Oral History Program Eden Saxton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 August 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Eden Saxton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 August 2022 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Saxton, Eden, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 10 August 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Eden Saxton conducted on August 10, 2022 by Lorrie Rands and Faith Christiansen. Eden shares her childhood and what it was like growing up queer in an LDS family in Northern Utah. She talks about her mental health, her schooling experiences, and the importance of queer spaces. Also present is Raegan Baird. LR: Today is August 10, 2022. It's a Wednesday. It's about noon. I'm Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and we're here with Eden Saxton doing the interview for Queering the Archives, in the Stewart Library, here at Weber State University. Raegan Baird is with me. However, Faith Christiansen will be in shortly to actually take over. We always begin with pronouns and introducing ourselves in that way and how we identify. ES: Pretty cool. LR: I will start. My pronouns are she/her, I identify as lesbian. RB: My pronouns are she/her and I'm straight. ES: My pronouns are she/her, and I identify as a lesbian. LR: All right. Thank you very much, Eden. Why don't we just jump in with when and where you were born? ES: I was born in St Mark's Hospital, Salt Lake City, September 8, 2003, at 5:11 AM with my mom and dad and no one else there, as far as I'm aware. LR: Okay. St Mark's. Did you grow up in Salt Lake? ES: I did, until I was about 10 or 11 years old. I grew up in a little neighborhood just north of City Center called Rose Park. It's a primarily Hispanic and Latino neighborhood with a lot of immigrants. I mean, I grew up just down the street from a Buddhist monastery. I had a lot of cultural diversity around me growing up, so it was a really great place to grow up. 1 LR: That's really awesome. Okay, so growing up in Rose Park, very diverse, you said until about ten. ES: Yeah. LR: Did you give an address for where you were? ES: For where I used to live? No, I didn't give an address for it. LR: Are you willing to? I'm just curious. ES: Yeah, totally. It's 1210 West 900 North, Rose Park, Salt Lake City. LR: All right. Growing up in that neighborhood, what are some of your memories of that neighborhood? You said very diverse. I know you don't know any different, but what was that like? ES: Well, I actually experienced a really interesting division. I attended Mormon church when I was a child, all the way up until like age 14. Church was primarily white, and so a lot of my family friends were white. But just walking through the neighborhood, I would see people of all sorts of different ethnicities and cultures very visibly displaying that, through decorating their house, their clothing, the way they talked. I grew up hearing Spanish all around me. So that division between church and home and community was always one that kind of led to me… not feeling isolated, so much, as feeling split in how I was supposed to treat people and how I experienced the world. My house was kind of a bubble of whiteness, of cis-gendered heterosexuality, but going out into the community, Salt Lake City is a very diverse place. There are a lot of queer people, and being out there, it was one of the first ways I was exposed to anything outside of my very white Mormon upbringing. It kind of started opening my eyes. Even as a young child, it was a very different thing to be out of the home versus in it. 2 LR: Okay. Out of curiosity, as you're growing up and you're out in the community having a different type of experience, what was the difference from home life, learning about gender norms and going out into the community? ES: At home, my dad is pretty conservative and my mom is pretty liberal, so growing up, they had to center their way of teaching my sibling and I between their two ideals. I was taught, in the style of the Mormon Church, that men and women are different, but those differences are determined by yourself. Sort of implicitly and not-soexplicitly told by my parents, I picked up on a lot of the stereotypical Mormon gender stereotypes just through the media. My parents showed me Mormon-friendly movies, family-style church productions, stuff like that. I was very much taught that women were subservient in the house and men were the breadwinners. But going out into the community, I would see single moms, I would see gay couples, I would see people of all sorts of different creeds. There didn't seem to be nearly as many gender norms for them than I felt there were for me, mostly because I didn't know any better. There are gender stereotypes in most cultures, different as they may be to the ones I was raised with. But it was just that contrast of so many different people living different ways, regardless of their gender, and me being implicitly taught and raised that there was one way for me to be. LR: Okay. Were you able to talk to your parents about the differences you were seeing? ES: It wasn't so explicit when I was younger. I didn't know, in as many words as I do now, that that's what I was seeing, that that's what I was learning. I didn't realize consciously that those were the differences. Growing up, I just thought that's kind of the way the world was, that my home was going to be different than the outside world. I didn't know any better. So those conversations, I didn't start having with my parents until I was probably a teenager, so there wasn't any dialogue about that. It was just the way life was. 3 LR: What was your family life like? ES: Basically, I just grew up with my parents and my little sibling. We lived in a postbaby boomer small house for most of my childhood, and it was a really happy childhood. My dad has been a teacher for my whole life, and my mom was a stayat-home-mom and she worked part-time doing flight registrations for JetBlue. They were always home; they were always around me. My parents weren't necessarily impoverished, but they had student loans and a house loan, so we grew up really focusing on doing things together as a family, not