Oral History Program Emory Ogaard Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 July 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Emory Ogaard Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 July 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: Ogaard, Emory, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 5 July 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 Emory Ogaard on July 5, 2022 with Lorrie Rands over Zoom. Emory talks about coming to understand their identity as they navigate their formative years. They talk about the different cultures that shaped their life, and how it eventually led to them coming out as queer. Emory also talks about teaching and how their queerness impacted their career in Davis County, Utah. Also present is Raegan Baird. LR: Today is July 5, 2022. We are with Emory Ogaard, doing an oral history interview for Queering the Archives here at the Stewart Library, Weber State University. I am Lorrie Rands conducting, and Raegan Baird is on the call as well. To begin with, my pronouns are she/her, and I identify as lesbian. RB: I am she/her, and I identify as straight. EO: My pronouns are they/she, and I identify as a non-binary, transfeminine bisexual. LR: Thank you so much, Emory, for your willingness to share and to do this interview. I'm just going to start out with when and where you were born? EO: I was born on November 23, 1993, at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. LR: Did you grow up in Salt Lake? EO: I did not. I lived in Utah until I was about three, and then my parents moved to Arizona. I spent most of my formative years growing up in rural Arizona. LR: You spent the first three years here in Utah. Were your parents going to school? EO: My mother had just finished her bachelor's degree in, I want to say, sociology. My father was finishing out his active duty time in the U.S. Marines. LR: I do understand military life a little bit. Was the move to Arizona a duty station switch, or was he retired? EO: He had finished his service at that point in time, and so it was a transitionary period to civilian life. 1 LR: Let's talk about your family dynamic a little bit. Are you an only child or do you have siblings? EO: I am the oldest of four. I have one brother and two sisters. LR: Okay. Just to have it on the record, what are your parents' names? EO: My parents' names are Judy and Kent. LR: I know you probably don't remember much about being here in Utah those first three years. Talk a little bit about your time in Arizona, your favorite memories of elementary school and growing up in Arizona. EO: It's funny because our perceptions of the past are so filtered by our current experiences. If I were to try to divorce from that a little bit, I would say that at the time, I loved growing up in a rural area. Lots of spending time outdoors. We would spend our summers digging holes and attempting to build treehouses in giant mesquite bushes. It was a time in which family was really close and important because the nearest kids that you could play with would sometimes be 10 minutes away or so. There weren't a lot of kids because the community we lived in was mostly a 5000-people-large retirement community. It just happened to be cheap housing, so that's where my parents ended up. I was very close to my siblings. It came with all the benefits and drawbacks that come from a conservative rural environment. It was very tight knit, but at the same time, very insular in mindset. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? EO: I went to elementary school at a school called Toltec Elementary for the first two years. It was about a 20-minute drive in nearby Eloy, Arizona. I lived in a little tiny place called Arizona City. My fourth-grade year—I skipped the third grade—they opened a new school about five blocks from my house. I attended all throughout the rest of elementary school there. LR: Okay. So you skipped third grade? 2 EO: Yes. When I talk about this, people often take that as some indicator of academic giftedness. It really wasn't. What it was is I grew up in an area of very poor socioeconomic status with a lot of disadvantaged students. I've had the advantages and privileges of a family in which I had parents who were at home, college educated, and who had the time to educate their children. As a result, comparatively, I was doing much better than my peers. To attempt to improve on that academic performance, they decided to move me forward. All it really ended up doing was stunting my social development compared to my peers, but that's a whole ‘nother conversation. LR: That actually kind of makes sense. You were ahead of your peer group, so you were the youngest in the fourth grade. EO: Correct. LR: What were the gender roles you were taught growing up and that you saw? EO: This is a very valid question, and I know exactly what you're asking here. I was raised within the LDS family traditions. Very patriarchal, those traditional JudeoChristian American gender roles, masculine stoicness and female subservience, and a lot of relatively unhealthy ideas about gender separation. There’s this concept of like, man has to be tough, and women are supposed to be nurturing and gentle and soft. As an AMAB person, assigned male at birth, I was expected to fulfill those roles, but never really did a good job at it. I was always very genteel, I guess you can say, very soft spoken. I loved books, and I loved video games because they allowed me to kind of explore new ideas and new worlds. Never really was one for sports or big athleticism. I was never super aggressive. LR: So how did being taught these typical gender roles within the culture you were raised in interact with your family? I hope I'm asking that right. 