Groups rally for transgender rights in wake of recent actions
Emerson Kirkpatrick managed to get about 20 oxycodone pills and was planning to take them all, then just drift away.
He was 17 years old, and the struggle had just gotten too hard for him. That struggle, in its most basic form, manifested itself in a choice most people never have to consider: Which bathroom do I use? The one for the gender I was assigned at birth, or the one for the gender I identify with? Each day at the small private school he attended, Kirkpatrick had to make that choice. He eventually made the decision to use his lunch break to walk a mile to and from a drug store to use the bathroom there, away from any snickering or abuse.
“I was failing. I went from being an almost straight-A student to not turning in work,” he said. “It felt like it was not going to ever get better. I couldn’t see a reason to make it through the day.”
Thanks to some intervention, Kirkpatrick spent a week in a psychiatric ward, he said, and never tried to commit suicide. He dropped out of that school and earned his GED. On Tuesday afternoon, Kirkpatrick, now 21, told his story to the 150 people or so gathered in Overton Park for a rally in support of transgender people. Kirkpatrick, who was born female but identifies as male, received loud applause.
The rally, organized by Out Memphis and featuring several different organizations, was intended in part as a response to threats against transgender rights at both the federal and state level, said Will Batts, executive director of the group formerly known as the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
Those threats, Batts said, include not only President Donald Trump’s revocation of protections that allow transgender students in public schools to use the bathroom of their preference but also proposed legislation in Tennessee that would mandate students use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth gender.
“(This is) to bring light and to say that transgender equality matters to all of us,” Batts said.
More than a dozen other people spoke at the rally, some sharing their stories with the sympathetic audience.
“It’s really not about the bathroom,” said Ellyahnna Hall, a transgender woman. “It’s about a transgender person’s right to exist.”
Ginger Leonard, president of the Tennessee Equality Project, urged those there to continue to rally as well as contact legislators with their concerns.
“I know it’s easy to become disheartened when we’ve been hammered from every corner every day,” she said. “They have no idea the fierceness of this dragon they’re poking. They’re going to find out.”
Geneva Paulk is 16, and she says she doesn’t really identify as female, her gender at birth, or male. That also presents a problem when she tries to use the bathroom, she told those
“He was an inspiration to me when I was in high school, and he would call me by my first and last name when I was in trouble. I sure thought a lot of him and Dean Daniels (the dean of girls),” wrote another student.
“The BEST DEAN ever. God, how I appreciated his correction when I was a student!” wrote another. It all makes me think of where we are today. If we had more people in schools like my father, would we be grappling with this school-to-prison pipeline — where students, and black students especially, are criminalized for minor infractions of school rules and where police are used to handle issues that people like, say my father, could handle, or at least diffuse.
If we had more community fathers say, like here in Memphis, would four out of 100 black youths who commit offenses be referred to court, versus one out of 100 white youths who commit similar offenses?
Would those same black youths, if they had someone like my father to intervene on their behalf, wind up being treated with leniency instead of as a threat? That’s hard to know. Yet research has shown that courts tend to give white youths the benefit of the doubt, and to see them as good kids who made a mistake, while they view black youths’ transgressions as being indicative of their character and of future criminality.
My father knew better — which is why he not only tried to help steer many black youths away from behaviors that could get them in trouble, he also intervened to help get some of them out of trouble.
He believed in their worth, and he believed in second chances. But today, like the black youths in Memphis who wind up in court instead of back in the community, many can’t catch a break because not enough people like my father are around to see them as being worthy of a break, of believing that they, like his own black children, are a work in progress, with the same potential to contribute and to create as anyone else.
“Tonyaa, thanks for sharing Dean/Coach/Mentor/ Friend for so many of us,” wrote Greg Coleman, a Raines graduate who became one of the first AfricanAmerican punters in the NFL.
“Please know that so many of us are better people because he was a part of our lives…”
I do. And I know. Because he was in my life for 57 years.