Gavin Grimm, 25, and five of his close friends are crowded around a table, laughing and shouting over each other as they recount the bullies they survived as teenagers.
Seated in the back of a strip mall pub in Newport News, a midsize city in south-eastern Virginia, they recall the boys who spat on them at a pep rally and the time a popular senior threatened to beat up Grimm because he is transgender.
“We were all misfits and leaned on each other,” says Calin Lindberg, one of Grimm’s oldest friends. “These people are part of my fucking soul,” Grimm adds. The group over-enunciates one bully’s name, joking he should be exposed. But they also express empathy for their tormentors – some later came out as queer and trans themselves. They direct more of their ire at the adults in their school system, who made Grimm’s life a living hell.
In 2014, the Gloucester county school board voted to ban Grimm, then 15, from using the boys’ bathrooms, even though he’d been living openly as a boy for months and using the restroom without incident. The policy turned deeply intimate facts of Grimm’s life into a media spectacle. With the ACLU, he sued to defend his rights to use facilities that matched his gender, launching a groundbreaking national case on bathroom access. Grimm became an LGBTQ+ icon, celebrated by Laverne Cox at the Grammys and interviewed by Whoopi Goldberg on The View. He eventually won a landmark federal decision asserting trans youth’s constitutional protections against discrimination.
Advocates hoped the victory would squash the conservative movement’s targeting of trans students. Instead, the climate for trans youth in the US has rapidly devolved as laws eroding their rights have been adopted in more than half of the country in recent years. Trans students have increasingly been banned from bathrooms and sports teams, barred from using their pronouns and names, and their existence has been ridiculed by Republican leaders and debated in news segments.
And while Grimm became a civil rights trailblazer, the case did not secure him stability or financial security. The Pride parade invites have stopped coming, and like so many other marginalized trans people, Grimm has faced significant mental health challenges and struggles with poverty. He recently lost his housing, and is now facing homelessness.
“I’m someone who has had worldwide visibility. I represent an outer crust of privilege most people will never see, and I cannot make ends meet no matter how hard I try,” he says.
***
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.”
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.
She helped him choose his name and told the rest of the family before his 15th birthday party. Then she switched to an LGBTQ+-affirming church. “Some parents of trans kids talk about this period of ‘mourning the loss of their daughter’, but I never went through any of that. He just became so much happier. He was also the same person – the kid who went out to help the homeless, the kid who liked to donate his birthday money.”
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.”
Pursuing a lawsuit, Grimm says now, was a way to reclaim his story. “There was nothing to be lost by standing up for myself. 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.”
***
Grimm’s case progressed at a time of rapid change for LGBTQ+ rights. In 2015, the US supreme court legalized gay marriage and conservative groups shifted focus to trans people, whipping up baseless fears about hypothetical “male predators” in women’s bathrooms. In 2016, North Carolina faced national scorn and costly boycotts for passing an anti-trans bathroom bill, which was later repealed.
Grimm was a powerful antidote to the GOP’s dehumanizing messaging, says Joshua Block, the ACLU lawyer who represented him: “Gavin’s case really moved the conversation leaps and bounds forward for people’s understanding of trans people, the harms of discrimination and the inanity of these exclusionary policies.”
As Donald Trump rolled back LGBTQ+ rights, including banning trans servicemembers from the military and authorizing homeless shelters to exclude trans people, Grimm won repeated court victories. But his school district appealed. One court of appeals judge compared Grimm to the historic American plaintiffs who challenged slavery, Japanese concentration camps, segregation and bans on interracial and gay marriage. A 2020 ruling offered a “resounding yes” in favor of the constitution and civil rights laws protecting trans students from discrimination.
Grimm graduated before the case was resolved and never got to return to his school’s boys’ bathrooms.
In 2021, the supreme court allowed Grimm’s victory to stand, and the school board was ordered to pay $1.3m in attorney’s fees.
Grimm, however, only got a symbolic $1.
To secure damages, Grimm would’ve had to give the opposition’s lawyers access to his medical records to scrutinize the cause and extent of his emotional distress, a process he couldn’t stomach after years of fighting. The idea he’d have to prove his anguish was unbelievable to his mom, who can’t shake the memories of her son becoming suicidal.
