On Thursday, the Human Rights Campaign filed the lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the child, identified as D.H., and her parents.
Under the 2021 law, which allows cisgender public school students and their families to sue if they’re not given a “reasonable accommodation” by their school if they don’t want to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities with trans people, D.H. was forced to use single-occupancy restrooms at school.
According to the lawsuit, D.H. stopped using school restrooms entirely and began limiting her food and water intake to minimize her need to use school facilities. She also developed migraines, reflux, and recurring nightmares of school.
“These restroom ‘accommodations’ provided to D.H. by the elementary school are not accommodations at all,” according to the complaint. “They reinforce the differential treatment and trauma associated with living under the [Accommodations for All Children Act], violating D.H.’s constitutional and statutory rights.”
The suit argues that the Tennessee law, signed by Gov. Bill Lee (R) in 2021, violates D.H.’s constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause and violates Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. In June, the Biden Administration announced changes to the legal interpretation of Title IX which would help prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Last month, a federal judge blocked the Education Department’s new guidance.
“It is unfortunate that Tennessee lawmakers are using their authority to attack some of our nation’s most vulnerable: our children,” said HRC litigation director Cynthia Cheng-Wun Weaver.
“Years ago, I chose to move to Tennessee because it was known as ‘the Volunteer State,’ whose citizens cared for their neighbors without hesitation – not a state that legalizes discrimination against helpless children,” D.H.’s mother said in a statement. “Now I am embarrassed to say that I live in a state that refuses to see anything beyond my child’s gender.”
“By filing this lawsuit, I am showing my volunteer spirit – because I’m fighting to not only affirm my child’s existence, but also the thousands of transgender and nonbinary children who live in Tennessee.”
This is the second lawsuit the HRC has filed against the Tennessee law on behalf of a transgender child. A previous suit, filed last year, was dismissed after the plaintiffs chose to leave the state.
The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence.
“The hypothesis that transgender and gender diverse youth assigned female at birth identify as transgender due to social contagion does not hold up to scrutiny and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for adolescents,” study senior author Dr. Alex S. Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program, said in a statement.
The “social contagion” theory can be traced back to a 2018 paperpublished in the journal PLOS One. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity “suddenly during or after puberty.” These adolescents, she wrote, “would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood” and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.
Littman also hypothesized that adolescents assigned female at birth are more likely to be affected by social contagion and, as a result, are overrepresented in groups of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria when compared to those who were assigned male at birth.
After intense debate andcriticism, PLOS One conducted a post-publication reassessment of the article, and issued a correction that included changing the headline to clarify that Littman did not survey transgender or gender-diverse youth themselves, but actually surveyed their parents. The correction also noted that, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time.”
To test the social contagion theory, researchers used data from the 2017 and 2019 biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collected gender identity data across 16 states from ages 12 to 18. In 2017, 2.4%, or 2,161 of the 91,937 adolescents surveyed, identified as trans or gender diverse. In 2019, that percentage dropped slightly to 1.6%, or 1,640 of 105,437 adolescents surveyed.
Researchers concluded that the decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as trans or gender diverse “is incongruent with the (rapid-onset gender dysphoria hypothesis) that posits social contagion.”
The study also found that the number of transgender adolescents who were assigned male at birth outnumbered those assigned female at birth in both 2017 and 2019, providing additional evidence against a “notion of social contagion with unique susceptibility” among those assigned female at birth.
The social contagion hypothesis, by assuming that youth are coming out, for example, because their friends are, asserts that there’s some social desirability to being trans. Some supporters of the theory, according to the study, also believe that more youth identify as trans or gender diverse because those identities are less stigmatized than cisgender sexual minority identities, or those who identify with their birth sex and are lesbian, bisexual, gay or queer, among other sexual identities.
To evaluate these claims, researchers examined rates of bullying among adolescents who identified as trans and gender diverse, and those who did not.