necessarily going out. We would get movies from the library, we'd go on walks, we'd play in the backyard. The other thing I was very blessed with as a child was that my mom, she worked at JetBlue, she got free flights, and so we traveled a bunch. When I was a kid, we'd go on weekend trips; we'd visit family. We even went to Denmark when I was five and my sister was three. There was a lot of exploration. I had a really happy childhood, even though there was always the shadow of religion that would sneak its way into every part of my family. But it never made me sad. It never really was a barrier when I was a little kid. It was just part of my life at that point. LR: What were your parents' names? ES: My parents' names are Katrina and Aaron Saxton. LR: Okay. Where did you go to elementary school? ES: My elementary school was Legacy Preparatory Academy in West Bountiful, so it was pretty far away from Woods Cross. It's like a 15 minute drive. It's a charter school, so it's not fully public, but it's not private. My parents didn't have to pay tuition. It's like a raffle that you enter, and if you get picked out of the raffle, your kid gets to go, and if you don't, you just go somewhere else instead. LR: Okay. So I'm assuming that your sibling went there as well. ES: Yeah, they did. 4 LR: Did you ever experience a traditional public school? ES: No, I never did. LR: The reason I ask is it's very different, I think, between the two. What are some of your favorite memories of elementary school? ES: I was very, very blessed to have a music-heavy and classical education at my elementary school. We would have multiple music classes. We had wonderful art programs and wonderful social studies programs. All my favorite memories are of my art classes. We had really awesome art teachers who were classically trained, amazing artists who'd sell their work, but they just worked there because they had kids there, or they were local teachers. I always loved the focus on art in my education. I'm a science major now, which is funny, but I really loved learning how to express myself as a kid. So I definitely loved art and just all the different memories I have of going to art class, drawing with my friends, going out and putting pastels on the front sidewalk at the end of school. Stuff like that are some of my favorite memories for sure. LR: I recognize it's not really a fair question, but as you were going through elementary school, was there ever a time when you felt like you were different? ES: No. My elementary school, kind of comparatively to the community I grew up in, was very predominantly white and cisgender, heterosexual. I didn't feel different because I didn't know I was different. I never had crushes on anybody growing up that I thought were crushes. I was just the kid who didn't like anyone, but I never felt like an outlier. LR: Forgive me. This is going to sound really petty, but I don't mean you to be petty. I'm just not used to interviewing someone so young, so I hope you'll forgive me. All my normal questions that I would ask aren't relevant, so that kind of makes me feel silly. Did you ever see a disconnect or a difference between what you were taught 5 in your home, especially with the religion you grew up in and what you were seeing in the community? ES: Absolutely. The older I got, the more apparent it was. My mom, her side of the family is a lot more diverse than my dad's. All of his siblings are biological and white. He's got like ten siblings; they're all his full-blooded siblings. My mom, on the other hand, had four biological siblings and five adopted siblings, three of whom were African-American and one of whom was Korean. My dad especially struggled with homophobia a lot when I was younger. We'd go out into the community, into Salt Lake, and we'd see gay couples on the street, or we'd see transgender people literally just minding their own business. My dad would make some sort of snide comment away from them, apart from them. I have an aunt who's transgender. My dad would occasionally comment on things about her in a very transphobic way. He would be like, "She's not a real woman," in not so many words, of course. He was never quite so blatant because he knew my mom's values differed significantly from his. But going out into the community, it was definitely different when I was younger. 2007, 2008, some of my earliest memories, it was a lot more conservative in Salt Lake, before Jackie Biskupski was ever mayor. There's still just a lot of open queer community that sort of faded as I got older. Not so much that the queer community itself faded, but the sort of hiding yourself, just less and less as I got older. LR: [Faith enters the room.] All right. You’re actually going to take over. FC: Oh, yeah. LR: [To the camera] Faith Christiansen just walked in. [To Faith] We're in the early years of her life still, we haven't gotten very far. She went to Legacy Prep Academy in Bountiful. We're just talking about the differences between what she was seeing at 6 home and in the community growing up in Rose Park. We know about her home life, basically. We're still talking about elementary school. FC: [To Eden] Did you have a best friend growing up? ES: I did have a best friend. She was a ballerina. She was probably the most gorgeous girl I had seen to that point in my very young life, and we were close from like second grade to eighth grade. We were very, very close friends. FC: How was the community space during elementary school? ES: In what regard? FC: Were you out yet? ES: No, I didn't know I was queer in elementary school. Looking back, I had no crushes on boys. I didn't think I had crushes at all just because I hadn't learned what attraction was or what a crush would look like on a girl. But looking back, I had some very obvious queer inclinations towards girls in my classes. I'd like them. I'd spent way too much time around them. I'd get irrationally sad when they didn't want to be my friend. What actually happened with my old best friend is, I was very attached to her for a lot of years and we had a whole big blow-up when I was like 12. I remember going to my mom and sobbing, not just because she was my friend, but because, you know, the classic lesbian best friend as a kid you're secretly in love with. For several years after that, I was just destroyed over the fact that she wasn't my friend anymore. It was very sad for little me to not have that person in my life who I'd been very attached to for so long. FC: What were you taught about gender roles growing up? ES: So we touched on this a little bit, but most of what I learned about gender roles was implicit through my exposure to media and the Mormon Church. I definitely, through the church, picked up that women are subservient, they stay at home, caretakers. Men are explicitly the breadwinner, the head of the household, protection, defense. 