3 EO: I think I understand what you're asking. Most of my family comfortably conformed to the rules that they were kind of assigned and instructed to. My brother was a star athlete and All-State wrestling champion football player. My sisters are very, very feminine in nature. My mother is very quiet and reconciliatory, tries to play peacemaker. I was always the one who didn't fit in. It makes a lot of sense now, but I was constantly butting heads with my dad. I connected much more closely with my mother. I never really felt comfortable with the roles, from the time I was probably about 17, 18, even before being exposed to new ideas. I had this really weird disconnect with masculinity and didn't understand why men couldn't wear dresses and men couldn't wear makeup. No one ever really understood that in my environment. LR: That kind of leads to my next question. When did you start to realize that you were different and didn't quite fit into what you were being taught? EO: That's a good question. There's the recognition, and then there's the piecing it together thereafter. I had always felt like an underdog, somewhat disconnected from my peers and group, and I couldn't really pin that down. Honestly, it was pretty recent, within the last five, six years that I started to really identify more strongly with the LGBT community. I couldn't quite place why at the time, I just thought that I was a big advocate of supporting marginalized groups and a very good ally. I think as I started to interact more with the queer community, meeting kids who were trans and who were gay, I started to realize that a lot of their experiences matched up with my own. I started to evaluate part of my life that I kept very insular, very unexamined intentionally. Early 2020 was when I finally came out to myself. I'm like, “This is like being authentic and recognizing that I'm bisexual and that gender really doesn't matter to me as much as people's behavior's and actions and energy 4 and vibes. That’s what really matters.” Once that started, the whole floodgates just kind of cracked open. LR: I'm kind of going to stay in your elementary years here for a little bit. EO: Oh, absolutely. LR: Let’s see. You were born in 1993, so you would have been six. I've kind of been asking this of a lot of our interviewees because it's relevant to today. Columbine happened in 1999. Do you have any memories of what it was like in your hometown? EO: Not at that age, no. Later on, I definitely remember learning things about it. But at the time, I have no recollection of that whatsoever at that age. LR: Okay. Skipping a little bit. I'm curious about your memories of 9/11, of that day, of what that felt like for you. EO: It's funny because that one I do actually remember. I would have been in second grade at the time, if I remember right. I remember very vividly coming to school one day, and a couple of the teachers outside of the hall were talking very animatedly about something. They seemed very concerned, and they were just giving off this very upset energy. I remember hearing something about a plane and a crash and like, I had no context, no idea what was happening. That's all I really remember at that time. By the next year, I remember more vividly how that kind of led to the war in Iraq. I remember just being really, really mad at the people who'd done this, to the degree that a fourth grader can understand anything. I would talk to my friends about it. I think at that age, it took about a year for everything to really filter in and understand anything at all. LR: That makes sense. If you look back at your elementary school time, what is one of your favorite memories that just stands out? 5 EO: When it comes to positive memories, I remember playing tag and I loved it. I wasn't very athletic, but I loved running around just having a positive interaction with my friends. I remember we would just get together and we were a little group who played tag every day at recess. It was super low stakes and like no one was ever super serious about it, it was just kind of fun. I remember I loved reading even then, and I would sometimes get in trouble in class because I wouldn't be paying attention. I'd have a book under the desk, just trying to work through the next little book that I'd got. I would read like three or four books a week. I was quite the voracious reader. LR: That's