They found that, consistent with other surveys, trans and gender-diverse youth were significantly more likely to be victims of school bullying (at 38.7% in 2017 and 45.4% in 2019) compared to cisgender lesbian, gay and bisexual youth (at 30.5% in 2017 and 28.7% in 2019) and cisgender, heterosexual youth (at 17.1% in 2017 and 16.6% in 2019).
“The idea that attempts to flee sexual minority stigma drive teenagers to come out as transgender is absurd, especially to those of us who provide treatment to [transgender and gender diverse] youth,” study lead author Dr. Jack Turban, incoming assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement. “The damaging effects of these unfounded hypotheses in further stigmatizing transgender and gender diverse youth cannot be understated. We hope that clinicians, policymakers, journalists, and anyone else who contributes to health policy will review these findings.”
They wrote that despite the methodological flaws in Littman’s study, the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria “has been used in recent legislative debates to argue for and subsequently enact policies that prohibit gender-affirming medical care” for trans and gender diverse adolescents.
An increasing number of states have also tried to ban or restrict trans youths’ access to gender-affirming medical care through legislation. The number of bills seeking to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender youths has grown from one in 2018 to 36 this year, according to an analysis by NBC News. Governors in three states — Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — have successfully signed such restrictions into law, though judges have prevented those measures from taking effect in Alabama and Arkansas.
The study lists several limitations, including that the data were collected through a school-based survey and, as a result, youths who don’t attend school were not represented. It also noted that youths were asked, “What is your sex?” and that response options were limited to female and male. It didn’t ask about respondents’ “sex assigned at birth” and didn’t include an additional question about their “gender identity,” which is an established research method for asking about gender identity. But the researchers creditedseveralstudies that found trans and gender-diverse youths are aware of the differences between their sex assigned at birth and gender identity.
A new draft report from the California Attorney General’s office indicates transgender people in the state are stopped by police at vastly different rates than cisgender men and women.
The report is based on data reported from 58 of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies and shows transgender people were stopped because of “reasonable suspicion” alone —instead of a specific violation or clearly unlawful behavior — in nearly half the stops.
For transgender people, the proportion of “reasonable suspicion” stops was 44%, or four times the ratio for cisgender people.
The data includes all people stopped by police, regardless of whether the officers were responding to a potential offense they observed or to a call for service.
California requires police departments to report the demographic data of every driver, bicyclist, or pedestrian they stop, including perceived race, gender, and approximate age.
The new state data shows that transgender women are stopped due to an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” in more than 45% of encounters when they were stopped in 2021. Trans men were stopped for the same reason 43% of the time.
Interactions with police officers were also more likely to lead to more drastic outcomes – with transgender people more likely to be searched, handcuffed, and arrested – and to have lethal and non-lethal force used against them.
Reasonable suspicion is a legal standard that requires officers to articulate why they believe a person is likely engaged in a crime. Probable cause, the standard required to arrest someone, has a higher bar.
Under the 2015 Racial and Identity Profiling Act, or RIPA, law enforcement agencies with 334 or more officers were required to report data to the state for 2021. The reporting requirement expands to all police agencies for data collected this year.
Alex Binsfeld, legal director at the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, an advocacy group in San Francisco, told the San Francisco Chronicle that gender biases result in officers focusing on transgender people because they don’t fit their notions of how a woman or man ought to look.
“It’s in effect a way to enforce Western gender binary norms on appearance, that you will be punished if you are not gender binary in your appearance,” they said. “Policing of trans folks at these disparate rates has led advocates to argue it’s a status crime.”
Cisgender people, who made up the overwhelming majority of the total number of stops statewide, were stopped for traffic violations the majority of the time. Cisgender women were stopped because of an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” in less than nine percent of encounters; cisgender men were stopped because of an officer’s suspicion in 11% of encounters.
Out of 3.2 million total stops, transgender people accounted for 4,740.