7 Those differences would be as little as the activities the boys and girls do differently. Boys would start out in Boy Scouts at age eight, while I was going to Activity Day Girls and learning etiquette and how to sew. So even if my parents weren't the ones teaching me, it was definitely the wider community who was saying, “This is what you need to be. This is how things are.” FC: Did you have a similar experience while learning about sexuality or was it different? ES: Sexuality was entirely not talked about when I was a kid. I don't ever remember explicitly being taught what gay or lesbian or bisexual was until I was maybe 10 or 11 and started getting more access to the Internet and social media. My family never was so explicitly homophobic when I was a kid. I was never given the conversation that you can't love someone of the same gender. My parents were never, ever, that I remember, super homophobic or anti-gay or anti-LGBTQ. It was more subtle things that would come out in conversation. It was a quiet condemnation of the queer community, but it was less that my parents were homophobic and more they had been raised in an environment that they didn't know any better themself. I actually have several queer family members that have been coming more and more out as I've gotten older. When I was younger, I had an aunt who came out as transgender a few years ago. Before then, my mom really struggled with 'transgenderism' and people like that. But it was never hateful on my parents' part, it was misunderstanding and being misguided, mostly. They didn't know any better. FC: Right. So what was your first exposure to queerness? ES: So when I was ten, I started really being on the Internet. You know, I was never really on social media—I didn't even get Instagram until I was 16—but it was just existing on the Internet and ingesting queer media. One of the earliest memories I have of watching a video that was explicitly queer was Joey Graceffa's coming-out 8 video when I was like 12. Eventually, it was just stumbling upon more and more and more information about it, mostly on YouTube. I'd watch a lot of videos about gender and about sexuality and about what different words meant. As I got older, I was just exposed to more things, and I learned about it. Eventually, when I was 12 or 13, I figured out that I was queer, but I didn't tell anybody. I didn't know anybody else who was. It was never really a problem for me. I was never particularly bothered by not coming out until I was older because I was always able to pass as cisgender and heterosexual. I just didn't seem interested in anybody. I was 14, I think, when I made friends explicitly bonding through our queerness, when it became something that actually mattered to me. Before then, the only communication I'd had was someone else who was queer was my aunt. She's biromantic, something like that. She was a great figure for me growing up. She's definitely much more liberal than my parents. She's very spiritual. So when I was struggling with my sexuality, I did talk to her about it and she's like, “Well, I loved a woman once and I love a man now, and you can love whoever you want.” It wasn't really something I was explicitly exposed to until I was a little bit older. FC: Did you see representation of your identity online? ES: No, not really. I didn't know I was a lesbian until I was like 15 or 16. Before then, I just knew I wasn't straight. For a while, I thought I might be asexual-aromantic because I didn't realize that I was having crushes on girls. I just thought I didn't have any sort of attraction or anything to anyone. I didn't really fully understand what a lesbian was until I was 15. It's just hard to find any clear information online, or it was when I was first starting to be on the internet. I didn't know what I was just because of learning what other people were. 9 FC: I know you talked about Joey Graceffa. Did you have any icons or role models growing up that were queer? ES: No, I didn't know anyone. I never knew who they were in media. I didn't have anyone who I looked up to. It was when I was 15 and I learned about Sally Ride that I had my first, like, “I want to be like her.” She was a queer astronaut, and she had a long-term partner who was also female. That was kind of the first person who I looked up to, partially because they were queer, but I never really had anyone before then. FC: I know you talked about, you didn't come out until, what was it, 12? ES: I didn't come out until I was 16. FC: Did you feel the need to traditionally come out? ES: I wanted to, but the way I did end up coming out was I just kind of blurted it to my mom. It just came out all in a rush. I think I was 13 or 14 when I actually came out, and then I came out again when I was 16, properly. You know, the whole sit-down conversation with your parents about who you are and you know who you love. But it was sort of hush-hush until I told my dad because I told my mom I didn't want him to know because he had more conservative leanings. It wasn't because I thought he'd react poorly, it was because I didn't want him to blame himself for the way I turned out. I was 14 when I first told them that I had realized I liked girls, but I was probably 16 when I actually told them flat-out, both of them, that I was queer. FC: How was that experience? ES: It was largely neutral. My mom responded with, "I know," and that was kind of it. She had already figured out because I never came home talking about boys. I was always more attached to my female peers. But my dad, when I told him—he never was cruel to me