On November 14, 1960, a young Black girl walked into William Frantz Elementary School flanked by US Marshals. Her family and friends were so proud, excited, and nervous for her that she assumed she was a child prodigy headed to college. Instead, she was a pioneer against cruelty. Louisiana had dragged its feet on desegregating its public schools. Finally, William Frantz was desegregated, although not without students unenrolling and parents and other adults standing on the sidelines shouting indecencies into the face of a child. It was this point that struck me most as I listened to Karen of My Favorite Murder tell Ruby Bridges’ story.
Ruby Bridges is 71 years old. Her mother, Lucille, died in 2020 at the age of 86. If she were still alive, she would be 92, rare certainly, but far from improbable. How many of Lucille’s peers are still alive? According to the 2025 Census, about 0.52% of the US population was at least 92 years old which translates to roughly 1.7 million people. Like I said, far from improbable. Were any of those almost 2 million older adults one of the ones shouting insults at a 6-year-old girl on a November day in 1960? I’m not sure how to find that out, but it’s a possibility.
If my math is right, I started elementary school in the fall of 2002. Desegregation was in full force by then but demographic ideas about who was intrinsically good and intrinsically bad were not. I grew up in a poorer neighborhood full of immigrants who spoke Spanish and/or were of color. Naturally, my mom was told at her affluent, White church that she was sending her kids to school “on the wrong side of the tracks.”
What exactly this person meant I’m not sure. Was she concerned about the Spanish speaking element of my classmates or the fact that their skin wasn’t White? Was she concerned about the general poverty she had no idea the woman she was talking to was part of? Was she just kind of concerned about the general vibe of the town I lived in? I’m not sure. All I know is, in her mind, there was a right and a wrong side of the tracks to grow up in and my parents had picked the wrong one.
A while ago, a pastor I know asked me why I care about immigration so much when there’s, in his view, more pressing issues for Christians to rally against. Unlike him, watching conversations about immigration unfold from his living room television, when I think of (il)legal immigrants, I think about being in kindergarten and seeing a boy’s name card that read J-E-S-U-S.
My five-year-old brain exclaimed to itself “Um… I go to school with JESUS CHRIST?!” Of course, I didn’t. I went to school with Jesus pronounced with the Spanish “J” sound we use “H” for in English.
I think about Brian, whose name would always come out of my teachers’ mouths and I got excited thinking they were calling on me until the last syllable hit my ear with crisp disappointment.
I think about Isabella who gave us all Spanish names on the playground and talked about eating tamales.
I care about immigration because I know immigrants, because I grew up with them, because I love them. I’m not saying that immigration is a simple issue, or that I’m some sort of policy expert on how we should navigate immigration and refugees in the 21st century. While I have my own convictions and data-based beliefs about the right way to handle immigration, I’m never going to sit back and watch as rich White people in my life call Spanish speakers slurs. To do so would be an insult to the child I carry inside of me, and to all the people who made me who I am today.
For all the times someone told my parents or I with cruel sneers that we lived on “the wrong side of the tracks,” I want to say that I’m proud of the community and people I grew up beside. Cruelty is a lazy invention of terrified adults. It’s a myth I no longer believe in.
Speaking of lazy inventions from terrified adults, on the last day of Pride month this year, the US Supreme court ruled that trans girls cannot play in female sports. I guess we adults lack the imagination to come up with a solution that includes all children who want to compete in an equitable way. Many of us can’t even begin to reckon with the idea that, biologically speaking, roughly 1% of the population is born not male and not female, but something we call intersex. This isn’t a “woke” statistic or a political invention of the Democratic party; it’s God’s perfectly and wonderfully made creation that we in our infinite arrogance call flawed or non-existent. Of course we can’t yet wrestle with anything less tangible than that.
Although many of us adults are not at a picket line, yelling slurs at transgender children as they walk into school buildings, we are nonetheless terrified of our children being forced to associate with them. For a religion so boldly called not to live in fear, many practicing Christians in the United States spend the majority of their lives absolutely quaking.