Transgender advocates scored a major victory in July when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed S.B. 357, a bill repealing a notorious “walking while trans” law. Effective January 1, the bill repeals a 1995 law that prohibits loitering in public places with the “intent to commit prostitution.” The voided statute allows police to cite people they find suspicious due to factors like how they dress or where they stand on the street.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who sponsored S.B. 357, said the sweeping loitering law causes innocent people to get swept up in the criminal justice system and makes sex workers less safe because they fear seeking out law enforcement.
“Even one arrest can have such profound implications for someone’s life,” Wiener said. “It’s one step; there’s certainly more work to do.”
Nearly 50 percent of transgender people travel outside of their state of residence to get gender-affirming genital surgeries, according to a new study from Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). The percentage could increase as more states put bans against gender-affirming healthcare for trans people in place, the study’s authors say.
The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Surgery, looked at 771 transgender patients who had a vaginoplasty or phalloplasty between 2007 and 2019. It found that 49 percent left their state of residence to get the procedure. People who lived in southern states were more likely to have to leave their home states in order to receive the surgery.
That’s because there’s a lack of surgeons who provide such care in the South. A 2020 studyfound that just 11 doctors in the South could provide such surgeries, and four of the doctors resided in Florida.
The number of such doctors could decrease as more Southern states ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. Genital surgeries aren’t typically performed on young trans people, but some doctors could choose to locate their practices outside of states with such bans in place because the bans increase doctors’ legal and financial liabilities if they treat young patients.
Of additional concern, the OHSU study found trans people who left their states to get surgery ended up paying up to 50 percent more in out-of-pocket medical expenses than those who were able to obtain surgeries in their home states. This included costs for post-surgical visits and foll0w-up care.
Only one of the 771 patients included in the study had their surgery paid for by their commercial health insurance provider, The Hill noted. This suggests that the life-saving surgical procedures may not be affordable for many trans people. Trans people living in transphobic states will face even greater financial and time costs just to receive gender-affirming care.
“We already knew that traveling for health care requires patients to take time off work and pay for travel and lodging on their own, and that it can make receiving follow-up care from qualified providers who are familiar with each patient’s unique needs challenging,” Jae Downing, the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
“This study helps quantify how severely we need more gender-affirming surgeons,” Geolani Dy, an assistant professor of urology and plastic and reconstructive surgery at OHSU School of Medicine, added.
U.S. Republicans in Congress are lining up behind legislation that critics say would roll back protections for transgender people, setting a playbook for action on a divisive social issue should they take control of Congress this fall.
Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would block federal funding to colleges where transgender women are allowed to participate in sports with cisgender women. A separate bill would allow transgender people to sue medical personnel who helped them transition as minors.
Another bill would block funding to schools that disobey state laws regarding “materials harmful to minors,” mimicking state laws that have been used to remove books discussing history around race and LGBTQ themes.
The bills have support from key Republicans in the House and Senate. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has promoted the sports bill at a press conference and in a conservative newspaper. It is backed by 127 of 211 House Republicans.
In the Senate, five Republicans have sponsored a version of the bill targeting medical providers, including Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.
Republicans would be in a position to advance those bills next year if they win control of the House or the Senate in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, which analysts say is likely.
“I hope these are legislative initiatives that we can pass when we get the majority back,” said Rep. Jim Banks, who sponsored the medical providers bill and represents a district in Indiana, which banned transgender students from playing on girls’ sports teams at schools this May.
Fears of discrimination
Critics say the legislation proposed by House Republicans would reduce access to care needed by transgender people to transition. Transgender people are significantly more likely to attempt or commit suicide, often due to lack of access to gender-affirming medical care, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group.
Banks called such criticism “outrageous” and said he did not see how his legislation would contribute to an unsafe environment for transgender people.
