian Jr., Celeste Michelle Condit, and John Louis Lucaites, “The Rhetorical Boundaries of ‘the Law’: A Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Legal Practice and the Case of the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 4 (November 1996): 323–42; Marianne Constable, Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2014); Clarke Rountree, “Instantiating ‘The Law’ and its Dissents in Korematsu v. United States: A Dramatistic Analysis of Judicial Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 1 (2001): 1–24.

18 Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19–46; see also Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 279–306.

19 Robert Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 2–3.

20 Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, 10, 35, 5.

21 Karen Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 2–5.

22 Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy, 200–3.

23 Samuel McCormick, “Arguments from Analogy and Beyond: The Persuasive Artistry of Local American Civic Life,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014): 187; see also Whitney Gent, “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’: Neutrality as an Obstacle to Counterpublic Rights Claims,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 230–50.

24 Gloucester County School Board meeting minutes, November 11, 2014.

25 Gavin Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, No. 19–1952 (2020): 5–6.

26 Neeru “Nina” Gupta and Suzann M. Wilcox, “Transgender Students and Title IX: Biden Administration Signals Shift,” The National Law Review XI, no. 327 (November 23, 2021), https://www.natlawreview.com/article/transgender-students-and-title-ix-biden-administration-signals-shift.

27 While Gavin’s case was pending, several other cases regarding transgender students and the use of bathrooms and locker rooms at school were decided in 2016, all in favor of the transgender students’ rights; see, for example, Students v. United States Department of Education in Illinois, Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District in Wisconsin, and Board of Education of the Highland Local School District v. United States Department of Education in Ohio.

28 Joellen Kralik, “‘Bathroom Bill’ Legislative Tracking,” National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), October 24, 2019, https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/-bathroom-bill-legislative-tracking635951130.aspx#3.

29 Samantha Michaels, “We Tracked Down the Lawyers Behind the Recent Wave of Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills,” Mother Jones, April 25, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/alliance-defending-freedom-lobbies-anti-lgbt-bathroom-bills/; “Alliance Defending Freedom,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliance-defending-freedom.

30 Kralik, “‘Bathroom Bill’ Legislative Tracking;” Diana Ali, “The Rise and Fall of the Bathroom Bill: State Legislation Affecting Trans & Gender Non-Binary People,” NASPA, April 2, 2019, https://www.naspa.org/blog/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-bathroom-bill-state-legislation-affecting-trans-and-gender-non-binary-people; Murib, “Administering Biology.”

31 Wendy S. Hesford, Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021), 175. For scholarship on the intersectional “passing” of Black bodies in and beyond Black communities see: Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Amy André and Sandy Chang, “‘And Then You Cut Your Hair’: Genderfucking on the Femme Side of the Spectrum,” in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2006), 254–69.

32 John Riley, “Gavin’s Story: Gavin Grimm Is the New Face of the Transgender Movement,” Metro Weekly, May 12, 2016, https://www.metroweekly.com/2016/05/gavin-grimm-story/.

33 Dean Spade, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Yve Laris Cohen, and Kalaniopua Young, “Models of Futurity,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, eds. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 327; Wuest, “The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics.”

34 Spade, Barrow, Cohen, and Young, “Models of Futurity,” 327–28; see also Dean Spade’s critique of the violence inherent to seeking legal and administrative recognition as the primary form of advocacy for trans people (Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2011)).

35 Roderick A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

36 James Hohmann, “Please, Go On.” In 2022 Gavin even published a children’s book called If You’re a Kid Like Gavin (with Kyle Lukoff and illustrated by J Yang) that tells his story and seeks to inspire other trans kids.

37 Che Gossett and Juliana Huxtable, “Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, eds. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 42.

38 “Gloucester County, VA,” DataUSA, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/gloucester-county-va/#demographics. There is no record of the racial demographics of those who attended the school board meetings. My assignments of race to speakers are derived from the recordings of the meetings; in some cases speakers identified their race (either explicitly or implicitly) in their statements or individuals’ races were named by others.

39 Che Gossett, “Žižek’s Trans/Gender Trouble,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 13, 2016, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/zizeks-transgender-trouble/.

40 Marquis Bey, “The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 284.

41 Omi Salas-SantaCruz, “Decoloniality & Trans* of Color Educational Criticism,” Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education 8, no. 1 (Spring 2023), https://traue.commons.gc.cuny.edu/decoloniality-trans-of-color-educational-criticism/. My own use of the asterisk follows the lead of the individual scholars I cite, including the asterisk when the authors do so in their work.

42 Bey, “The Trans*-ness of Blackness,” 276, 278.

43 Bey, “The Trans*-ness of Blackness,” 285.

44 Claire Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be a Human?” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (May 2015): 228.

45 Bey, “The Trans*-ness of Blackness,” 285–7.

46 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 5–7.

47 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 20, 57. See also Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.

48 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 141–2.

49 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 185.

50 Green, “Troubling the Waters,” 66–7, 79.

51 Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 162.

52 C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, 2nd ed., eds. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67; Ellison, Green, Richardson, and Snorton, “We Got Issues,” 162, 164.

