ProPublica has a story about a transgender man dealing with life in North Carolina.He remembers walking into one of the men’s bathrooms on campus the first week after the law passed. A man standing at the urinal turned and asked, “Are you allowed to come in here anymore?”
Henson frequently experienced panic attacks, fearful of potential assault and furious at public policies that restricted his rights.
He was driven to attempted suicide by living in this.
A friend told me that he won’t visit the south because he has a transgender kid. The south is unfairly maligned for some things, but not this. Imagine if it were still outwardly racist like it was in James Baldwin’s day (and this is how they are about trans people right now) and bringing your kid into that?
There are cities in the south where the norm is to respect trans people, but I think it’d be small comfort to say “OK, but people will treat you like a human being as long as you stay inside city limits.”
Though again, how must it feel to know you can only go so far outside your state (assuming you live in a state where people generally treat you like a human being)? This is one of the reasons it’s hard to feel like this is one country.
There are right-wing people everywhere, and they have a different conception of reality which again makes it hard to feel you’re all part of the same thing. But it is interesting to see how geography can matter when they have control of a state.