Gavin Grimm, the now-25-year-old trans man who made headlines for suing his Virginia school district over its transphobic bathroom policies, is struggling with mental health challenges, poverty and looming homelessness, according to The Guardian
Grimm sued the district after the Gloucester County School Board voted to ban him as a 15-year-old from using the boys’ bathrooms, even though he had already been doing so for months without incident. After years of litigation, he eventually won a landmark federal decision asserting the constitutional right to protection against educational discrimination.
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But even though the school district ended up settling Grimm’s case for $1.3 million in legal fees and other legal costs, the settlement didn’t provide him with stable housing or financial security. He only received $1 as a symbolic share of the settlement.
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To settle for personal damages, Grimm would have had to have given the school district’s lawyers access to medical records showing the impacts of the school’s discrimination on his health. After years of court battles, he didn’t like enduring another fight.
As his court victories mounted, Grimm gained notoriety: Trans actress Laverne Cox told people to Google him at the Grammys, Whoopi Goldberg interviewed him on The View, and in 2017, he served as the grand marshal for New York City’s Pride parade. But he hasn’t been invited to any paid appearances as the LGBTQ+ community’s focus has largely moved on to others.
“I’m someone who has had worldwide visibility. I represent an outer crust of privilege most people will never see, and I cannot make ends meet no matter how hard I try,” he told The Guardian. He is one of the 8% of trans adults who have gone unsheltered over the last year
Grimm now suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder and stress-induced seizures in addition to having autism which affects his sensory processing. In May 2021, he spent four days in a coma after a grand mal seizure which seriously impaired his ability to work or drive. Combined, these have prevented him from keeping a job or finishing higher education, even though a generous benefactor helped fund it.
“The PTSD at its core is about not being safe or understood, being rejected, and the adults in my life not acting responsibly,” he said. “In high school, I was picked over and hyper-analyzed. I was tortured, harassed and bullied.”
While he receives some financial support from disability payments, his mother, and an ongoing GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign, he recently moved out of his apartment in Newport News, Virginia.
His mother has begun caring for his 19-year-old cat Rascal, but Grimm has begun couch-surfing with friends, occasionally staying with his mother, and spending some nights at a local dog park. He avoids houseless shelters, fearful of discrimination.
He volunteers some days with a climate justice group and spends time hanging in the garage of Evan Hamilton, a 66-year-old fellow trans man and “autistic stoner” who he met through a local queer group. Grimm wishes to eventually return to college to become a teacher.
Grimm said he’s voting Democrat in the upcoming election as a form of “harm reduction,” but he has been discouraged at the wav of anti-trans legislation that has swept the nation in the years since his case made headlines.
Virginia’s Department of Education under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried to force districts to enforce policies forcing students to use bathrooms, pronouns, and names that align with their sex assigned at birth. Some state districts have refused but the policies and the hostile atmosphere they create still threaten the estimated 4,000 transgender students in Virginia.
“This system is built specifically to ensure the status quo continues, that people like me are disenfranchised, underrepresented and never have full equality under the law,” Grimm says. “But I know that what I did was important. Even though the system is not going to serve our ultimate liberation, it is what we have in place right now.”
“If I maintain housing while my cat is still alive, that’s all I can really hope for,” he added. “I’m prepared to face homelessness, but I just don’t want her to face it.”
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