awesome. Moving a little bit forward into junior high, which is everyone's favorite time. Where did you go to junior high? EO: I was still in Arizona at this point in time. I went to junior high at Toltec Middle, which was K through eighth. I know it's a little different here in Utah, with it being seventh through nine instead, especially Davis County. It's funny because the school that I went to was the same school that I had gone to for first and second grade. Then I went to that new school and then immediately came back the year after for fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. Middle school, even though it's in the same location, it was a very different experience in a lot of ways. LR: How was it different? EO: I think it was around that time that I started to recognize that I was different from my peers. I started to really want to hang out with girls more and not necessarily in a starting hormone, attraction kind of way. I just felt way more comfortable around other women. At the time, I just thought it was because I was kind of nerdy and liked books and was a little shy. In hindsight it was that I felt more comfortable around women because that's what I was, a trans woman. I started recognizing a lot more of my friends were girls and that I loved talking more than doing things. I could 6 just sit for hours. I started getting into theater and I actually loved putting on makeup and dressing up. So it's funny, because you think that all these things would click, but no, not at all. LR: Sometimes it takes a while. I know hindsight is funny because you look at it very differently than when you're living it. At the time, did you ever deal with bullying? How did you learn to process through that? EO: I would definitely say that a young Emory did not have the best coping mechanisms. A lot of them were very internalized. They talk about that whole flight or fight; I would just shut down any time I was confronted. I remember very distinctly, and this is such a weird thing to remember, I was in my youth group and there was this kid. I don't know to this day what his problem was, but he just did not like me for some reason. He decided to pick a fight with me. He started this altercation, and I think he punched me, and I just sat down said, "If I just sit here, someone bigger will come and stop this." They did because there were bigger kids who actually did like me. But to this day, I'm like, “That was such an odd reaction.” I didn’t think to run away; I didn’t think to fight back. I just thought, “If I stop, someone else will come and stop this,” because I just couldn't do anything. LR: All right. Middle school was through eighth? EO: It was through eighth. Ninth through twelfth was high school. LR: You said you started doing theater in junior high? EO: Around my eighth-grade year. LR: Kind of the same question as with elementary, is there a favorite memory you have of that time that stands out? EO: Several, actually. We were doing a rendition of Romeo and Juliet, and of course, I was in a masculine role because that's what you were going to get assigned. I remember sitting there hanging out backstage with all the other girls in the cast. We 7 were just sitting in a circle and talking and chatting and I just had this sense of belonging and this feeling of connection. At the time, I just thought, “I have friends who understand me.” Later on, it very much was like, “Oh, that was kind of a little taste of what being one of the girls was like.” I remember walking to my friend's house in the middle of the summer. It was blazing hot. It was like a 45-minute walk to my friend's house, and it started raining. Usually most people do not appreciate getting caught in the rain, but it's in Arizona and it was just like the best feeling ever. It was just a really calm, peaceful feeling. A lot of my memories are like that. Not your traditional memories of junior high experiences that most people associate, but just these quiet little moments of peace. I don't think I had a lot of those as a kid. LR: During this time, were you ever able to talk with anyone, or even express what you were feeling? Did you have any outlet at all? EO: None whatsoever. I had no context or anything at that time because I had never been exposed to any ideas of queerdom at all. The first memory I have of even knowing that gay people existed was my freshman year of high school because I had a gay choir teacher. Mr. Forsythe. Sweetest man. We hate to play into the stereotypes, but he was very flamboyant, queen kind of energy. I think it was a bit of a shock for me because I had no context for this, and I really had no idea how to process it. LR: That makes sense. Speaking of high school, where did you go to high school? EO: I went to high school my freshmen, sophomore, junior year at Casa Grande Union High School, in Casa Grande, Arizona. It was about a 35-minute bus ride, ‘cause there was no high school in Arizona City. Everyone who lived in Arizona City went to Casa Grande Union, and so my friendships were strongly based on people