towards it. My parents have never been any level of discriminatory towards me for being queer. But my dad really struggled with it personally, because 10 due to his Mormon and conservative upbringing, he sort of still believes in some capacity that queerness is bad, or it leads to bad outcomes, or that it's just harder for people to exist as being queer. He never blamed me, he was never cruel to me, but he did blame himself. It was a mixed bag of reactions, but I never felt like my parents were going to kick me out; I never felt like they loved me less for being queer. It was just that they still didn't fully understand what that meant. In my perception of things in the past, it hasn't really been until the past year and a half that I've noticed them finally fully coming to terms with what it means to have a queer child, and that I'm happiest when I'm being my true self. It's not some sort of misery sentence for the rest of my life. LR: Quickly, out of curiosity. Did your parents ever just sit and talk with you about what it was like for you? Did they have those conversations with you once you came out? ES: Yeah. We've had several in the past, especially in the past half a year or so as my sibling has gotten a little older. We have conversations about politics and identity fairly frequently. When I was younger, it just never happened. There was no talk of it. I didn't know what anything meant. But I've started bringing it up, my parents started bringing it up, and we've had some very, very lovely conversations about identity and culture and the experiences of minorities and marginalized groups. My mom especially, when she was younger, she was like a full-blown environmentalist, feminist. She was very involved with politics. Less now that she's older. You get two kids, you get a job, you don't have much time for anything else. My dad in particular, it's been interesting to see the way he's reacted to having constant exposure to queerness in his house. Once again, I've never felt individually discriminated against, but like there was the Netflix show Heartstopper that came out recently that features a gay male couple. My sibling had put it on at some point, and my dad made some sort of comment about it being gross or 11 something, but never so explicitly. My parents are definitely still learning how to approach things carefully. They're both teachers, and my mom is like, “If a student ever comes to me and says they want a different name used or different pronouns, I will always respect that.” It's definitely been really cool to see how they've started adjusting things in the past a little bit. FC: Because your relationship evolved as their understanding of your identity did? ES: Absolutely. When I was 16, I came out as non-binary and bisexual, which I don't identify as anymore, and it was for me a misunderstanding of what I was experiencing. But for a while there, due to several factors that aren't necessarily relevant, we had a very rocky relationship. Part of it was I changed my name, I changed my pronouns, and I wanted to be referred to as differently, and that was really hard for them. I moved out at 17 and started college early, and the distance actually really helped. As of the past year and a half, we've been repairing that, and me being open has definitely been integral to us coming closer together. I can say confidently that now that I'm almost 19, this is the best relationship I've ever had with my parents. I feel comfortable and safe coming to them with anything. It's been really amazing. FC: I think I'm going to go a little bit backwards again, just so that we cover some things. We talked about elementary school. Do you want to talk about junior high and high school? ES: This is where things get interesting. Elementary school, nobody knows what queerness is. Kids maybe have a gay aunt. They maybe see Modern Family once. That's it. They just don't understand. But come middle school, you're starting to get some level of social awareness about the world around you. I literally figured out my final year of elementary school, sixth grade, that I was queer. Going into seventh grade, it felt like I had this huge secret I was keeping 12 from everybody around me. I personally never experienced homophobia from my peers because I was never publicly out. I don't present in a way that you can immediately clock as being queer most of the time, especially back then. I went to school where we wore uniforms so everyone's going to look the same. I never, ever, all the way through high school, had any experiences with homophobia. It just didn't happen because nobody could look at me, nobody could tell, and I didn't tell people I wasn't entirely sure I trusted. I actually had a largely positive experience with being queer in middle and high school. When I was in eighth and ninth grade, I got a really close friend group of other queer kids, many of whom were trans or non-binary, and they were the ones who were experiencing the discrimination. I never felt it, not even in association with them, because people assumed I was a straight friend of a queer friend group, not that I was also queer. I definitely heard stories of some people I knew in my grade bullying and harassing my friends, but I didn't hear about those stories until way after we were done with middle school, just because it wasn't something we wanted to talk about. We wanted to just have our little piece of safety in a world that was trying to break us down, you know? So school itself, I didn't experience much of the discrimination. Where I really felt the majority of the homophobia of my life was from the church and from going to church. It wasn't my parents, but it was every little comment in the sacrament meeting. It was every little piece of, “Marriage is between a man and a woman,” that I read in church doctrine, that I heard from Young Women, that I heard in the lessons, that I heard at activity days. That is what really got me. That was one thing my parents were very much insistent on was that I continued attending church until I was a little bit older. So when I was 14, when I was 15—not so much when I was 16—I was still attending church. I was still 13 attending young women's activities, and so just