Janet Mock: Young People Get Trans Rights. Its Deplorables* Who Dont

[DemocratSinceBirth]

When I was a high school freshman in Honolulu, I would sit with my girlfriends on the bleachers of the school amphitheater every morning. We’d meet in the same spot and chat for an hour, before homeroom began. We’d gossip and giggle, swoon over Justin Timberlake and sip from our coffee cups, which made us feel so adult. It was our version of Central Perk on “Friends.”

I felt like any other student, just one of the girls, until one morning when a vice principal, who had always looked at me curiously, blocked me as I was following my friends into the girls’ restroom. The administrator told me to come with her. We walked to the nurse’s office, a five-minute trip from my homeroom, where she pointed to a single-stall restroom.

“This is where you go,” she told me.

I walked into the restroom in silence as the vice principal and the nurse looked on.

I was only 15, and I obediently used that restroom for the rest of the year. I didn’t know then that I had agency and could defend myself against authority figures. I was also used to making compromises so that the adults around me felt comfortable. That was 1998.




https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/opinion/janet-mock-young-people-get-trans-rights-its-adults-who-dont.html

* My word