I knew in school. You didn’t really hang out with people after school unless you were 8 doing some kind of after school activity, because like they lived 30 minutes away by car. LR: Right. So you spent your first three years at Casa Grande Union, and then your senior year, you were somewhere else? EO: I still don't understand the full circumstances, but my senior year, my dad had been kind of pushed to an early retirement with the police department he was working with. We moved to central Idaho my senior year. Place called Mountain Home, Idaho. So we started in Utah and then just kind of hopped around the edges, above and below it, for the next two decades. LR: So back in Arizona, those first three years of high school, you've hit puberty. Talk about your experiences of just what it was like to figure yourself out. I realize you were a kid and it's hard to look at these experiences without looking at where you are now. Did you start to date, and what was that like if you did? EO: I did start to date and I was terrible at it. It's hard to explain, partially because we have to keep it in context here. I was developed, mentally, a year behind everyone in my age group. As a teacher and as educators, I'm sure you can appreciate there's a huge difference between a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old, or a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old. Developmentally, there's so much going on in your brain at that point in time. I could never connect well with my peers, but I had this deep desire to connect with people in my group, as opposed to people my age. I needed to show that I was mature. I was really awkward, and so my dating experiences kind of reflected that. I never had a relationship in high school that lasted. I think the longest was like three months. For high school, that's not a terribly short relationship, I suppose, but I had no idea how to relate to anyone. I couldn't relate to the men in my life because I didn't feel like them. I couldn't relate to the women in my life because I 9 was attracted to them, but I also really connected with them. I was just a creation unto my own. LR: That makes sense. Moving on, unless there's an experience you want to share in high school that's just standing out? EO: I don't think so. LR: I'm curious what it was like to move to Mountain Home. Was it culturally different? And was it hard to connect, especially your last year of high school? EO: You would think so, but surprisingly, it was a very formative experience for me. I went from this community that was 5,000 people, retirement, middle of nowhere, to a proper town of 20,000 people, where the high school was actually located in the same town. I could walk to school. I had friends who lived a couple of blocks away from me. We could walk and hang out. Moving to Idaho your senior year, you have to make friends. No one wants to be alone in their senior year. I just started making friends with people who had similar interests, regardless of religious affiliations. A lot of walls broke down there. The circumstances kind of pushed me outside of my comfort zone. As a result, I interacted with people with way different ideas than I had my freshman, sophomore, junior year. LR: Were you still doing theater? EO: Actually, at this point in time, I had kind of started to transition. My junior year, right before we moved, I had gotten into a robotics team. Oddly enough, you'd think building robots is what we consider a traditionally masculine role, at least according to our society. That team was 50/50 and I spent almost all my time with the other women on that team. So when I got to this new high school, I wasn't interested in theater anymore. Their theater program was way smaller than the school I went to, ‘cause even though I moved to a larger community compared to where I was living, 10 my high school in my senior year was much smaller. I'd gone from a school of four thousand students to like twelve hundred. It just didn't feel the same. There was no catwalk for me to work on; there was no counterweight system. All the tech stuff that I loved in theater, all the grandiose performance stuff, the green rooms, all that stuff was gone. It felt like a step backwards. I didn't do any events or activities or clubs my senior year. I just hung out with friends and had a good time. LR: With more people, new ideas, was it easier to be yourself in Mountain Home? EO: Exceptionally, yes. I got to reinvent myself once I got there. No one had any preconceived notions of me, no one had known me years and years and years. Say what you want about rural communities being similar. Arizona and Idaho could've been different planets as far as that's concerned, because in Arizona, all my friends were incredibly sarcastic. You show your friends you care by teasing them and making fun of them. That just never worked for me, I was incredibly sensitive. In Mountain Home in Idaho, everyone was just so damn polite and it was wonderful. My friends respected me, and I never got made fun of enjoying more girly music