This article was was jointly reported by Truthout , a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues, and Deceleration , a San Antonio-based nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises.
“The hostility has always been there,” Paul told me. “But I feel like it truly began to ramp up like 2020.”
A 16-year-old student at a large public high school in a large Texas city, Paul (a pseudonym to protect his safety) is a varsity athlete with aspirations to join the FBI. But in 2020 he was still in middle school. Texas wouldn’t pass its first anti-trans bill — a sports ban on trans youth playing on the team aligning with their gender — for another year. But Paul remembers watching sports bans passing in other states and feeling unsettled, “hearing [rumored] horror stories of kids having to take their pants off and have teachers check them. I wasn’t out yet. But [another family member] was. So it was really scary. I couldn’t at the time tell why it scared me so much. But thinking about it [was] like an invasion of my privacy, even though it wasn’t directly happening to me.”