Watching Ain’t Enough
Growing up south of the Mason/Dixon Line is no picnic, as Blackwarren’s Skye Sisk can tell you. Here’s her story about what it’s like, what it’s not like, and what we can all do to step up in the face of trans hate.
When I tell people I grew up in the South, I get one of two reactions. Most of the time, I get jokes: “Bet you couldn’t wait to leave,” laughter, maybe a pat on the shoulder. Other times, I get pity: a sympathetic frown, a hug, “That must have been so hard.”
I don’t like either response.
I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina until I was nearly 20. It was the “good part” of the city, too; at the time, I didn’t appreciate the fact that I was living in the most diverse part of the Tarheel State. Metropolitan living was just what I knew. I caught glimpses of the more stereotypical “hillbilly” way of life when visiting family in the Appalachians and the Piedmont, and we’d joke about how lucky we were that my dad didn’t have as thick of an accent as the rest of his family, but life in the Charlotte bubble felt so far removed that we might as well have been living in a different country.
The Rise (and Fall) of House Bill 2
I was 18 when the state passed the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, colloquially called House Bill 2. The law declared statewide that public restrooms could only be used by people whose sex on their birth certificate matched the sign on the door, effectively making it illegal for trans people to exist in public. (If you think that’s an exaggeration, think about having to eat at a restaurant without being able to wash your hands; go to a job interview unable to check your reflection in the mirror; attend school, go to church, work an eight-hour shift, or even go grocery shopping with no bathroom access.)
The pushback was immediate and catastrophic. Suddenly my home state was on travel advisories and do-not-fly lists. News anchors and online chat groups spoke in the same righteous tone about the outrage they felt on our behalf. There were boycotts and relocations; many of my neighbors feared for their jobs. But the tone of these conversations was... weird. The phrase “of course” came up a lot: “Of course North Carolina would do something like this.” Even as we marched in protest, my group of friends and I felt alienated and rejected by that view. We’re North Carolinians, and we would never do something like this. Do all these outsiders just think that everyone down here is a bigot?
HB2 was repealed a year later, but the attention and outrage had already passed; I didn’t hear any cheering.
A Very Different Landscape Today
The political climate is different in 2023. We’ve had a president brag on microphone about sexually assaulting women; there are Nazis again. We’re all a little tired of the constant barrage of terror and tragedy on our televisions and our phones. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen only a fraction of the outrage shown to HB2 in response to the Florida Senate Bill 254. The law explicitly makes it illegal to offer gender-affirming care to children under 18, and gives the state the ability to revoke medical licenses for any practitioner who does. Bill 254 also allows the Florida government to take custody of children if the children or their parents receive gender-affirming care. Where HB2 made it illegal to be trans in public, Bill 254 makes it illegal to be trans at all.
And yet, I watch the news each night, and there’s never any mention of the bill’s passing, and I worry if it’s for the same “of course” reasoning that so many people wrote off North Carolina’s bill: do people assume everyone in Florida is a backwards, zealous bigot? Do people not realize this isn’t just a matter of rhetoric – that this isn’t just indicative of Florida’s legislative stance on trans rights, but an actual material law that can ruin people’s lives?
This Is an Existential Threat
I don’t know. Maybe they do. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. But I think about the disdain with which my own home was discussed in our time of crisis, and the way in which the whole state was written off as a lost cause even while we fought for our own rights, and I worry. Florida Man memes and The Good Place jokes about Jacksonville are funny, but there’s a whole community of our trans family living their lives and making the world, and Florida specifically, a beautiful place.
People have already begun fleeing the state. The writing’s on the wall, after all, and just like in the aftermath of HB2, many trans people are deciding the state simply isn’t safe for them to stay. But at the same time, there are people who are staying, and fighting to make their home a safe place for people like them. And watching from the (relative, of course) safety of a blue state? It ain’t enough.
