On the first day of Pride month, Adria Jawort was scheduled to speak at the public library in Butte, Montana. She was going to give a lecture on the history of trans and Two Spirit people in the west. She is not a drag performer. And yet the city’s top elected officials pressured the library to cancel her talk, saying it might pose a legal risk given the state’s new law against drag performers reading to children.
Perhaps naively, I thought my city would be one of the last places to censor Jawort, an Indigenous trans woman. Butte, the mining town where I grew up and now live, hasn’t voted Republican in generations. It’s the historic heart of the labor movement in the US west, a scrappy place where people pride themselves on standing up to power and protecting the less powerful. But our political landscape is changing.
Across the country, far-right politicians are waging war on the rights of queer people. In Montana, a state facing an affordability and housing crisis of historic proportions, a Republican supermajority in the legislature largely ignored the economic issues facing most residents and instead gained a national spotlight by passing laws targeting drag shows and healthcare for trans people, in debates loaded with hateful rhetoric.
I spoke with Jawort about her work and what this censorship means.
What happened on the day your event got cancelled?
I woke up on the first day of Pride in good spirits, looking forward to doing a history lecture about Indigenous LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit people, and how we’ve existed in the Americas since time immemorial.
I’d written a facetious tweet mocking how my being considered “flamboyantly” dressed as a transgender person – which in rural Montana could mean wearing the purple lipstick I’m fond of – while reading passages from a history book in a library might now be deemed illegal due to the vagueness of a silly, unconstitutional anti-drag law which was just signed into law.
Soon, librarians messaged saying people had been calling and misconstruing the event and were trying to get the event canceled, but that they’d press forward. Still, it was concerning enough that they felt it necessary to have a police presence there.
At 11.14am, I got a message saying my history lecture was canceled; they were using the anti-drag-queen law bill to do so. I was shocked, seeing as Butte was known historically as progressive city who’d stood up for the little person. Now here they were, cowering to fascists’ laws and white supremacists who later took credit for shutting down my event due to their “campaign of complaints”.
The writer of the bill, Representative Braxton Mitchell, had said the anti-drag show bill wouldn’t apply to trans people. I of course didn’t believe him. If the state finds itself on the side of Nazis, maybe they need to reassess their bigoted laws.
We’re in a historic moment in Montana and several other states where far-right extremists who control state governments have passed a spate of bills attacking the rights of vulnerable people. Did you see this coming in our state?
Most certainly. I jokingly call myself a “doomerette”, but I’ve testified for and against some 60-something bills in the 2021 legislative session and saw first-hand how the far-right fringe obsessed with culture wars worked to push out moderates.
While they might be offended if you call them fascists, figure, the last 2021 GOP House leader, Derek Skees, called Montana’s constitution a “socialist rag”. State Senator John Fueller said “democracy is a methodology of government that has failed as miserably as socialism” in his defense of banning books. These people are more interested in forcing their personal, authoritarian, theocratic beliefs upon the populace than governing.
Although it didn’t pass, another bill was brought forth on behalf of defending a literal book-burning pastor. It was an oddly specific bill that would have forced the National Association of Realtors to associate with Pastor Brandon Huber, who’d violated their code of ethics, which prohibits LGBTQ+ discrimination.
Anyway, I called him a “book burner” six times in testimony – in case they didn’t hear it the other five times.
Does living in Montana in this moment feel safe to you?
I write about white supremacists. They know who I am. They despise me. While I am a pacifist and take precautions, you still have to show you’re not going to be cowered by bigoted coward bullies.
After the 2021 legislative session, a far-right darling named Pastor Jordan Hall wrote a transphobic, racist hit piece against me with fabricated claims that I had yelled in the face of an elderly senator until the sergeant of arms pulled me him away from me. Obviously, it never happened so it was confirmed by no one; I am extremely mousey and soft-spoken. But it put a target on my back.
I sued for libel, and for eight months Hall held rallies were he’d often call for my death and claim it was “metaphorical” while quoting biblical scripture. But two men traveled over 200 miles from Great Falls, Montana, to where I live in Billings to confront me, all while claiming I was involved in some bizarro child abuse image cover-up and the theft of $80m.
Pastor Jordan Hall ended up filing for bankruptcy rather than face possible sanctions for all of his “metaphorical” threats.
There’s a lot of talk about “red states” v “blue states”, and blue states are seen as havens for queer people. What duty do Democrats and progressives have to offer LGBTQ+ people who live in red states?
I once noted in a testimony that most people don’t know what it feels like to have to wait for a supreme court ruling to see if the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to you.
A lot of people won’t vote because they say “both sides are the same”. To that I’d say: watch a hearing of someone in a red state arguing passionately to keep their reproductive rights, or watch an LGBTQ+ person whose rights are about to be voted away argue for their humanity. Then tell me both sides are the same.
Therein lies a lot of our hope: that thinking and empathetic people see the importance of voting and democracy.
On that note, people who don’t think very deeply about this stuff seem to have a propensity to tell vulnerable people to just leave red states, and live somewhere more welcoming. What’s your response to that as an Indigenous person?
I was living in Las Vegas on a writing fellowship back in the fall. I loved it there. I didn’t feel like I had to constantly be wary and suspicious of everyone, especially in the goth club I lived by where I’d “found” my social tribe. I finally had time to relax and work on my novel.
After dealing with that libel lawsuit nonsense and just feeling done with how moronic our laws were going to get, I honestly didn’t want to go back. There seemed nothing left for me in Montana other than being co-dependent to the land.
But I did eventually have to come back and give a speech about being Two Spirit to high school and middle school kids on the Standing Rock Reservation. The same speech Butte banned – and those students loved it. Whereas before I’d been a lost doomer, after that I had hope. The kids are all right, I thought.
I might eventually move and write novels full time, but while I’m stuck here, I’ll give ’em hell.
I’m interested in the actual topic of your talk that was cancelled – the history of Two Spirit people in the west. Can you tell us more about it?
Firstly, I should describe what Two Spirit is: it’s the 1990 umbrella word replacement for what anthropologists had previously called “berdache”. Let’s just say that word was an offensive, inaccurate term used to describe what we’d collectively call trans and/or gay and lesbian identities within tribes.
“Two Spirit” stems from the Ojibwe term niizh manidoowag, which means having the “Two Spirits” of male and female. Two Spirit people were considered sacred and essential to ceremonies and spirituality.
Crow tribe have what they called the badé, Lakota have winkte, my Cheyenne tribe has hemaneh – which means born male but has the heart and soul of a woman. The Navajo word naadleehi means “one who transforms” into a woman. And of course there’s also male variations.
During the late 1890s and after the Indian wars, an Indian agent acting on behalf of the government tried to get a popular badé trans woman named Finds Them And Kills Them to live as a man. She refused. The agent jailed all the badé, cut off their hair, and forced them to do manual “man’s labor”.
The Crow were shocked at this attempted conversion therapy. It was against their nature. The late second world war hero and Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow said: “The people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow agency and told the agent to leave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them.”
It was such an alien, baffling, and upsetting concept to Natives to force people to live against their nature, they were going to revolt on their behalf. They stood up for who she was.
Do you see hope for things changing? What can people do to support you?
One of the greatest weapons we have against bigotry and ignorance is education. And I always deemed it important to fight for not just Indigenous trans and Two Spirit people, but all LGBTQ+ people – we are both equally targeted.
I am about to finally launch a non-profit called Indigenous Transilience; we hope to continue to stand up for marginalized people and empower future generations through the strength of our past. We want to be able to be that ancestor our descendants may look up to someday.