hearing that day in and day out, that was the only form of discrimination I really experienced was related to the Mormon Church. Most of it wasn't from people themselves being discriminatory, it was from the indoctrination of homophobia that happens to a lot of people. I think most of those same people, if you put them in a different environment, would be incredibly accepting and kind and wonderful people. Some of the best people I've ever met have been Mormon, but because of factors that they couldn't necessarily control and I definitely couldn't control, it just really affected me. Watching General Conference, sitting next to my family, and being told that I was bad and evil: it wasn't those words, but having that understanding that I'm not wanted and I am lesser really was a hard thing for me. FC: What was it like keeping it to yourself? It was a secret during middle school. ES: It was very painful. Not for school specifically, but at home and at church. Sometimes I just wanted to scream out, “This isn't me. I don't belong here.” Whenever I'd walk into a Mormon church, it felt like my skin was on fire just because I felt like I could hear the thoughts of all the people around me just being like, “You don't belong. You don't fit in. We don't want you.” I was never treated that way, but if you brought up any sort of opposition to what they were telling you, if you had any different points against what theirs were, you were immediately struck down. There was no room for discussion; there was no room for being different. You conformed or you were excluded. That was just it. LR: Was there any one thing, or was it just a combination that actually helped you to just be able to finally come out? The reason I'm asking this is you're going to church, you're being someone you're not. That's the only place you don't feel like you can really be yourself, at least that's what I'm hearing you say. So where did the courage come from then, to finally say, “I'm done?” 14 ES: It was the pandemic. It was being stuck inside with my family all the time. I was 16, so at this point, both of them knew I was some level of queer. They knew I liked girls, so it wasn't a shocker. My mental health had tanked; pandemic, everyone was struggling. I had reached a breaking point where I needed them to understand fully what I thought I was and what I identified as. During the pandemic, when I was 16, I identified as non-binary and bisexual, which was different than I had up until that point. Sometime last year I figured out I'm not actually, I'm cisgender and I'm a lesbian, but my mental health was at the point where I couldn't keep anything like that down anymore, and my truth had to be heard. LR: Quick and fast. Where did you go to junior high? ES: Legacy Preparatory Academy all the way, K through 9. I attended one year of high school at Bountiful High, and then I graduated early through like a GED, and Weber since then. LR: So you only went to high school through your sophomore year? ES: Yup. Even then, it was only about halfway through because of mental health issues. I was in and out of school, and then the pandemic happened and that was basically the end of my sophomore year. LR: [To Faith] I'm sorry, I'm on a roll. FC: Keep going. LR: When did you first notice you were having some mental health issues? That's something you have to be able to communicate with your parents about. Were you able to have those conversations with your parents? ES: My mental health issues started a lot earlier than sophomore year. I was struggling with anxiety ever since either eighth or ninth grade. I got mono at school from a drinking fountain or something, and so I was knocked flat with chronic fatigue and severe pain. I was getting sick pretty regularly for like the last half of the school 15 year. I was isolated in my home without wanting to be for six months, and I was super sick. LR: Before we continue, one thing I forgot to mention. If we ask a question that you're not comfortable with, please let us know. You do not have to talk about anything you're not comfortable with. I realize as we're getting into mental health issues, it's kind of dicey, which is interesting, considering what we're talking about. So, seriously, if you're uncomfortable with anything, please, just let us know. But back to what you were saying, sorry. ES: You're good. So I struggled with anxiety and stuff from there on out. It wasn't too bad. I had a therapist for a few years who was unfortunately ineffective for my needs. She was a family and marriage counselor, not so much for individuals. She was great, and a lot of what she taught me I use now, but it wasn't so helpful when I was a little younger. I'm going to keep it very brief for personal reasons and the anonymity of everyone involved. I lost a friend at the beginning of my sophomore year and it was fairly traumatic. I spoke at his funeral. I eulogized him, so it was a very rough time. Due to a couple of experiences I had related to mental health, suicide, and substance abuse issues in my family on both sides, I was already in a fairly precarious state relating to those topics. And so once that happened, I basically spiraled into a hole of anxiety and depression. I was really struggling. I was misdiagnosed with bipolar, also, and I was put on some medication that was ineffective for me, unfortunately. Finishing out COVID, it was just a bad year, so I decided to graduate early. I stopped taking my meds because they were not correct for me anymore. I switched away from my psychiatrist and my therapist, and for a while, until last month even, I had basically been doing self work to help improve my mental health, and it's 16 actually been really effective. I haven't struggled nearly as bad recently as I did then. It was just very unfortunate that I had a poor experience with the mental health system, but I actually signed up for therapy last month to get on a waitlist, so I was very lucky in that I was able to do work on myself. A lot of people don't have that same opportunity because of how their mental health issues present, but for me, I was able to just kind of pull myself out of the pit I was in and work through a lot of stuff on my own. It's a privilege that I'm not