53 Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 71.

54 Green, “Troubling the Waters,” 79; emphasis added.

55 The minutes and video recordings of these meetings are publicly available through the Gloucester County meeting portal: https://www.gloucesterva.info/640/Meeting-Portal. All subsequent citations of these meetings are drawn from these records.

56 GCSB meeting, November 11, 2014, 57:17; GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 1:28:32.

57 GCSB meeting, November 11, 2014, 37:23.

58 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 30:23; GCSB meeting, November 11, 2014, 58:09.

59 GCSB meeting, November 11, 2014, 1:04:31.

60 Hsu, “Irreducible Damage.” The overlapping discourses of racial contamination and queer and trans contagion are evident in numerous contexts including, for example, HIV/AIDS, terrorism, child abuse, and sex trafficking, not to mention contemporary fears about queer “groomers.” For scholarship on some of these contexts see, for example: Karma R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 172–5; Ian Barnard, Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020); Annie Hill, “Producing the Crisis: Human Trafficking and Humanitarian Interventions,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 315–9.

61 Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 358.

62 Alison Reed, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead: Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 49–50.

63 GCSB meeting, November 11, 2014, 1:34:25, 1:36:41; GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 1:00:34.

64 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 30:01.

65 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 46:27.

66 David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 38.

67 Library of Congress, “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875,” http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=014/llsl014.db&recNum=058.

68 Kirt H. Wilson, “The Contested Space of Prudence in the 1874–1875 Civil Rights Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 2 (1998): 131–49. Wilson argues that Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights protections for Black Americans depicted the Civil War as an “epochal rupture” that separated the era of slavery from the “new sensibility” that guided their behavior in the present (135). This temporal distancing is a precursor to the contemporary liberal narrative of progress that I describe here, which locates racial segregation and discrimination in the past.

69 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 1:39:34.

70 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 1:46:53.

71 GCSB meeting, December 9, 2014, 2:06:09.

72 Not only did the GCSB lose the case, but it was ordered to pay $1.3 million to cover the ACLU’s legal costs in representing Gavin. “A School Board Will Pay $1.3M Over a Trans Student’s Lawsuit against Its Bathroom Ban,” NPR, August 27, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031640545/school-board-transgender-bathroom-policy-gavin-grimm?utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr.

73 Alison Reed, “The Whiter the Bread,” 50.

74 Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 11; Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 57.

75 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 181.

76 Gavin Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 59–60.

77 Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

78 Trans lives and experiences are described by some scholars in terms of their ruptures of normative temporalities, producing a sense of being “out of sync” or operating in “disjunct time.” In a longer version of this project I explore the way Gavin’s identity and development are depicted as being not only “new,” but also as skewing normative temporalities of gender and sexuality (Kadji Amin, “Temporality,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 220; Jian Neo Chen and Micha Cárdenas, “Times to Come: Materializing Trans Times,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 4 (November 2019): 475).

79 Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, 182.

80 Schares, “The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn,” 4.

81 Jonathan Stempel, “U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Florida High School's Transgender Bathroom Ban,” Reuters, December 30, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-upholds-florida-high-schools-transgender-bathroom-policy-2022-12-30/.

82 Samantha Riedel, “A Florida School's Transphobic Bathroom Policy Was Upheld by a Federal Appeals Court,” them, January 4, 2023, https://www.them.us/story/drew-adams-florida-school-transphobic-bathroom-ban-upheld?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=them.

83 Wyatt Ronan, “BREAKING: 2021 Becomes Record Year for Anti-Transgender Legislation,” Human Rights Campaign, March 13, 2021, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/breaking-2021-becomes-record-year-for-anti-transgender-legislation; Nico Lang, “2022 Was the Worst Year Ever for Anti-Trans Bills. How Did We Get Here?,” them, December 29, 2022, https://www.them.us/story/2022-anti-trans-bills-history-explained?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=them; Trans Legislation Tracker, https://translegislation.com/ (accessed September 4, 2023).

84 “Outlawing Trans Youth: State Legislatures and the Battle over Gender-Affirming Healthcare for Minors,” Harvard Law Review 134, April 12, 2021; Tamar Goldenberg, Laura Jadwin-Cakmak, Elliot Popoff, Sari L. Reisner, Bré A. Campbell, and Gary W. Harper, “Stigma, Gender Affirmation, and Primary Healthcare Use Among Black Transgender Youth,” Journal of Adolescent Health 65, no. 4 (2019): 483–90.

85 “Fact Sheet: The Importance of Sports Participation for Transgender Youth,” Center for American Progress, March 18, 2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fact-sheet-importance-sports-participation-transgender-youth/; Derrick Clifton, “Anti-Trans Sports Bills Aren’t Just Transphobic—They’re Racist, Too,” them, March 31, 2021, https://www.them.us/story/anti-trans-sports-bills-transphobic-racist.

86 Spade, Barrow, Cohen, and Young, “Models of Futurity,” 328; Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 196.

87 Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 2, 196.

88 Hsu, “Irreducible Damage,” 71, 74.