Research Reveals The Hidden Costs of a Landmark Trans Rights Victory
Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Victoria Pitts-Taylor first became interested in the story of Gavin Grimm, a transgender youth, while viewing the work of a performance artist named Cassils in 2017. The artist’s work addressed the rollback of trans rights and included a recording of a school board meeting about Grimm. That introduction to the case, Grimm vs. Gloucester County School Board, led Pitts-Taylor to follow it as it wound its way through the courts, leading to her paper published in Feminist Studies. Pitts-Taylor explained the case and its significance in the following Q&A, which has been edited.
For people who have never heard of Gavin Grimm, what were the basic facts of the case?
Pitts-Taylor: Gavin Grimm was a teenager at a high school in Virginia in a fairly rural community. When he transitioned, the school asked him to use the bathroom in the nurse's office. He disliked that. He had been using men's bathrooms in public spaces in the mall and restaurants. So he was given access to the boys' restroom for several months without incident until a conservative community member, who happened to work at the school, started drumming up discontent in the community. The school board held a hearing, and they adopted a policy that there would be a special bathroom set aside for any trans students. But Gavin didn't want to use a special bathroom; he was a boy and he wanted to use the boy's bathroom. He and his mother, with the help of the ACLU, sued the school board. The case took many years and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Gavin eventually won, yet the win was bittersweet.
Why? Even though he won the case, you explored issues with the way it was framed.
Pitts-Taylor: As the case went through the circuit courts, appeals courts, and so on, the ACLU presented Gavin as an acceptable (or ‘transnormative’) boy. They presented evidence that he had medically transitioned, he had the proper legal documents, he had his name changed, he had gone through therapy. He was using hormones. He was planning on getting surgeries. There was this tremendous effort to present him as truly, acceptably, unambiguously a boy. And the courts were sympathetic to that argument and decided that he should be allowed to use the boys' bathroom and that trans students should be allowed to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
But there were many qualifications. One qualification was that trans students had to persistently, insistently, and consistently express their gender identity. So there would be no tolerance for gender fluidity or gender changes.
In addition, the whole language around establishing Gavin's fitness for the boys' restroom relied on a lot of resources that many trans people don't have. He had gone to therapy, he had access to hormones, he had access to legal name changes, and he could access public space without being questioned. Not everyone can do that, including people who are racially profiled.
Your paper mentioned examples of the way the media covered Grimm’s case. Talk a little bit about the way that was problematic in terms of the wider issue of trans rights.
Pitts-Taylor: Advocates believed that visibility would be helpful. There was a plethora of media around the case, multiple documentaries, a children's book about Gavin, and curriculum materials for schools. There was a social media hashtag campaign on behalf of Gavin. Gavin was filmed visiting [actor and LGBTQ+ advocate] Laverne Cox at her apartment. He was given a media award from a gay and lesbian rights organization.
The media depiction of the case overwhelming centered on Gavin himself rather than addressing a broader context of trans rights. Gavin was a white boy with access to gender-affirming care, and he was held up as a representative for all trans people, which Gavin himself knew was problematic. Gavin took pains to point out that he had many privileges that many gender-marginalized people don't. He also noted that visibility didn’t deliver what trans people needed the most—economic safety, access to health care, and protection from over-policing and mass incarceration.
You mentioned that Grimm was positioned as a civil rights icon. Why is it important to interrogate that in the greater scheme of things?
Pitts-Taylor: One thing to notice is that the story of progress that was narrated around this case, including by a judge who described him as the latest in a long line of civil rights heroes, suggests that we've come a long way, that we've made all of this progress, that civil rights is on a trajectory of inclusion—first for women, then African Americans, then disabled people, gays and lesbians, and now trans people.
What's wrong with that? Well, first, it obscures that we're not in the place of progress that this trajectory suggests. Instead, we're seeing the rollback of all kinds of civil rights gains that are absolutely under attack. It doesn't recognize systematic racism that is still not solved. Embracing Gavin Grimm as a 21st-century civil rights hero risks treating racism as a settled matter.
It also risks depicting trans people as new, [and] trans rights as a new social problem. In fact, if you look at the history of trans rights, you'll see that trans activism has long been championed by racially and economically marginalized people.
What might be a better way forward with this issue?
Pitts-Taylor: My article describes some of the research on the history of bathroom segregation, which includes not only segregating men and women, but also, of course, involves racial segregation and other exclusions.
What the case for trans access to bathrooms centers around is the problem of whether or not we need gender segregated bathrooms at all. Activists from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, including the legal scholar Dean Spade, have long pointed out that segregated bathrooms harm lots of people because they encourage gender policing. Even people who are not trans or don't identify as trans may be subjected to gender policing when they enter a bathroom, as scholars like Che Gossett, Toby Beauchamp, and Marquis Bey have argued. This is especially true for people of color, who are more likely to be subjected to scrutiny in white-dominated spaces. So establishing some people's inclusion for segregated bathrooms doesn't solve this problem.
There's been a lot of really interesting work around thinking through gender-neutral bathrooms for everyone, architectural spaces that recognize all kinds of social differences and needs. Susan Stryker, one of the most prominent trans historians and scholars in the United States, partnered with architect Joel Sanders and legal scholar Terry Kogan to produce a project called Stalled!, which advocated for reform of the plumbing codes that govern architectural design in order to make legally possible the creation of gender-neutral bathrooms that would be private, safe, and accessible for everyone.
Since this case, and you're writing the paper, are there other trans cases or situations that are on your radar?
Pitts-Taylor: I've turned my attention to the restrictions on gender-affirming care for youth. I'm interested in how transgender non-conforming youth are being denied access to health care on the basis of a logic of developmentalism, or this idea that they're not old enough to know their gender. Advocates have rightly pointed out that it’s not just kids who are being denied access—increasingly, adults are too, for example, through denying health insurance coverage. Even so, I'm interested in developmentalism as a powerful logic that is discriminatory, and is applied to both minors and marginalized adults. Gender non-conforming people, along with racialized and colonized subjects, have historically been treated as underdeveloped.
I’m also thinking more broadly about how to understand medicalized body modification as a technology of gender. In previous scholarship, I examined the discourse around cosmetic surgery, which is often used as a form of gender-affirming care for cisgender people, for those who want to look more feminine or masculine in a normative sense. As a society, we’ve largely embraced cosmetic surgeries that are gender conforming, even for young people. My future research will return to thinking about cosmetic surgery as a form of gender affirming care in the current political landscape.