mentally ill or experience mental illness in a way that would require extensive treatment and care. That was definitely something, though, that has been a big part of my life and partially related to my queerness. It's just very difficult to exist in a church and society at-large that doesn't want you to exist. FC: How has your relationship changed with yourself as you've worked through your mental issues? ES: So much better. When I was younger, I didn't really have any sense of self. I felt like I didn't have much of a personality or personal identity. I liked the blandest things. I felt like I was a blank slate of a person. But over the past year or two, I've really been fighting and getting better. I've finally discovered a whole bunch of my interests. I feel like I've really bloomed as a person, and I've been able to make some wonderful long-term friends. I've found a job I love. I am doing a major I love. I love makeup; I love fashion; I love video games. There's so many things I have now that are very important to me that I didn't know were important to me when I was a little younger. Definitely part of working through my mental health issues for me was forming a strong sense of identity and a strong sense of self and being able to rely on myself, knowing that I will always be there for me, even if no one else is. It's been a very important relationship in my life, what I have with myself. 17 FC: As you learn more about your interests and what you like and what you don't like, have you learned more about your identity? ES: Yeah, I have. By experimenting with makeup and clothing in particular, that was how I initially figured out that I wasn't like a very neutral, non-binary person. I love feminine things. I love being traditionally feminine. I love makeup. I love wearing skinny jeans and crop tops. Part of that was me figuring out that I can be queer and look however I want. Part of the reason I thought I was non-binary is because I never felt queer enough. I had never felt valid in my identity because all of my friends were transgender, non-binary, masculine, gender-nonconforming, and I thought that I had to fit in. I had to be one of them. It was never any of them pressuring me into this, it was just my own collectivist mindset from being raised in religion, that I needed to be like them. For a while, I had really short hair. I buzzed my head. I had a pixie cut. I wore pretty neutral, masculine clothing, and eventually that just wasn't right, and I could tell it wasn't right. So I went to Dollar Tree and I picked up a bunch of makeup, I bought some feminine clothes, and then I was like, “I think I made a mistake. I think I am very much feminine and a girl.” Part of the reason that I struggled with my gender identity so hard was because of compulsive heterosexuality and being a lesbian. You're always told that you need to be attracted to men, you need to be this, this, and that. My view of lesbians, very wrong, was that most of them were masculine. When I thought of a lesbian, I was thinking of a very butch person with short hair. But when I started looking into queer history, I learned about the wonderful long history of butchfemme relationships, that there's this dynamic between the masculine and feminine energies of lesbianism and of womanhood, that you don't need to align yourself with any sort of anything else. You can just be feminine, you can just be masculine, and you're still a lesbian. It was definitely something that I needed to work through. I 18 didn't feel a traditional or stereotypical connection to womanhood and femininity because I lacked that attraction to men, so I was forcing myself into a very rigid, masculine, non-binary box because I thought that's what I needed to be in order to have my gender identity be valid. I feel very disconnected from a lot of the aspects of traditional womanhood, but I still am a woman. I am very much female and feminine, but I needed to experiment with what I could be and who I could be to figure out that I was still allowed to be a girl. FC: I know that through your discovery of your identity, you were able to kind of change the way you interact with yourself. Has it changed the way you interact with your outside world and those around you? ES: It has. A lot of it has been slow-coming, slow to change. But when I was younger, I was very jaded against lots and lots of people just because of who I thought they would be when I first met them. Mormons, you know. I had been hurt by the church, and so I thought they would hurt me. But as I got older, I realized that judging someone on sight goes against everything I personally believed in. I've stopped caring what people tell me they are at first; I wait for them to reveal who they are. I always assume people have good intentions, and that is true in 99% of cases. I truly believe that no person is beyond redemption. I am very much someone who will stick with my friends through hell. Part of that is realizing that everybody, no matter how horrible they may be—to a certain extent, of course—is like me. We are all human, we all hurt, we all have horrible things in our past and wonderful things in our future. That empathy was definitely key to me becoming a kinder person to myself and others. FC: We kind of talked about your relationship with the LDS church. Has that changed? ES: In some ways. I am still very theologically adverse to what they believe in. I find a lot of their teachings and practices to be harmful and reductive, but as I've gotten 19 older, I've had to take a step back and see that it means a lot to a lot of people. My relationship to the church itself is still very much an adversarial one. I don't like it. I don't agree with the church, but I am willing to accept that it's going to have some presence in my life as long as I live, if I want to maintain relationships with my family, who I love dearly and would not give up over something like this. So as much as I may struggle with its ideologies and the way it affects people, I have basically been forced to come to some sort of acceptance with it, which isn't inherently a negative thing. It's just been a part of repairing relationships with my family. FC: Have you been able to find any safe spaces