All eyes are on 15-year-old Gavin Grimm at a school board
meeting in Gloucester, Va., the small town where he has lived his
entire short life. Gavin is here because the main item of business
before the board on the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2014, has to do with him.
The board is voting on whether he should be allowed to use the boys
bathroom at Gloucester High School.
Designated a girl at birth, Gavin, now 16, is transgender. He came
out to his family after a long struggle in 2014, and has been taking
hormones as part of the transition process. He has legally changed his
name, dresses as a boy, and lives as a boy in every way.
When he started 10th grade in September 2014, the administration
granted his request to use the boys room. But now, in response to
complaints from members of the community, the school board
was compelled to vote on a policy that would prohibit him from using
the boys room and require him to use a gender-neutral bathroom or the
girls room.
As the floor opens for public debate on
the question, Gavin, wearing a crisp checked dress shirt and a
royal-blue tie, rises and approaches the microphone at a podium in the
aisle. He faces the board without fidgeting, his posture erect and his
hands folded, speaking with composure and precision.
“I want to say that this has been a very, very long process,” he
says. “I’ve been aware of who I was since I was a very young kid, and
it’s taken me a very long time to be able to be myself and be OK with
that. The person I am now, being able to have all my rights in full, is
such a massive, dynamic difference from the person I was just last
summer. The person I was last summer was an inauthentic, incorrect,
upset, angry person, because I was not able to be myself. Gloucester
High School has done something unimaginably wonderful for me, and I
cannot thank my principal, my administration enough for that.
“If the evidence said that me using the boys room would be
catastrophic, I would not be advocating for myself, regardless of my
personal emotions on this issue,” Gavin continues. “I look only at the
facts, as one should in an issue that requires separation of church and
state, and feelings and state. I guess, in conclusion, I would like to
thank you for exercising your right to speak here, and thank you for
hearing my voice.” With that, he returns to his seat.
In the video of the meeting,
Gavin sits just outside the frame as a procession of speakers march to
the mic to weigh in. The camera remains fixed on the podium, and aside
from an occasional glimpse of his shirt or his hand, you never see him.
But you know he’s there, absorbing it all, as one person after another
disparages his right to use the boys restroom.
He listens to one of his fellow students, an articulate young woman
who says she aspires to be a journalist, tell the crowd, “Fact: despite
what the world will tell you, discomfort with public indecency is not
hateful or discriminatory. It’s biology, not politics.” He hears a male
student say, “The Grimm family and the media say students don’t care one
way or another about what happens in the high school or who uses the
bathrooms. We do care. The main reason you don’t see more of us is that
several of my friends have told me, we are afraid to come to these
meetings, that they are afraid of being bullied in school and in the
community, of being labeled hateful or intolerant or sexist just because
they are uncomfortable having a biological girl in the men’s room.”
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