I won’t entertain the idea that we as a country are somehow very passionate about women’s sports and protecting the sanctity and dignity of female athletes when we routinely label male athletes as “athletes” and men’s sports as “sports.” I won’t entertain that idea in a nation where the WNBA is nowhere near the NBA in terms of popularity or financial backing. I won’t entertain the idea that we care about women while withholding our most precious national commodity – cold, hard cash – because we fear it won’t be “profitable” yet somehow find the money to propel the XFL to national television in its first season.*
Banning kids from sports is a thinly veiled attempt at decency from a longstanding United States tradition of adults talking with cruelty about and to children. Republican governor Spencer Cox wrote in his 2022 veto of the Utah trans sports ban (bolding mine):
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.
As a queer** Christian, I am not naive to the fact that many people I am friends with would prefer, even if they would never dare to say it aloud for wisely fearing the wrath of my mother, for me to die than be who I am. I know this, not abstractly, but tangibly.
I’ve been invited to many an awkward coffee date for pastors to sheepishly tell me they don’t believe in my right to get married (as though I couldn’t immediately tell when I looked at their website or walked through their doors) but that they really love me personally and of course they don’t mind taking my queer money or using my queer hours of service or posting my queer designs or using centuries of queer songs in their worship. They really, really love me. Until, of course, all of that love dissipates in my DMs when I mention that straight white men shoot and kill more people than trans people do or when I exercise my own constitutional rights to assert me and my friends’ rights to get married or when Charlie Kirk is killed and they post about the “demonic nature of transexual children” to their congregation in a Facebook post supposedly about love.
I am familiar with the casual cruelty of adults in the United States. I was in 2011 when I tried to kill myself to escape their wrath and I am today.
To all trans kids who think there’s no hope in a world like ours, I want you to think about Ruby Bridges walking into school in 1961 and 1962 and 1963 and so on. The adults around her tried their hardest to weaponize their fears against her and make her afraid. What Ruby likely didn’t know then, what you might not know now, is that when someone is afraid of you, you hold all of the actual power. Sure, they can pass legislation that makes a real and tangible impact on your life. Yes, they say horrible things that worm their ways into the deepest parts of your brain. True, they have the power to make your life increasingly worse.
But all you have to do to drive them absolutely crazy, to keep them up at night stewing in anger and fear, is convert oxygen to carbon dioxide with your little trans mouth. All you have to do to give these people nightmares is laugh and cry with your friends. All you have to do to win the war is keep going.
Someday, they’ll be old with creaky bones too embarrassed to admit they spent their adult years being mean to children. And you’ll be old too, also with some creaky bones, having lived a good, full life with people you love. You’ll have seen movies that make you cry and have heard songs that get stuck in your head. You’ll have spent time in that city you’ve always dreamed about living in. You’ll have slept in so many weekends you’ll wonder how you ever woke up at 6am to go to school. (Seriously. How did we do that?!)
You will have a long, beautiful life full of good days and bad ones.
You will develop courage.
You will be your wonderful transgender self for a lifetime.
And all they will ever have is their fears.
If you’re a trans youth thinking of hurting yourself, you can contact the Trevor Project by texting START to 678-678, calling them at 1-866-488-7386, or chatting with them here.
You can help prevent trans kids from teen suicide by supporting The Trevor Project. All kids, no matter what you think of them, deserve the chance to become adults.
*For what it’s worth, I also didn’t buy the bathroom bills this country tried to and did pass about a decade ago. We were super concerned about hypothetical women being hypothetically sexually assaulted in hypothetical bathrooms by hypothetical men at a time when almost every state had a backlog of untested rape kits from real women who were real victims of real sexual violence?
**I’m looking at all cis White men who somehow think they would be allowed to exist if it wasn’t for the unpaid labor of Black trans women. Every person who has even gently approached the “LGB without the T” hallucination is terrified of their own vulnerability and will push any victims under their own bus of oppression if it means a conservative might pay them a compliment. Just as fear is a weak defense that straight, White people wield against small, Black girls in 1960, fear weaponized against trans people by gay boys in 2026 will never convince me. I’m not free until everyone’s free.
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Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He sells poetry art here, published a collection of poems titled Weak Eyes, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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