On the first day of Pride month, Adria Jawort was scheduled to speak at the public library in Butte, Montana. She was going to give a lecture on the history of trans and Two Spirit people in the west. She is not a drag performer. And yet the city’s top elected officials pressured the library to cancel her talk, saying it might pose a legal risk given the state’s new law against drag performers reading to children.
Perhaps naively, I thought my city would be one of the last places to censor Jawort, an Indigenous trans woman. Butte, the mining town where I grew up and now live, hasn’t voted Republican in generations. It’s the historic heart of the labor movement in the US west, a scrappy place where people pride themselves on standing up to power and protecting the less powerful. But our political landscape is changing.