or girly activities. I did ballet in high school as part of theater and I got mercilessly mocked for it in Arizona. When I told people that I did it in Idaho—I didn't end up doing it because they didn't have a program—they were impressed. They thought it was cool. They thought it was this interesting, fascinating thing, and not something to be mocked or teased about. LR: I like that. As you're getting closer to graduation, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do after? Were you thinking about college? What was going through your head at that time? EO: There were two warring ideas. I knew that I loved teaching, I loved the idea of teaching. I wanted to be an English teacher or a Social Studies teacher. But at the same point in time, I was still at this time stuck in a lot of those traditional gender 11 role ideas of being the male provider. I was like, “I can't provide for my family on that.” What I ended up going to college for was electrical engineering, which lasted all of about one semester before I realized my brain was not well equipped to the ideas of theory and math. LR: This idea of being a teacher, was it based on a specific teacher you had? What kind of shaped that idea? EO: I think a lot of it was that teachers were the positive adult role models in my life. I have several teachers I could think of who were just incredibly enthusiastic individuals who cared about me. Outside of giving my best, they didn't really care who I was. That's because good teachers treat all their students with respect, dignity and kindness. Living in an environment in which people treated you with dignity, kindness and respect only if you fit the role they expected for you to have, an adult who did that for you regardless was huge. LR: Where did you end up going to college? EO: I ended up going to Brigham Young University, Idaho. A large reason for that was it had less to do with the religious elements of it as a Mormon, and more to do with the cost. My family was always lower middle class at best. My parents had zero ability to contribute to my education. They told me, “Get scholarships, go to a good school, but go to one that you can afford.” The only school that I was going to be able to do effectively was one of the church schools. I didn't get into Provo. There was definitely a lot of bitterness there because the one thing that I really felt I had going for me as a kid was my intelligence. I wasn't athletic, I didn't consider myself particularly good looking. But I was very smart; I considered myself a sharp kid. It was a very big blow to my ego to not get accepted to the, ‘Good BYU,’ as I saw it at the time. I had to go to the budget BYU. 12 LR: Quick question that doesn't really relate to college, but growing up in an LDS environment and LDS culture, were you encouraged to serve a mission? EO: I was, and I did. LR: Okay. Are you comfortable talking about that? EO: Yes. I will say to anyone who ends up reading this archive, it's not going to be nice things about a mission, but it was very formative, at least in some ways. I served from 2013 to 2015 in the country called Sweden. There was only one mission there, so it was the Stockholm, Sweden mission. I learned fluent Swedish. I lived in like ten to fifteen different cities. It was the best experience for setting up my future life, in terms of being able to remove myself from the church, accept my queerness, and divorce myself from a lot of my old conservative ideas and values, while simultaneously being one of most emotionally and mentally traumatizing times in my life. LR: Emotionally traumatizing, how so? EO: There's the inherent trauma that goes with a mission. If you think about it, the church is really good at what it does. It isolates you from your established home community, limits contact with that group usually to once a week via email, at least at the time. It connects you with someone who you are with 24/7, allowing you effectively no time for self-reflection or ability to truly be alone. It makes it so that you have to rely entirely on the religious structure for everything: your income, your medical care, your emotional and social well-being. Even determining where you live and how long you live there is controlled entirely by the church. So you come to depend on it. It puts you in an environment in which most of your interactions with people outside of your religion are either going to be negative, when they reject your beliefs, or positive, because they accept them and join your community. They will constantly keep you moving from location to location, so you never have time to 13 tie roots down between any outside influences. The whole while, they're going to be pushing that your worthiness as an individual is directly tied to, A: your adherence to religious orthodoxy, and B: your ability to convince other people to join that. It was incredibly numbers-based on my mission. Your worth as a human was your ability to proselyte. A good missionary was a missionary who had success. A missionary who didn't have success clearly had something