or communities? ES: I have, absolutely. Ogden has been such a blessing in my life. I've been to a lot of local maker fairs like the Ogden Bizarre, the yART Sale, the Art Walk on 25th, and I've just visited a lot of local queer spaces. Several of the businesses on 25th Street, especially, have pride flags up. Grounds for Coffee has queer safe space stickers all over their buildings. The local art collective, I think on 23rd, has very heavily featured queer creators. There's Lavender Vinyl on 25th, there's the queer archives here at Weber, there's the LGBT Resource Center at Weber. It's a level of acceptance I never thought I'd find. You walk down most streets in Ogden and you're going to find someone existing who you can say, “Hey, you're like me.” There's a lot of visible queerness here that there just isn't in, say, Bountiful, or most of Utah County. The only other place I've felt this accepted was probably San Francisco or Salt Lake City, places that are very explicitly queer. Being able to find that community space in Ogden has been such a boon. I haven't felt alone in the way I used to as a kid. I haven't felt like I needed to keep myself secret. It's brought a lot of peace to just be able to exist and not be so afraid that I'm alone. 20 FC: I know you practically already talked about it, and I'm wondering if I can get more detail on how Northern Utah, Ogden, is different from those other community spaces that you've been in. ES: So I grew up in Salt Lake for a lot of my life, but when I was 11, I moved to Woods Cross in the Bountiful area. Even though it's only 10 minutes north of Salt Lake, it is a total culture shift. It's a lot of young couples, young families, it's older people. There's a big population of Mormons. It's a much more conservative area. Luckily, like I mentioned, I have not experienced too much outward discrimination from other people just because I don't present that way. But I know of one of my friends who lives like 10 minutes down the street, he's transgender and he's gotten harassed by a lot of people. He's been called the f-slur by people at school. He would be targeted by other students. It's more hostile. You go down there and you bite your tongue. You don't want people to know what you are because you're afraid that you're going to get jumped or hate-crimed or something. Now, that's not a worry for me as much, but I can feel the same tension everywhere. You tread lightly. You don't fully show your hand of cards to other people. Being in Ogden, anywhere, it's going to have its dangers, it's going to have its safeties. But that is definitely one of the things in Ogden that I haven't felt so afraid about. There's just so much local community. There's so many spaces where people are brought together on the unifying base of being part of the queer community. It's just insane how much more open you're able to feel. There are definitely things that I'm lucky that I don't feel. It's easier for me to be open as a cisgender lesbian than it is for several of my transgender or gender-nonconforming friends. I have it easier than them, so I hesitate to say that Ogden is safe as a flatout statement, but I definitely think there is a better culture of acceptance here than there is there. 21 FC: What do you think Bountiful or Woods Cross could do to create more safe spaces? ES: Well, for one, there's no openly queer spaces. In Salt Lake City, there are several businesses that are explicitly queer-owned, queer-run and focus on queerness. My favorite one is Under the Umbrella. It's a queer bookstore. It's awesome. You've got those in Ogden, too. You've got several of them. But there is nothing in Bountiful at all that is explicitly queer. If you go to a coffee shop, you're likely to see a couple pride pins on the baristas' aprons, but that's it. There's no spaces that are dedicated to queer kids or to the queer community at large, and so there's nowhere you can go that you're going to have cishet people being exposed to, every day on the street. If there's not a space like that for the local community to see that there is queerness all around them, they're not going to realize that they need to change or that they need to be less bigoted. So definitely there needs to be more queerowned spaces in general, which is made difficult by so many socioeconomic factors and the fact that a lot of the queer community in Utah are black and brown people who are underprivileged at large. There's just nowhere you can be yourself. FC: You talked a lot about how your experience is a lot different from your gender nonconforming and trans friends. What do you think Northern Utah could do to improve their experience? ES: We need more protections against trans discrimination. There is basically nothing anywhere in Utah's legal code that states that you can't discriminate against people based on their gender. Sex? Yes, gender? No, there's nothing. While that's unlikely to happen, there definitely need to be more community-based initiatives on spreading awareness regarding how to interact with gender non-conforming and transgender individuals in a way that respects them and their pronouns and doesn't mislead and increase transphobia. Those initiatives might be as simple as the rainbow flag organization in Salt Lake run by Encircle that will put flags in your 22 ground for you during June. That doesn't really exist in Ogden. You don't have people who are going to come around doing that. Having more just queer-led anything at this point, but specifically for trans and gender-nonconforming folk, it would be nice if there were more spaces for them in particular. Under the Umbrella has like free gender-affirming clothes for transgender individuals. I know that there have been several free clothing closets for the queer community in Salt Lake. So that, once again, is just spaces that you can go and get what you need. It's hard to go out into public and look a way that you don't feel and look a way that can be dangerous for you. I think Weber as a university could stand to have more scholarships and more aid specifically for transgender students. On a legal level, although unlikely to happen, there definitely needs to be more protections against gender-based discrimination