Grimm doesn’t regret moving on without damages. But he desperately could’ve used financial help – especially as the trauma of his childhood began to catch up with him.
***
Inside his Newport News apartment one hot day in July, Grimm sits under a poster he recently hung on his wall celebrating the 19th birthday of his beloved cat, Rascal, whose array of photos is captioned: “Doesn’t look a day over 12!” Grimm’s life revolves around Rascal, he explains: “If I maintain housing while my cat is still alive, that’s all I can really hope for. I’m prepared to face homelessness, but I just don’t want her to face it.”
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.
His mother supports him but also has a tight income, he says. “I don’t have options … unless some rich gay philanthropist tosses me a crispy million.” At times, he’s felt disposable to the broader movement; he says it’s hard not to think of notable gay rights plaintiffs who have not struggled to make ends meet after their victories.
“It makes me so angry that it’s so hard for him to find housing stability,” says Camille Gibson, his best friend who moved to England and video calls him on a nearly daily basis. “Some days, it’s almost like he’s short-circuiting because there’s just so much stress.” Still, the two find ways to have fun with each other from afar, often streaming anime. “When he’s not in a complete utter funk,” she says, “we are cackling at each other, because we’re both silly-billy stupid bitches.”
Survey data has suggested more than half of trans and nonbinary youth have considered suicide in the US, with increases in self-harm linked to anti-trans laws. Trans people disproportionately face housing insecurity and related psychological distress.
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.
***
Despite the federal appeals court ruling in Grimm’s case that trans youth cannot be banned from bathrooms that match their gender, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, rolled out policies last year directing schools to do exactly that, with limited exceptions. He is part of a wave of GOP lawmakers across the US who have, in the lead-up to the election, prioritized making it harder for trans youth to play sports, get medical care, have their pronouns respected, use public facilities and access LGBTQ+ curriculum.
Youngkin was yet another reminder of limits of the court process to secure meaningful progress, Grimm says.
“Youngkin knows if he flies in the face of the law, the only possible repercussion is going to be some poor queer justice group will have to scrape together the money for another lawsuit,” Grimm says, noting that legal complaints carry the risk of increasingly conservative courts further eroding trans rights.
“We’re going backwards after working so hard, after Gavin suffered so much,” says Deirdre, adding: “It makes me angry and sad, and makes me want to get everybody out to vote.”
Grimm says he sees voting for Democrats as “harm reduction”, but he’s disillusioned with mainstream liberals who refuse to take bold, proactive steps to fight back against the GOP’s culture war.
The Republican national convention was rife with cruel attacks on trans people. The Democratic convention, however, largely avoided the topic of trans rights, and no trans person spoke.
“This system is built specifically to ensure the status quo continues, that people like me are disenfranchised, underrepresented and never have full equality under the law,” Grimm says. “But I know that what I did was important. Even though the system is not going to serve our ultimate liberation, it is what we have in place right now.”
***
These days, when he’s not working to resolve his housing, Grimm volunteers with a climate justice group. He hopes to eventually pursue teaching. He’s also worked to find queer community; in recent years, he’s befriended Evan Hamilton, a 66-year-old trans man he met through a local LGBTQ+ group.
Seated in Hamilton’s garage, adorned with trans pride and weed flags, Grimm recalls their first meeting: “Evan said, ‘I’m an old man you won’t want to hang out with me.’ But we’re both autistic stoners who are trans, so we had a lot in common.”
“I’m kind of like his grandpa, but I’ve learned a lot from him,” says Hamilton, who transitioned in 2018, more than five decades after he declared he was a boy at age six and was rebuffed by family. “I decided, screw ‘if’. I’m going to be who I’m supposed to be for what’s left of my life. I felt like I had released all this stuff that had weighed me down.”
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. His friendship with Hamilton has helped shift that.
“I hope to get to the ripe old age of, ‘I don’t give a shit any more,’” says Grimm. “There’s a version of the future where I’m this older gentleman. This relationship shows there’s a whole lifespan waiting for me.”