going on. LR: That's interesting. So going to Sweden, how was that culturally for you? Was that a culture shock? Did you fit in well? EO: It was like going home to a place I’d never known was home. The Swedish people are, in my estimation, some of the best human beings we will ever meet. They are quiet and dignified; their cultural values, at least in my experience, is done largely around the desire to not harm or negatively affect those around you. There's this big idea in Sweden of like, one of the worst things you could do is disturb another person. You could sit on a bus packed with people and outside of the sound of the motor, it would be dead silent. It was a place where respecting differences of ideas was important because Sweden's a country that accepts massive amounts of refugees. You have people from Peru, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Syria, just commonplace throughout. Even within the members of the LDS Church, it was a much more liberal place. I had this idea that the church was correct, and therefore, if most people in the church were conservative, growing up in rural Arizona and Idaho, then conservatism was correct. To meet liberal Mormons completely shattered that worldview of like, you have to endorse all these cultural things that are attached to the LDS Church in America, but aren’t religiously associated. It completely shattered my worldview. 14 LR: That's so interesting. As you look back now, how did those experiences shape you as you moved forward in your life? EO: It gave me the freedom to really start evaluating ideas on their own face, because I recognize that there were these deeply held tenets that I believed to be true within the church. There was all this room for variance of personal opinion. Suddenly I had the ability to still be a ‘good Mormon’ and still support taxing the rich, or gender equality, or equality within the LGBT community. I know now why I connected so deeply with that, but at the time it just made sense to me. From the time I was probably about 18 or 19, queer equality just was logical. But everyone in my life was very much in disagreement with that, and I could not understand why. I'm like, “They’re not Mormon, they could do whatever the hell they want, who cares?” From that point on, when I got back from Sweden, I just started becoming more authentically me. LR: Did you do a little college before your mission? EO: I did one year before. LR: You said you only did a semester of electrical engineering before you realized it was not for you. What did your major shift to after that? EO: I did a semester, and then I shifted to undeclared. I just did general studies for a semester, and then went on my mission. It was as I was coming home that I realized, money doesn't matter. I'd rather be doing what I'm happy with than making a ton of money. So I decided to go into history education. LR: Okay. Did you stay at BYU, Idaho? EO: I did. I stayed the entire four years at BYU Idaho. Let's be honest, once it gets more than a year there, transferring, you lose so many credits. 15 LR: It's true. So having now had this experience of your mission, your eyes open to new things and learning more about yourself, what was that like going back to BYU Idaho? How did you integrate all those new things into who you were? EO: I think part of it was I started diving heavily into understanding history because I had my big worldviews questioned. I kind of wanted to see, “What else have I always been told that just isn't true?” As a fellow student and historian, you can appreciate just how much the American narrative of our nation's history is often whitewashed, and the LDS church's history is often whitewashed. Pretty quickly within my study of history, I started realizing just how messed up a lot of things were. It just furthers those cracks. Around this time, I started also being a lot more vocal about my opinions and beliefs and more willing to disagree with people on things. We have to keep in mind, this was 2016, and I was relatively young. I remember I bought a Soviet era flag just to tick off my neighbors, who were like those flag flying, flag-in-the-window kind of people. I was like, “Fine, I'm going to throw a communist flag up there and we'll see how you react.” I became very defiant. I kind of took it upon myself to be like, “You know what? I wish people had challenged my world views earlier, so I've just got to do that for other people.” I hate to say it, but I definitely took the attitude of, “I'm going to play devil's advocate,” a little bit. LR: That's just interesting. I know you said you didn't really come out to yourself ‘til 2020, but were there any experiences at BYU Idaho that helped lead you and guide you to that moment where you felt like you could be authentic with yourself? EO: Oh, very much. I think one of the formative ones was I had the opportunity within my history classes to meet a man by the name of Randy Hoffman. Great man. He works as an archival historian here in Utah, doing a lot of documentation work with sodomy laws and