Six years ago, we called her Jane because she was afraid to let us use her real name and photo. But, as Knox County Schools first acknowledged transgender student back in the mid-70s, she had a lot to say. She talked to us on the condition of anonymity because she was afraid.
The issue in 2017 was the county law department’s intention to remove the words “actual or perceived gender” and “sexual orientation” from the KCS anti-harassment and bullying policies. The plan was to replace them with the word “sex.”
Jane thought this was a terrible idea.
Her experience as a non-conforming student in a Knox County high school had nearly driven her to suicide. What saved her was her mother’s willingness to take her to the gender reassignment clinic at Vanderbilt Medical Center – the one that the Republicans who control the General Assembly have targeted and are trying to shut down.
Thanks to the diagnosis and treatment plan she got at the clinic, she not only survived, but thrived. She left Knoxville after high school and built a successful career as a fashion model, walking runways in New York and Europe and then moving on to plus-sized modeling in the later years of her career. The lifetime of most modeling careers is limited, and eventually she moved back to Knoxville to be closer to her family a few months before this issue arose.
She has a home and a job (sometimes two of them) and is still stunningly beautiful, but you’ll have to take my word for that because we can’t run her picture or even describe her with any particularity because doing so could endanger her life.
Please read the column from 2017:
And here is the response she wrote this week to the bill that Gov. Bill Lee signed into law March 2 criminalizing the kind of gender-affirming medical care that she was given in the mid-1970s. A picture of Lee dressed as a woman at a high school powder puff football game made it to Saturday Night Live last week, but “Jane” doesn’t see any humor in the situation:
“I am absolutely astonished at how transgender children’s rights have devolved and diminished in the six and a half years of me moving back to Knoxville, Tennessee.
“For the Tennessee legislators and our Gov. Bill Lee to sign this law into action is disgusting and reprehensible. Parents, in general, know what is best for their children. Parents who are aiding their children in having psychological and hormone therapy to live their authentic identities are now facing fines, prison and having their children taken away from their home. It is incomprehensible to me!
“My diagnosis came in 1975, and my mother faced severe criticism from her job, her church and her community for allowing me to transition from male to female. Thank God this archaic law that just passed was not enacted back then or my mother would be in prison.
“And this business about ‘protecting our children from life-altering acts’ is hypocritical and ridiculous. Rarely have I met a transgender person who did not know from the moment that they had consciousness that we were trapped in the wrong body. When these children start their transitional journey, it is full speed ahead under the care of doctors and professionals.
“How cruel for Mr. Lee and the Tennessee legislature to take these transgender children’s taste of freedom away from them. First it was the bathrooms and then the sports and now this ludicrous law. What they really want to do is eradicate transgender people along with the LGBTQ population and ultimately everyone else who is not a far-right Republican, white and Christian.
“I now feel less safe than when I arrived in 2016. I spent most of my life in NYC and LA. I guess I will have to go back there … for I feel uneasy and unwelcome in this current Tennessee climate.”
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.