The underside narrative surfaces

Every high-profile feature piece I’ve ever read about someone who identifies as trans has a darker narrative running underneath every sentence. In The Guardian’s new profile of Gavin Grimm, a trans-identified young woman who brought a Supreme Court challenge demanding access to boys’ facilities at school, that narrative repeatedly breaks the surface: Grimm—now 25 years old—may have won her case, but these days she “struggles to survive.”

Grimm had little confusion about who he was at a young age. He rejected girl’s clothes, wanted his hair short and legs unshaven and despised the Baptist teachings of his family’s church. He came out as lesbian at 13, but knew the label wasn’t right. Once he learned being trans was a possibility, “there was no questioning phase,” he recalls. “It was like seeing color for the first time.”

Read: Grimm grew up in a household where it wasn’t acceptable to be a gender-nonconforming, same-sex-attracted girl. Shunning girly clothes, preferring short hair, refusing to shave your legs, and rejecting religious teachings does not make a girl in any sense a boy. But this back story does provide some hints about where Grimm got the idea that she should have been a boy, or that life would be easier—that she would be more acceptable to herself and others—if she were a boy.

His mother, Deirdre Grimm, knew nothing about trans identity, and vaguely understood it as a “sin”. But she read a book her son gave her, learning that affirming a trans kid can dramatically decrease their suicide risk. “That’s all I needed to know,” Deirdre says one morning in July, seated with her son in his apartment.

Read: Mom had reservations but was manipulated into supporting her child’s transition out of fear that her child would commit suicide otherwise.

Much of his family rejected him, but many friends and teachers were supportive as he entered 10th grade as a boy and clearly more comfortable in his skin. He initially used a private nurse’s restroom, but it was inconveniently located; peers and staff noted his long bathroom breaks, leaving him alienated and humiliated. So the principal and guidance counselor agreed to let him use the boys’ restroom, and for two months, he had no issues.

But gossip circulated outside school and on a community Facebook forum, where people posted vicious comments. Friends defending him online faced harassment.

“It was the adults who made it a problem, because their mentality spread to their kids,” recalls Evelyn Hronec, another friend. “These were grown adults talking about a 16-year-old’s genitals. It was vile.”

At school board meetings in 2014, speakers stood feet away from Grimm, misgendering him, asking questions about his body and transition, calling him names and demanding he be kept out of boys’ facilities in the name of “safety”. In one speech, Grimm pleaded for the opportunity to “use the restroom in peace”. When a man called him a “freak” and likened him to an animal, Deirdre lunged out of her seat, she recalls. “I was fighting for his life.”

But transition was an imperfect solution to Grimm’s problems, and created new challenges as well: new sources of tension, embarrassment, and bullying at school, and—as Grimm’s story gained visbility—harassment from the outside world, something no young person should have to face.

Reflecting on the decision to pursue a legal case against the school, Grimm echoed the suicide narrative, which repeats several times throughout this piece: “People already didn’t like me or understand me. There already wasn’t a place for me in society. I realized I could choose to make one or slink away. I was either going to live as the boy I was – or not at all.”

His struggle to stay afloat escalated as his case ended. The networks he’d built through the ACLU fight started to disappear, and his mental and physical health spiraled downward.

Grimm has complex post-traumatic stress disorder and has suffered from stress-induced seizures that have affected his cognition and left him hospitalized in 2021. “The PTSD at its core is about not being safe or understood, being rejected, and the adults in my life not acting responsibly,” he explains. “In high school, I was picked over and hyper-analyzed. I was tortured, harassed and bullied.” He recalls a period when the stress was so severe he’d dissociate as he walked down the hallway, not hearing his friends call his name.

Grimm also has autism and struggles with sensory processing, and the combined impacts of his disabilities have prevented him from holding down a job or completing school, he says. He’s relied on a GoFundMe and disability benefits, but has repeatedly struggled to make rent.

How might autism have contributed to Grimm’s sense of wrongness in her body? Was this taken into account by clinicians involved in her transition?

Today, Grimm’s autism and other disabilities are severe enough to prevent her from “holding down a job or completing school.” Grimm has no realistic prospects of supporting herself in the future, except through the kinds of GoFundMe campaigns she’s relied upon so far, which are no longer covering the rent:

In August, Grimm put in his notice for his apartment, which he could no longer afford. His efforts to secure a voucher have so far been unsuccessful. And for the past month, he’s stayed where he can, sometimes with friends or his mother, who took in Rascal. He’s scared of homeless shelters, fearing discrimination. Some nights, he says, he finds himself sitting alone in a dog park.

This is really a bad situation for a young person to be in.

Grimm struggles to envision himself growing older, partly due to his personal crises and climate catastrophe, but also because of the “utter invisibility” of older trans men in media.

While just about every young person grapples with this to some extent, “struggles to envision [self] growing older” seems to be a key component of transgender identification, a product of the transition-or-suicide mindset as well as a lack of imagination about the possibilities of existing within the most basic human limits: a mortal, sexed body that you didn’t get to choose in the first place, which will sicken and age.

Grimm’s terror about “climate catastrophe” fills out the picture. I’m not suggesting that climate change is not something to worry about, rather that something beyond a healthy apprehension about the ways our planet is changing is at play when a young person “struggles to envision” herself growing older due to apocalyptic beliefs about climate change.

Grimm is still young—in her mid-twenties—and may yet face an avalanche of health complications related to her transition as she grows older. She’s already unable to complete her education, work, and otherwise support herself due to mental and physical health issues.

Nine years ago, Grimm was a useful advocate: much better for a girl to be the face of mixed-sex bathrooms than a boy. Now that she’s no longer needed, she’s been discarded. Now that she's grown up and floundering, not flourishing, she's no longer the perfect “poster boy.”

In other words, The Guardian shows the reader the wreckage but no one questions the role transition and a decade spent nurturing and defending a false belief about the self may play in Grimm’s struggles. That question does not—cannot—be voiced or even suggested. When things don’t work out the way they should, something or someone else is always to blame. Even now, my guess is she’s one of many patients whose transitions are counted as “success stories” by those who cheered her on, wrote prescriptions, wielded knives, and posted self-congratulatory memes, while life is (much, much) more complicated.