whatnot in the state. I want to say he was my first queer friend, 16 honestly, the first openly out queer friend I had. We would talk ad nauseum about history and about education. We just connected very well. I felt incredibly comfortable and safe around him in a way that I just didn't understand at the time. Not only did it kind of help break what remaining weird feelings that had been kind of taught to me about gay people and queer people, but I started telling my friends that because it connected so well with them. I remember saying that I was- I find this hilarious to this day. “I was the gayest straight man they knew,” is what I started telling people which was very much inaccurate because I’m very much not straight, not a man. I started really going heavily into queer advocacy after meeting him because he would talk about his experiences and like what it was like finding that balance between being queer and being Mormon. I was like, “This is really messed up. This isn't right.” From there, I remember wishing that I was gay because I still considered myself a man. At that point in time, this was probably 2017, I had never heard or actually interacted with trans identities or non-binary identities. All I knew was I was a “man”, and that I was way more attracted to women, and I wasn't allowing myself at the time to feel otherwise. I was still in the closet enough that I wasn’t considering being attracted to men. Now that I look in hindsight, there were definitely some signs. LR: So you graduated from BYU Idaho in 2019? EO: Late 2017. LR: I know you've been teaching for a couple of years. Did you immediately just say, “Okay, I'm going to start teaching, and this is where I'm going to teach.” How did that evolve? EO: I did my student teaching here in Utah, at Copper Hills High School down in the West Jordan area. It's one of those things where like the universe just kind of helps 17 you out a little bit. My mentor teacher was a married lesbian, Amy Brown. She's brilliant and she was funny and just incredibly formative, and it was such a great experience working with her. From there I started looking for teaching jobs in Utah, and the first place that offered me a job, I took it. It was a junior high in Kaysville, Utah, and this is where the Davis County part of things start coming in. Centennial Junior High School, West Kaysville. LR: Okay. So this would have been about 2018. EO: I started the 2018-2019 school year. LR: When was your first interaction with a trans person? EO: 2018, actually that same year I joined a Dungeons & Dragons Group, and our Dungeon Master, the facilitator, was someone who would later come out as a trans woman by the name of Emily. I got to know Emily before she had transitioned, and so I was kind of there for that whole process. It just felt as natural as could be when Emily came out and asked that we use she/her pronouns and call her Emily. It felt right in a way that I couldn't describe. It still took me a couple of years after that to recognize that was me. At the time, I was like, “God, that sounds great that you can just do that.” LR: So, I actually understand the roleplaying universe a little bit. Both of my children are heavily into it. How long have you been doing Dungeons & Dragons? EO: I've been doing tabletop role playing games since early 2016. LR: Tabletop games, okay. EO: It's a tabletop role-playing game. You got video game role-playing too. LR: For those who don't understand, because there are a lot of people who don't, tabletop role playing is different from video games. That's what I'm accustomed to seeing- tabletop, just having character sheets. 18 EO: Tabletop role playing is the character sheet. I differentiate, because you got what's called an RPG, or a role-playing game. A lot of those are computer games where the options are pre-scripted, and you have branching on a path within a narrative. Whereas with pen and paper, character-based tabletop role-playing games, within the bounds of the world that your DM creates, choices are infinite. LR: Right. I was envisioning the little miniatures. EO: You can use, but those you don't have to. It's the same game either way. Some people like to do it imaginary; some people like a physical representation of things. LR: Okay, so that's the difference. I've only seen and interacted with the imaginary, not the physical. If you don't understand the world of Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying, it's interesting to learn about it. EO: I have a feeling that your next question is probably going to be how these interacted with my formative years, growing up and developing. In terms of as an adult and a queer person, it's a pretty common question because a lot of queer people get into roleplaying games as a way to explore. One of the things about roleplaying is that it's a safe space for you to explore different identities or perspectives or ways of being in a very comfortable environment, without judgment. It's funny, because after I came out to my brother, he said to me, "Oh yeah, I've known for years." I'm like, “How? I haven't known for years.” He's like, "Well, you've been playing a bisexual character for like two years now. Most straight people don't do that." It was all playing as a non-binary character, playing as more feminine roles or soft, gentle people. I did each of these things before I came out to myself or my community. It was a safe place for me to explore. LR: Do you meet physically with the group or would you meet online? 