Bay Area Reporter – SF event promotes CA transgender campaign

As a sophomore, Rexy Amaral sought to transfer to Mission High School so she could feel free to express herself. Her first day at the public school, which straddles San Francisco’s gay Castro and Latino Mission districts, she wore a black dress, her make up “all done up,” and had fashioned her hair to the side.

“I experienced something I never felt before. I experienced acceptance,” recalled Amaral, 19, who identifies as a trans Latina woman.

Now a recent high school graduate, Amaral told the Bay Area Reporter she is “working on becoming a drag superstar.” She has been shopping around a television series to tell her transition story and promoting herself as a public speaker and performer who can address students and others about transgender issues.

Being able to attend Mission High, were she felt “welcomed and protected” for the first time as a student, was “such a blessing,” said Amaral.

She was one of the speakers during a May 27 event in San Francisco to promote the recently launched Transform California campaign. An effort to educate the public about transgender people and the issues they face, it is co-led by statewide LGBT advocacy group Equality California and the Oakland-based Transgender Law Center.

The aim is to make “the state of California a welcoming place for all,” said TLC Executive Director Kris Hayashi, himself a transgender man.

The event was held on Mission High School’s 18th Street steps to highlight the San Francisco Unified School District being a leader in ensuring its schools are safe spaces for transgender students. It first adopted pro-LGBT policies in the 1990s and has continued to expand on its efforts.

Just days prior to the Transform California event, the district’s school board passed a resolution requiring that all single-stall restrooms on school campuses and administrative buildings be labeled as “all gender” bathrooms.

It also mandated that every school in the district designate at least one bathroom as “all gender” and allow any student to use it “regardless of the underlying reason.” And the resolution further stated that any new buildings the district builds, or those it renovates, will have single stall and multi-stall all gender bathrooms.

The school board also clarified that its dress codes and uniform policies are to be gender-neutral and apply not just to school days but also to special events likes proms and graduation ceremonies. And it specified that students and personnel do not need to legally change their name in order to be referred to by their name and the pronoun that corresponds to their gender identity.

“I hope other school districts join us and take action to build schools that are safe for all,” said school board member Matt Haney, who authored the resolution.

At its May 24 meeting the school board also voted, at the request of Superintendent Richard A. Carranza, to ban paying for travel to North Carolina and disallow attendance of its employees at any conferences or meetings in the Tar Heel State due to its House Bill 2, which among other things requires transgender individuals to use public bathrooms based on their gender assigned at birth.

Faced with the prospect of fighting an anti-transgender ballot initiative in 2016, EQCA and TLC announced last summer they were planning to launch an educational campaign focused on transgender rights.

Even though the ballot initiative failed, the two groups felt it was still necessary to move forward with their marketing effort. The Transform California campaign officially launched April 18 with a kick-off in Los Angeles. Since then events have been held in various cities highlighting different themes: the one in San Diego focused on combating transgender youth suicide.

Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose), whose granddaughter is transgender, led a recent Transform California rally in San Jose. He called on other elected leaders to sign the pledge associated with the campaign that states they will fight for and protect the rights of transgender individuals.

At the San Francisco event last week, Paul Lagarde, 26, shared his story as coming out as a transgender Latino man married to a woman and an immigrant who is the first in his conservative Mexican Catholic family to graduate from college. While his parents have been supportive, Lagarde acknowledged it took them some time to fully embrace his transitioning.

“It took a while for my father to accept it. He needed to grieve for the daughter he lost,” said Lagarde. “My mom worried how our friends and neighbors would react to me being a man. They had a right to worry. We know transgender people are most likely to suffer from depression and nearly half of us have thought of suicide.”

He has chosen to be public about his gender identity in order to support other Latino transgender men.

“I speak up because it is vital, especially for young transgender people, to know they are not alone,” said Lagarde. “Even though I was born with a female body, my soul, my mind, my spirit was always that of a male.”

Thirty groups are involved in the Transform California campaign, which as the B.A.R. noted in November, is being paid for with $1 million contributed by a group of national LGBT funders.

To learn more, visit http://www.transformcalifornia.com/.