Deb Foreman
Deb Foreman, President of PFLAG Spartanburg, co-founder and Executive Director of the Uplift and Outreach Center delivered their statement in front of the South Carolina State House as part of Sunday’s Trans and Queer Field Day event on Sunday, May 16th, 2021.
My name is Deb Foreman, and my pronouns are she/hers. I am the mom of a transgender person, as well as the President of PFLAG Spartanburg, and co-founder & Executive Director of the Uplift Outreach Center in Spartanburg, SC. Uplift is a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth ages 10 to 22 years old.
This onslaught of anti-transgender bills – not just here in South Carolina but all across the country – has been demoralizing, dispiriting, and dehumanizing. I cannot believe that as our country grappled with the traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, our lawmakers chose to subject transgender children to the violence of these bills that singled them out for exclusion and othering.
It breaks my heart. Because transgender students already face hostile environments at school. Did you know that 81% of South Carolina’s trans students hear negative remarks from other students, and are bullied by school personnel? Approximately 15% of those students are physically assaulted at school due to gender and gender expression.
Throughout the session, elected officials discussed trans kids’ bodies in invasive detail. Adults tried to make the case that trans youth were DANGEROUS, that they’d take up all the scholarship money and, I don’t know, win the Olympics over cisgender girls. They tried to say young people in crisis should be separated from trans-affirming medical care.
For months the SC United coalition heard urgent cries from trans youth: What happens if they take away my healthcare? What happens if I’m singled out for discrimination when I’m just trying to play volleyball?
As the parent of a trans person, I also heard so much anguish from other parents: How do we support our youth in a state that is working so hard to take away their rights and basic humanity?
Here’s how: We show up. When trans kids are under attack, we come together, we organize, we speak out. Many of the folks here today attended three separate subcommittee hearings in this building behind me, sometimes traveling for hours. We testified and we shared our stories and we looked legislators in the eye and said – how dare you. And in the next breath, we looked at trans youth and we said – We love you, we care about you, and we support you.
I’m proud of the ways that LGBTQ and allied South Carolinians have come together this year, and this is just the beginning. There is so much that we can do to support LGBTQ people in South Carolina, and we’re going to keep moving forward, together.