Violence against LGBTQ people has also increased fourfold between 2020 and 2021 in the United States, according to ACLED, a nonpartisan organization that tracks violence globally. The increase occurred during a three-year uptick in anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
“There has always been fringe voices who oppose LGBTQ equality, but now, unfortunately, that fringe has grown loud and is being given national platforms,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, a LGBTQ advocacy group.
Sixty-four percent of Americans support protecting trans people from discrimination, according to a June poll from Pew Research Center; 10% oppose protections.
Eighteen Republican-led states have enacted bans on trans girls and women participating in publicly funded women’s sports, while more than a dozen have introduced legislation mimicking Florida’s law limiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Advocates are pushing Democrats to do more to enshrine protections into law before the November elections, but they face uncertain prospects in the evenly divided Senate.
“If we lose the House or the Senate I think it’s really unlikely we’ll be able to prevent discrimination” at the federal level, said Fran Hutchins, executive director of Equality Federation.
The owners of an Applebee’s franchise restaurant in Plant City, Florida must pay $100,000 to settle claims that it allowed racist and homophobic discrimination against a gay Black employee.
Shortly after Jebriel Teague, a gay Black man, began working as a line cook for the Applebee’s franchise in March 2019, two of his co-workers — Cody Curby and Bobby Hogge — made inappropriate jokes about his sexual orientation, directing comments to him about dildos and anal beads on a near daily basis, and frequently using the n-word as well as slurs like “f**,” “f****t,” and “bi**h,” the complaint states.
Hogge also wore a Confederate flag hat all the time at work, a flag which has since been banned from all U.S. military installations as an emblem of white supremacy.
When Teague told his supervisors about his co-workers’ behavior, his supervisors told him that the men were just joking and that he should ignore it. The harassment continued. Even though Teague’s manager said he would investigate the harassment, no notes on the investigation exist.
When Teague continued to complain about his mistreatment, nearly half of his hours were cut. The lack of hours and continued mistreatment effectively forced him to quit in June 2019, barely three months after he was first employed.
Teague filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC determined that the business’ practices violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
The EEOC then contacted Neighborhood Restaurant Partners Florida, LLC (NRP), the company that owns the franchise, to correct the discriminatory practices and provide relief to Teague. Eventually, the EEOC sued NRP on Teague’s behalf, filing a suit in Federal District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
In addition to paying $100,000, NRP must also provide the EEOC with reports of what it has done to resolve any reports of harassment.
Evangeline Hawthorne, the EEOC’s Tampa field office director, said that while the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia was a huge step forward — ruling that employees can’t be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation of gender identity because of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — LGBTQ employees still face discrimination in the workplace.
“No employee should have to endure homophobic and racist harassment by co-workers,” said EEOC Regional Attorney Robert E. Weisberg. “Failing to take corrective action to correct a work environment permeated with racial and homophobic slurs, and, even worse, punishing an employee for reporting harassment, will not be tolerated.”
The Biden administration has lodged a federal charge of discrimination against a Florida trailer park and its owner for allegedly demanding a transgender woman present as male to avoid being evicted from her mobile home.
The charge, announced Tuesday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleges the owner of the 21 Palms RV Resort in Davenport, Florida, sent a discriminatory and threatening note to the woman after she came out as transgender in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
“No one should have to change how they express their gender identity to maintain their housing,” HUD official Demetria L. McCain said in a statement. “Setting restrictions like these is not only unacceptable, it is illegal.”
According to the charges, the resident, who has not been named publicly, lived at 21 Palms with her child and fiancé for several years before coming out as transgender and “wearing feminine-presenting clothing in public” on Jan. 4, 2021. Just nine days later, the park’s owner and manager, Nathan Dykgraaf, allegedly sent the woman a handwritten notice regarding her appearance.
“I have been informed of your actions to have your sex changed to a female, I am told you have started taking the necessary medication and that after a period of time your change will be completed,” Dykgraaf allegedly wrote. “To avoid problems you must: 1. Act as a man 2. Talk as a man 3. Dress as a man 4. Avoid tight clothing that is revealing sexual organs. If you follow the above steps trouble will be avoided. Sincerely, Nathan D.”