and ensured access to transgender health care, but that kind of thing is unlikely to happen just due to the conservative supermajority in Utah, unfortunately. LR: Okay, so this is going to sound like a strange question, especially coming from me, but if you were going to try to explain, especially to an older person like myself and maybe older, the difference between gender and sex. Most people my age, unless they are educated, don't understand the difference. So will you, from your point of view, explain the difference between gender and sex? ES: Sex is biology. Gender is identity. Things that are part of your identity are your religion, your politics, your background—where you grew up—your ethnicity. They are going to be things that you are, not that you are made of. I think one great example is the difference between your ethnicity and your cultural background or your genetics. You can be genetically from wherever you want, but you can still 23 identify with the local area you're brought up in. That's who you are versus what you're made of. Gender, just like all those other things, is something humans have socially constructed to express ourselves. Socially, there's two genders that people commonly understand. There's male and female, and there's a lot of things associated with those. Gender can have biological impacts, the same way sex does. There have been MRI studies showing that the brains of men and women have different aspects to them. You'll find that binary trans people will have the same brains as those other people. Your brain is where your gender is from, and the rest of your body is where your sex is. The place where the person is is your brain. You gotta remember that if your brain is different, you're going to be different, so being transgender isn't just a choice people make. It's an inherent part of their biology, just like your genitals, just like your chromosomes. It's not them making a choice, it's them honoring their bodies. FC: That was one of the most beautiful explanations I've ever heard. Mine's usually just, “One is fluid and one is not.” Is there anything else you want to add about Ogden or safe spaces? ES: I think safe spaces need to be more careful in the way they approach all parts of the community. A lot of safe spaces that are geared towards one group are going to be incredibly discriminatory of others. One thing that I often hear of for queer groups is ‘women and femmes.’ There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a safe space for people who experience patriarchal discrimination based off of feminine presentation, but 'women and femmes' implies you're talking about feminine, nonbinary AFAB people and cisgender women, and a feminine person can be any gender. You have feminine gay men. You have feminine, non-binary people of both biological sexes, and you have feminine cisgender men. But there's masculine, 24 cisgender women, there's masculine everyone. So safe spaces need to be more specific, so they're not discriminating. I know it sounds a little bit backwards, like, “How can you be more specific and not discriminate against more people?” But to be more specific is to say, "This is a group for the people who need it. We're not just excluding people based on random biological differences." Instead of ‘women or femmes,’ your safe space might be for those who are experiencing oppression based off a feminine presentation. Obviously, you'd have to find a better way to word it to put on your fliers to pass out to your LGBT group. FC: But the idea remains. ES: It does. Safe spaces need to be more specific about who they're there for, or they need to be open to everyone. We're dividing our community based on differences that don't even matter. You just have to be careful in the way you word things. There are so many different people. The queer community is not one group. It's not two groups. It's several hundreds of smaller groups that have decided to come together under a large banner. You could easily say gay men and lesbians have very little in common in the way they experience discrimination, but because we both experience discrimination, we come together, you know? We just need to be careful that the language we're using isn't excluding members of our community on arbitrary things. FC: We need more broad inclusivity as well as more specific. ES: Yeah, absolutely. FC: Do you want to add anything else to your story before I start the wrap up questions? ES: I think I need to make it very explicit that I am in a good place. I haven't had the hardest of lives ever, but I've gone through struggles. I have ended up, right now where I am, in an incredible place. I am, for the most part, healthy. I am at a school I love. I am doing astrophysics. I work in a planetarium. I have a wonderful group of 25 diverse and supportive friends. My relationship with my family is improving, and I have my finances, and all my ducks are in a row. Younger me probably wouldn't have believed that I would have had everything I have now. She always thought she would have to sacrifice something to achieve what she wanted. I think in the end, the story is, hard work and empathy pay off. Being a 14-year-old stuck in your parents' house doesn't mean you're going to be an 18-year-old living a hellish life. Not all stories have sad endings. We all have the capability to improve our lives for ourselves. FC: What would you say to your younger self? ES: I would say shut up, do your homework, and give your mom a hug. You will be okay. FC: What would you say to someone who was going through a similar situation as you? ES: When I was younger? I would say, “You are capable of more than you think you are. Just be patient with yourself. What you will do in the future is not necessarily determined by what you are doing in the present, so focus on taking care of yourself, making sure that you are okay, and just being as gentle with yourself as you can. There are no limits to what you can do.” FC: Anything else you want to add to your story? ES: Nope. FC: If we still have funding in 5 to 10 years, which I sure hope we do, would you be willing to be re-interviewed? ES: Yeah. That would be awesome. FC: All right. That's a wrap. Thank you so much for coming. 26