The ‘Yes on 3’ Fight Showed Us We Are Not Alone.
Full nondiscrimination protections for trans and gender nonconforming people in Massachusetts first went into effect on October 1, 2016—my birthday. I had recently told my therapist, “I feel lucky to be transitioning right now, at this point in history.”
I had come out as a transgender woman the year before, between Laverne Cox’s TIME cover and Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair reveal. I expected being trans to keep getting easier in this country and around the world, and I was excited for (and jealous of) the trans kids who could begin living as themselves at 16 and 10 and even 4 years old. Even though I knew that opponents of Massachusetts’ new law had gathered enough signatures to put it up to a popular vote, I didn’t believe repeal was possible, in the same way I didn’t believe Trump would win the election a month later.
I began volunteering with Freedom for All Massachusetts in April of this year. I did it because I felt overwhelmed by how much had changed so quickly. I now lived under a government that was coming for my friends and my family and me, and I felt paralyzed by the prospect of choosing where to dig in and fight. I decided the least I could do was make sure my own rights, in my own state, given to me on my birthday, were not taken away.
For most of this year I canvassed and phone-banked with Yes on 3, eventually training other canvassers and phone-bankers. I got to know countless incredible people, including a handful of the transgender and gender nonconforming teenagers I had been so excited for two years ago. I trained a 15-year-old trans boy at a phone bank, and just a few weeks later he was training volunteers himself. There was a trans 13-year-old who brought his best friend and his mom, and a 12-year-old who began using they/them pronouns within the space of the campaign. During the final Get Out the Vote push, a dad came with his 11-year-old to a canvass; the next day the 11-year-old came back without him to phone-bank.
I was amazed by them, but I was also terrified for them. I knew that Julia Raifman, assistant professor of health law, policy & management, found that when same-sex marriage was being legalized state-by-state, teen suicide attempts dropped in those states. I also knew that after news broke on the Trump administration’s memo about changing the legal definition of gender, calls to the Trans Lifeline quadrupled, and first-time calls doubled.
Part of the strategy in the Yes on 3 campaign was to make the issue personal by sharing our own experiences, or the experiences of trans friends and family, with potential voters. In our trainings, we would ask volunteers to say who, specifically, they were there for. Sometime this fall, my answer changed. I stopped saying I was there to protect myself, and started saying that I was there to protect my friends, including the kids I had met during the campaign.
When the polls closed on November 6, the team at my staging site cleaned up, then got in a circle for a final debrief. I had thought I would cry later, when the results came in—but first I cried when the 11-year-old said, “This gave me the confidence to come out to my brother as gay.”
Of course, I cried again when, just before 10 pm, I and hundreds of other Yes on 3 volunteers listened to campaign co-chair Mason Dunn announce we had won—that Massachusetts voters had chosen, overwhelmingly, to keep nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. “We didn’t choose this fight, but the silver lining of having to have a fight is that we grew this army,” Dunn said from the podium. Later we would learn that over the course of the campaign, 4,000 volunteers had spoken with more than 120,000 voters across the state.
As Dunn said, we should not have had to do any of this. But having to fight meant we got to see who would fight for us. We found the way to defend transgender rights, we won by a landslide, and along the way, we made a space where trans, gender nonconforming, and other queer people could feel confident, safe, and strong enough to announce who they really were.
On the morning of November 8, one of my GOTV co-trainers sent a message to the other volunteer leaders, announcing his new name and pronouns. He is 25, a few months older than I was when I came out. Unlike me at that time, he knows that progress is not guaranteed—but he also knows who is behind him, and how hard we will fight to keep him safe.
Michelle Samuels is senior writer and editor in the Office of Communications.
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