Dykgraaf did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Due to fears of being kicked out, the woman stopped presenting as female, avoided speaking with neighbors and stopped using the park’s amenities after receiving Dykgraaf’s note, the HUD charges allege.
She then filed a complaint with HUD last February, alleging the park violated the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender identity and other protected classes. Dykgraaf then responded to the complaint a month later, telling HUD the woman is “not free to engage with other tenants about her clothing and transition” and claimed her transition is “disruptive to the community.”
The unnamed complainant and her family moved out of the motor home park in August. She is now seeking damages for emotional distress, lost housing opportunity and out-of-pocket costs.
Most people identify as male or female, but others don’t feel they fit into a fixed gender category. For instance, you or someone you know might feel somewhere “in-between” a man or a woman or beyond the gender spectrum altogether.
If you feel like you don’t belong within a certain category, you might be non-binary. But how do you know for sure? Read on to learn more about non-binary as a gender identity.
A non-binary person is someone who doesn’t identify as a man or woman. Instead, they might identify with one or two more gender identities, which may change over time.
Every non-binary person identifies with the term in a unique way. Non-binary people might also identify as genderfluid, androgynous, agender, bigender, or non-conforming.
How Can You Tell If You’re Non-Binary?
It can be challenging to define what non-binary means to you, especially because the term itself is so broad. For instance, the differences between non-binary, genderqueer, or genderfluid can be confusing because each term is defined similarly.
However, there are some questions you can ask yourself that can make your journey towards self-discovery much clearer.
Do you align with the sex and gender-based attributes you were assigned at birth as well as those of other sexes?
Do you feel like you are neither a man nor a woman? Do you feel like you are both?
Do you constantly change your mind about your gender identity?
Do you adhere to more than one set of pronouns?
Are you comfortable dressing in any type of clothing?
If you answered “yes” to most or all of these questions, you could be non-binary. However, only you can say who you really are.
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Misconceptions About Being Non-Binary
Because being non-binary means different things to different people, there are many misconceptions about this gender identity.
You Can’t Have Other Gender Identities
You can identify as non-binary and another gender. For instance, if you are non-binary and transgender, you might undergo gender-affirming surgery to feel more “at home” with your body but still identify with other genders. Not to mention, how you relate to your body and gender can change over time.
You Can Tell Someone In Non-Binary By Appearance
There is no such thing as “looking non-binary.” While many people believe you have to dress androgynously to be non-binary, you can wear whatever you feel expresses you best. After all, cis women don’t have to wear skirts the way cis men don’t have to wear pants. The bottom line is people’s presentations are not inherently gendered.
Non-Binary People Use Only They/Them Pronouns
Non-binary people can have a variety of pronouns, especially if their gender identity frequently changes. Some non-binary people are comfortable with any pronoun, while others use only one specific set. The best way to learn someone’s pronouns is to ask them.
Non-Binary People Have A Fixed Sexual Orientation
Sexual orientation and gender identity are two different things. The former refers to what genders a person is attracted to, while the latter describes what gender you identify as. If you are non-binary, you can be attracted to many different genders.
Non-Binary People Are “Born Into The Wrong Body”
While it’s common for non-binary people to experience body dysmorphia, not all of them feel they are born into the wrong body. In most cases, non-binary people feel they are born into the wrong gender based on others’ misconceptions.
Non-Binary Is A Third Gender
Some people think you can either be male, female, or non-binary. However, it is not a third gender. In fact, it surpasses the binary entirely and can be a mix of genders. Some non-binary people might even consider themselves genderless.
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How To Support Your Non-Binary Friends
Discovering that someone is non-binary doesn’t mean you have to change the way you treat them. However, self-discovery isn’t always easy – keeping these tips in mind can make others feel supported and heard.
