It wasn’t until after Catherine Fray was elected to the Carrboro town council in 2023 that they learned that they achieved becoming the first openly nonbinary person to be elected to public office in the state of North Carolina.
“It’s not why I ran,” said Fray, who like the others featured in this story, uses they/them pronouns. “There still now aren’t a lot of public examples of people being nonbinary in different ways. I’m thinking about when I was growing up in Rockingham County and didn’t have language for any of the stuff I was thinking about … if I can provide a good example or mentorship to someone, be a source of helpful representation, then I’m thrilled.”
Fray is among a growing group of people across the country who openly identify as nonbinary or gender expansive at a time when the number of anti-LGBTQ that are being introduced or passed in state legislatures are increasing. One such law that went into effect this year is North Carolina’s House Bill 805, which recognizes only two genders, male and female, based on the biological sex assigned at birth. While the full impact of that law remains to be seen, advocacy groups say it erases the presence of nonbinary, trans and intersex individuals, and warn that it could have dangerous implications for the queer community…