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North Carolina
Swing Open the Door Four years after HB 2, Gray Ellis wants to become the first transgender man ever elected to a state legislature BY GIULIA HEYWARD backtalk@indyweek.com
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n a warm summer day in 1977, a group of neighborhood kids spilled into the kitchen of the Ellis family home in Whiteville, a small town in rural Columbus County, awaiting popsicles. “Line up. Girls first,” Gray’s mother called out. The four-year-old walked to the back of the line. His mom caught Gray’s attention. “Girls first,” she repeated. “I heard you.” Gray didn’t have the vocabulary to describe how he felt. He wouldn’t know the word transgender until he was much older. He only knew that he didn’t feel like a girl. “I knew I identified as male,” he says. “But what that meant, I didn’t know. And I thought I was the only person in the world like me.” His grandfather preached at the town’s Pentecostal church, and his father was the choir director. But Ellis stresses that the town embraced him. He never told his grandfather—or anyone—about his gender identity, but his grandfather referred to him with masculine pronouns and, as he neared death, offered him one of his prized suits. It was, he says, one of his first gender-affirming experiences. “I really don’t know whether he just knew and accepted it,” Ellis says. “But it was never vocalized.” Finding people like him, however, meant leaving Whiteville. The day he graduated high school, he packed all of his belong10
February 19, 2020
INDYweek.com
ings into a white convertible Mustang and drove to the Triangle to attend N.C. Central, his first step toward law school. Three decades later, Ellis, now 47, is a family lawyer, whose firm has locations in Pittsboro and Durham, where he lives with his son and partner. He transitioned at age 39. He’s been living as an openly transgender man for almost a decade. He says Durham welcomed him. “I’ve had shockingly little backlash,” Ellis says. “People just accepted me for who I was. Part of that is luck, and part of that was just who I was as a person. I’ve never been polarizing, despite being a trans person. I cross bridges with a lot of people.” Now he’s seeking to become the first transgender person elected not only to Gray Ellis PHOTO COURTESY OF GRAY ELLIS the General Assembly, but to any state legislature in the country. Ellis is running against Natalie Murdock and Pierce Free- targeted transgender people with HB 2. “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the last two years,” says Elliot Imse, communilon in the Democratic primary for the District 20 state Senate seat, until recently cations director for the Victory Fund, a political action committee that helps elect held by Floyd McKissick Jr. He’s already LGBTQ people. “There’s still only 841 [LGBTQ] elected officials, meaning that we’re the first transgender man to run for any just 0.1 percent of those in elected office.” In 2018, Danica Roem was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, becoming elected office in North Carolina. This is part of a trend. As stigmas sur- the country’s first openly transgender woman—and transgender person—to take office. rounding sexual and gender identities Since then, the Victory Fund says 20 more transgender women and five transgender recede, more and more LGBTQ people men have won elections, too. “Places that are more welcoming to LGBTQ people have more LGBTQ people in —including, notably, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is among the office,” Imse says. “When LGBTQ people are in the halls of power, we influence the top tier of Democratic presidential hope- debate, we humanize LGBTQ lives for legislative colleagues, and that leads to more fuls after the Iowa and New Hampshire inclusive legislation.” Advocates hope that could be the case in North Carolina, as well. contests—are seeking public office. All of In addition to making it a crime for transgender people to use public facilities that this is happening less than five years after the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex conform with their gender identity, HB 2—the so-called bathroom bill—also prohibmarriage legal nationwide, and four years ited local governments from enacting nondiscrimination ordinances that protectafter Republicans in the General Assembly ed LGBTQ people. While the law was repealed amid a furious backlash in 2017, its
