A trans writer’s talk was banned over a drag law. So she’ll speak here instead
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
