A New Renaissance
by Lea McGeever
“It’s ok if you’re gay,” my mom would tell my younger brother. I don’t remember her telling me that. Maybe she did. I definitely don’t remember my father telling either of us that. We watched Will & Grace when I was in middle school, but only when my military father was stationed in a different city. I believe that is the extent my parents broached queer existence. Oh wait! We watched that Ellen episode. Ok, now that’s it. At school it was even less. Having grown up in a military family, we moved often and throughout the late 1980s through 2002 I experienced five public schools in California, and two public schools and a parochial school in Maryland.
It takes a lot of social pressure to suppress an open, queer community at a high school when that same high school has a theater, dance and arts magnet program. Yet my high school with its School of the Arts program managed to do that. I never learned about gay, lesbian or transgender historical figures or social movements. Maybe a student in class would quip “they were gay!” but more often they jeered “ugh, that’s gay.”
Of course this utter absence of any LGBTQIA+ culture at home and in school impressed the message that it’s not good to be gay, or anything not cisgender and heterosexual. Something in my subconscious said, “it’s only acceptable to be cishet—got it.” It wasn’t until my spouse, who was male-presenting and whom I called husband, came out to me as a transgender woman in December 2021 that I really stopped going with the heteronormative flow to consider: who am I? It turns out I am bisexual and bigender. At thirty-seven years old I searched Google for a term to describe being both man and woman genders, hence “bigender.”
Lea and her wife, Erin
So imagine how blown over and impressed I was when first sitting down with a few San Francisco transgender teens and they shared how they often corrected teachers who continue to use incorrect pronouns with them. These teens immediately became my role models for how I should be standing up for myself as a recently realized trans person. They, along with their parents, transgender activist Jupiter Peraza and I listened to the daily discriminatory strife these brave teens faced in and out of school while we worked on the resolution to protect trans and queer youth and adults. Even though being in a city like San Francisco where queer existence is normalized, what I heard from the youth illuminated how much work still needs to be done.
How is it in 2023 that all schools are still not equipped with gender-neutral bathrooms so queer and transgender students have a safe option to use? They are not respected by all their teachers as exemplified with purposeful pronoun misuse. In turn, the unfulfilled Queer and Trans Parent Advisory Council hints to these parents that the school district does not respect them. It is not only public schools that have these issues. Transphobia, purposeful and learned, permeates our society at large. Just check how many anti-trans bills are quickly passing in this country with AB1314, a bill forcing schools to out trans students to their parents, recently introduced in California. We can be better. We must be better. With this resolution we are showing our commitment as a community, not just a city, to strive toward enlightenment and compassion. California passed SB107 signaling ourselves as a refuge state for transgender people fleeing states where trans existence is criminalized. This resolution is a beacon of hope for transgender people. We are not settling for crumbs. We are not done fighting the good fight for a better tomorrow.