Ask people what their pronouns are and use them correctly.
Be open to being educated.
Do not make assumptions about people’s genders according to how they act, speak, or dress.
Use someone’s preferred name – do not bring up their dead name.
Do not ask someone to explain why they are non-binary. If they are comfortable, they will share this information with you willingly.
Don’t expect to be rewarded for treating a non-binary person with respect.
The Bottom Line
The non-binary experience can be confusing, so educating yourself, unlearning assumptions, and having open discussions with others can make your journey more enriching and comfortable.
If you want to learn more about exploring your gender identity or how to treat others on the same journey, LGBTQ+ Nation has more in store for you.
A majority of Americans favor protecting transgender people from discrimination, but a rising share say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, and most support trans sports bans, a new poll from the Pew Research Center found.
The survey of more than 10,000 adults, which was conducted May 16-22 and published Tuesday, found that 60% say a person’s gender is determined at birth, up from 56% in 2021 and 54% in 2017.
Views on gender identity differ by age groups and even more sharply by political affiliation. Half of adults ages 18 to 29 say someone can be a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth, compared with about 4 in 10 of those ages 30 to 49 and about a third of those 50 and older, the report found. Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party were four times more likely than Republicans and conservative-leaning people to say that someone’s gender can be different than the one assigned to them at birth.
The new poll also shed light on how people in the United States feel about one of the most politically debated issues regarding trans people — whether they should be allowed to compete on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. Nearly 6 in 10 (58%) support policies that would require transgender athletes to compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, the survey found.
Of the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills filed in recent years — over 670 since 2018, according to an NBC News analysis — measures that would limit trans people’s participation in sports have been among the most popular and politically contentious in the nation’s state legislatures. Eighteen states have enacted the bills into law within recent years, with Louisiana doing so earlier this month.
Proponents of transgender sports bans say they are protecting fairness in women’s sports, arguing that trans girls and women have inherent advantages over cisgender girls and women.
Critics say the measures are less about protecting women’s sports and more about discriminating against trans people.
A 14-year-old transgender girl was kicked out of a faith-based summer camp that she volunteered at because of her “life choice.” But the camp is now saying that they’re not transphobic, they were just worried about the girl’s safety.
Elizabeth Clark went to the first two days of a week-long session of Connect Camps in Cordele, Georgia, when her family got texts telling her not to come back.
“Our team was advised that Elizabeth had made a life choice that unfortunately is causing some distraction at camp,” the text message said. “We have agreed it would be best that Elizabeth not return, allowing us the opportunity to meet our promise of a remarkable for the campers.”
“I was surprised that people who were just preaching about love and accepting everybody to come out and tell me it was best that I not return,” Clark said.
She said she was particularly hurt that the text used the word “choice,” since she doesn’t experience her gender as a choice but instead as a fact.
“If it was a choice, I wouldn’t choose to be a part of the LGBTQ community or be trans because I wouldn’t want to put myself through the struggles that other people don’t have to go through,” she said.
The counselor who sent the message – Connie Bivens – talked to WALB and said that the real issue was safety. She had heard some of the girls at the camp talking badly about Clark, so she talked about it with other counselors and they agreed that they couldn’t assure Clark’s safety so they told her to stay home for the rest of the week.
“Our choice, our decision was based on ‘can we keep her safe and can she have a wonderful time at camp,’” Bivens said. “We felt we couldn’t do that, and it had nothing to do with Lizzie being transgender,” she said.
Bivens said that the girls who were speaking badly about Clark were sent home as well, so it’s unclear why she was still worried about the teen’s safety. She said that Clark could come back to camp, but not as a volunteer in a leadership position, just as a camper.
Clark decided not to go back for the rest of the week.
“I know that we’re seen as outcasts and different,” she said. “I hope that people will open their eyes and realize we’re just the same as everybody else. We bleed red and we’re all human We deserve the same treatment as anybody else.”
