Families & Community

Michigan is in the midst of a controversy surrounding transgender people’s access to public bathrooms.

It’s a hot-button issue evidenced by the nearly 10,000 people who have filed public comments on the State Board of Education’s draft of voluntary guidelines for schools to meet the needs of their transgender students. By comparison, no other proposals have received more than 40 comments.

She first went into the system when she was five years old, she says.

She bounced around, like any of the thousands of kids in Michigan who go through foster care. So she waited, like everyone else waits. Many of them wait so long, they turn 18 in foster care, and they’re never adopted. They “age out.”

But her story took a different turn. 

It was this winter. January. Abbi was 15 years old. We’re just using her first name.

She was living in a group home, thinking of another year, another birthday without a family. She talked to her therapist about it.

Julisa Abad was was never kicked out of her home. She was never in the child welfare system. But her dad stopped talking to her years ago.  We spoke to her and her friend, Ashley Avery, as part of our Family Values documentary about the ways in which family rejection and acceptance impacts health outcomes for LGBTQ youth.

If you ask Cherish Blackmon about her gender, you won’t get a simple answer.

“Well, on the inside, I definitely identify my masculinity, but I also acknowledge my feminine on the outside because I know that God has given me the privilege to experience the opposite body of what I originally am in this lifetime," she said. "I feel like I’m both, but it feels like one.”

As for her sexual orientation, Blackmon says early on she knew she was attracted to women.

The tiny white ball arcs against the cold gray sky, almost too hard to see.  

"That's a good ball," says Devon Kitchen, eyes focused as the ball drops quietly on the still-soggy fairway at Lincoln Golf Club on the northern edge of Muskegon.

It’s one of those days when spring backtracks, feels more like winter. Not a great day for golfing.

But it doesn’t seem to bother Kitchen. The 17-year-old is just happy to be on the course again. He's dressed in a bright orange cap, dark gray pullover and black pants. Tiger colors. Kitchen is a student at the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy, home of the Tigers. Before Kitchen showed up at the school, the Tigers didn't have a golf team. Now they do. 

"It was a challenge," Kitchen says, "but we got here."

"Used to be a church right here," Jamiel Robinson says, nodding toward a storefront on South Division in Grand Rapids. 

"Yeah?" I say, eyeing the business. "Now they do tattoos. Ain’t the same at all."

"It’s not the same."

We're standing at the corner of Division and McConnell. Next to us is a gray, boarded up building Robinson’s grandfather once owned. It had a barbershop, a candy store, a pool hall and apartments upstairs. But it was old and needed repairs. In 2005, Robinson’s family sold it.

Then the building boom in the area happened.