Trans in Tallahassee

Hate from the inside

“Yeah. I am talking to you, faggot in fur.”

Jacob Bellinger never expected to hear such a derogatory term during Saturday’s Pride Night at Mint Lounge. Employees and managers of the club in downtown Tallahassee, Fla. promote the night as a judgement-free, anti-hate speech safe space for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to come together for drinks, dancing, and socializing.

On Nov. 9, Bellinger was confronted with the phrase and was banned after an altercation with another bar patron. While negative actions based on Bellinger’s gender identity is nothing new, this incident stunned him. What happened next sent shockwaves through the community that are still being talked about a month later.

After the altercation led to physical injuries to Bellinger, he says Eddie Kring, catering and sales director for Mint Lounge who promotes and oversees the night, took him outside and banned him from the club because management did not want him to say anything about the altercation and handling of the matter.

"When Yelena [Jacob's female name] became increasingly upset and not wanting to understand that this wasn't a matter of us kicking anybody out, we're just placing you outside to investigate what's happening we're not anti-trans, we do not promote hate speech," Kring says. "If you are going to verbally attack the establishment and say we are anti-trans, we're going to have to ask you to not come back."

The woman who began the altercation was not banned from the establishment until her male companion physically assaulted a club employee, according to Kring.

Bellinger is transitioning into a woman.

“All the lesbians basically excommunicated me for a while. They said I was taking the easy way out,” Keegan Whitehead recalls.

Whitehead has been transitioning for six years and struggled with friends and family at the beginning of his transition. Over time, things have gotten easier for Whitehead, born Kelly, as he moved further into his transition to become a man.

“Surgery and all this money and everything and having to chop yourself to bits does not exactly sound like a choice someone would consciously make for fun,” he says. “Or to be easy.”

Negative reactions to transition from one gender to another are not uncommon. In 2013, Transgender Day of Remembrance reported 238 cases of transgender people murdered for their gender identity.

Fears like these continue to impact the transgender community and many individuals feel they do not have an ally in the fight for protection, justice, and safety despite being included in the LGBT acronym. After coming out as transgender, Whitehead and Bellinger both felt swift and painful backlash from the LGB group of the community.

“I’ve had people that I really thought were my friends just kind of stop talking to me or slowly take steps backwards the more I start to transition into something else,” Bellinger recalls. “And some people deny ever sleeping with me or things like that or being intimate with me and, like, that hurts because why are you so defensive about it. It happened, it happened. Man up about it and accept it.”

Bellinger says those who have started ostracizing him since beginning his transition this summer are doing so because they are insecure in themselves.

Meg Kern, Whitehead’s mother, says she never experienced any negative reaction to telling friends and family about Keegan’s transition and was shocked to hear that members within Keegan’s community were more judgmental against her son.

“After hearing you guys, it sounds like my ‘community’ has been a little easier and accepting than the LGBT [community],” Kern says as she sits on her back porch, coffee mug in hand, thinking about her son’s journey. “It floors me.”

Family

Kern’s love for her son was how she navigated through the process of acceptance and understanding. With friends and family that reminded her of her familial bond to Keegan, Kern listened to her son and made sure to talk to get a better understanding.

Her husband, Whitehead’s stepfather, instantly embraced him as a son without a second thought. Most importantly, Kern’s father was unconditionally accepting from the very beginning.

“So, I thought, here is this 81-year-old, Marine, businessman and [he] never flinched,” Kern says as she recalls her father's reaction. “Never flinched. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. If he could do it, what was my problem?’”

Shortly before Whitehead began his transition, a doctor delivered news to Kern that altered her original attitude of shock and frustration about the news of her son to one of compassion and worry about her son’s well-being. Whitehead had contemplated suicide due to the burden of living life as the wrong person.

Transgender individuals are the most likely demographic to attempt suicide, according to a report by the Williams Institute in Los Angeles. Forty-six percent of transgender men surveyed and 42 percent of transgender women admitted to having attempted suicide. Fifty-seven percent of those who attempted suicide did so because of losing contact with family after telling them the news of their gender identity.

Bellinger’s parents had conflicting reactions to his coming out as transgender. His father was accepting from the beginning, but his mother had reservations about her son becoming her third daughter.

“Well, my dad was accepting from the beginning because he said what every child wants to hear that he didn’t care he just wants me to be happy and everyone wants to hear that from their parents,” Bellinger says with a smile forming on his face. “She [his mother] tends to blame everything that happens to her children as 100 percent a manifestation of her parenting so for me to tell her she was kind of like, “I don’t know. I don’t think you are.’ My mom didn’t even know I was gay.”

But it was not his mother’s disregard for his gender identity that bothered Bellinger. Its was the fact that his mother may never fully understand him and his life that made the largest impact about the interaction with his mother.

Support and love is all you need

Despite the initial rejection by friends after coming out as a transgender woman, Bellinger feels loved by the people he holds dear. Mark Burton, Bellinger’s roommate and friend, has been a constant source of support and love from the very beginning.

Burton says the two do a good job of surrounding themselves with the right kind of people and keeping the group small. Burton does admit that there have been bad times that he has witnessed and that they do leave an impact and Burton is quick to defend his best friend from hurtful and negative comments.

“There was one instance of somebody she knew prior to the transition that said, ‘Why do you look like a girl?’ and Jacob, she goes, ‘What do you mean,’” Burton says mimicking the judgmental tone used by the man who approached Bellinger. “He said, ‘You look like a girl. You didn’t use to look like that before.’ I said something like, ‘Okay. Why do you look like a [expletive]?”

Burton smiles as he explains that he is very defensive and protective of his friends and admits to jumping the gun when it comes to defending his friends.

Whitehead found comfort and support with his family and the transgender community. Whitehead, who has already started hormone injections, was faced with a wall when pharmacies in Tallahassee stopped carrying generic testosterone. This, coupled with his doctor’s $250 visit fee, was becoming unaffordable for Whitehead since all the costs are out-of-pocket costs.

Friends in the transgender community informed Whitehead that he could get his hormones online. With a money order, Whitehead is able to have a six-month supply of testosterone sent from Europe for the same price he was paying for a three-month supply at the pharmacy.

“It really puts a financial burden on people because, you gotta think, you’re saving up for surgery, you’re working, you’re paying rent. You’re trying to live a normal life but insurance doesn’t really cover it in this state,” Whitehead says. “So me and a couple of other trans guys have found a website and that’s what we order from. It’s the exact same thing; it’s testosterone cypionate.”

Whitehead explains that he has to send money orders under the guise of helping family because of the legality of obtaining testosterone without a prescription.

A continuous evolution