Transgender Americans are finding increasing support for their gender identities in unusual places: the so-called red states. In a small Colorado city, parents and the school administration were initially upset with the transition of a student's gender from boy to girl, but other students were not.
But on the first day of school, nothing happened. No flood of calls, no angry protests, and no bullying. Michelle was "happy and shocked" that M.J.'s classmates seemed to get it. When one student made a mocking comment to another using M.J.'s former name, one eighth-grade boy dismissed him with a simple insight. "That person doesn't even exist anymore," he said. "You're talking about somebody who's imaginary."
This proud Coloradan was trying to describe the culture to a friend over dinner tonight. She had no baseline understanding at all, I was the second one of my kind she'd ever met. Unlike our closest-culture-cousin: San Franciscans, there are fewer of us. And fewer still leave. And the majority of those return in a handful of years. So i feel tasked, as one of the few out there, to proclaim, matter-of-factly: Colorado is awesome. That is all.
