CHARLOTTE — This weekend, thousands of members of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies will flock to Uptown Charlotte for the annual Pride celebration -- while many are celebrating, some are viewing this year’s Pride as more of a protest.
We introduced you to Shenna a few years back, and she offered a look into her family’s life raising a transgender girl in North Carolina.
“At seven years old, she was able to articulate this, but she made it clear to us that she was a girl and she needed to live as a girl," Shenna told Channel 9’s Hunter Sáenz.
Her daughter is now 11, and Shenna says she is “thriving.”
“She just finished elementary school, she’s heading off to middle school in a couple of weeks,” Shenna said.
She knows her daughter is a lucky one, with a supportive family and accepting friends. But Shenna knows that can be unique.
“Just letting her be who she is is one of the best parenting moves that we’ve done,” she said.
Sarah Mikhail, the CEO at Time Out Youth, agrees. She runs the community center, which offers a lifeline of support to LGBTQ youth in Charlotte, including transgender kids, teens, and young adults.
“What is it like being a transgender person in America right now?” Sáenz asked.
“It is living despite what the social climate is right now that is trying really hard to tell trans young people that they should not exist or that they don’t exist,” Mikhail said.
Mikhail says because of recent state and federal policies against the trans community, Time Out Youth has put more young trans people in the hospital in the last six months for suicidal ideation than they have in her entire four years at the center.
“I don’t care who you are, we should all agree that young people should live, that they should want to live, no matter your politics, no matter your faith, no matter what you do on Sundays, you should care that young people don’t want to live because we’re making it so difficult for them to live,” Mikhail said.
One of the most notable policies is a recent ban on gender-affirming care for minors in North Carolina. Mikhail says it’s critical.
“[It] will have life or death impacts. If you cannot align with who you are, legally, medically, then many people will feel like, what’s the point?” Mikhail said.
Shenna knows her daughter is fortunate. They travel out of state for her gender-affirming care. But as a parent, she’s still anxious about the future unknowns.
“What keeps us up at night is just seeing the federal pressure that’s being enacted even in states where gender-affirming health care is still legal,” Shenna said.
So she and many others in Charlotte this weekend will celebrate as they continue to fight for and amplify the voices of the trans community.
“Our young people need us to not give up,” Mikhail said.
(VIDEO: GOP overrides governor’s vetoes of 2 bills concerning transgender rights in NC)
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