19 EO: I've been participating in several groups. The longest has been going for about four years now, and that one's been in person about once every two weeks for about four years now. I've also had a couple online groups as well that have been going for a couple of years. LR: That's really cool. So you start working at Centennial Junior High, in the 2018-2019 school year. You mentioned earlier that you didn't come out to yourself ‘til 2020. I'm curious how that first year was like for you, because you're still coming into your own identity and acceptance of who you are. What was that first year like in comparison to the next year? EO: It's funny. I kind of bumped heads with people more my first year than my second or third, once I had actually come out. I had literally just worked with a queer educator for my student teaching experience and she kind of helped ingrain this idea to create inclusive classrooms. One of the first things I did when I got my classroom was put up inclusive classroom posters. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the GLSEN posters. There was this poster that says “All students in this classroom have the right to an equal and equitable education, including gay, bisexual, and trans students.” She had a list of like, “You are all welcome and safe here.” It was very explicitly stating, “Queer students are safe here.” I got asked by the school board within the first month to take that down. Their legal justification was that it was endorsing a specific group that was not authorized by the school district, GLSEN, which is an advocacy group for queer youth. That was their justification because they knew they couldn't ask me to take it down legally or in other contexts. I had parents who complained about this to both my principal and myself. I had a parent who said, and I quote, "If they could put that up, they have to put up a picture of a temple as well.” In their mind, I was endorsing something that was in direct opposition to the LDS faith, and we have to be 20 inclusive of all views. If I was going to supposedly endorse one view, I had to endorse its opposite, which is very telling as well, that in this parent’s mind, the opposite of queer inclusiveness was the LDS Church. LR: Wow. That's kind of deep. It's interesting that you had more opposition before you were authentic with yourself than after. EO: At least in the beginning, I will say, because I definitely want this documented in this archive. I changed my tactics. I just put up a sign that was rainbow-colored and said that ‘All students are welcome.’ I dialed back what I said. That year, I had no less than five or six students who I didn't teach–I was teaching seventh grade. These were eighth graders or ninth graders–who just would consistently come by my room and talk about their days. None of them ever came out to me while they were at junior high. There was a need for that, and no one else was really intentionally providing it at that school at the time. LR: Instead of being obvious, you took a more behind approach to let everyone know this is a safe space. EO: It was definitely implied because it was very clearly a rainbow sign. It said, “We accept all sexes, all religions, all classes,” all these things, but it was in a rainbow. I put it up, but my principal asked me to take down the first poster. My principal, this whole time, had been amazing, in my corner every time, and hamstrung by the district in terms of what they had to enforce. I told her, “Okay, I'll take that down, but I'm going to put this up.” I would challenge the district to try to make me take this down. I would love them to try to explain why I would have to take it down. LR: After your first year, you begin the 2019-2020 year. Did you start to be authentic after COVID, or before? EO: I had started to come out to myself in mid-2019, but it was a very inward kind of battle. I started to see these guys who were really cute, but there was a lot of 21 mental disconnect, and so I wasn't quite accepting it yet. I was like, “It's funny that other people are gay, but that's not me.” I was on my way out of the LDS church by this point in time, largely because of their treatment of queer individuals, because, again, I was a Really Good Ally™. It was actually around the pandemic; once that hit, church got shut down, it went to Zoom calls. I was not interacting with other people there. All societal pressures just disappeared in that timeframe, so I had the ability to distance myself from the church. I had the ability to explore my own thoughts and feelings away from prying eyes. Once I was no longer under the pressure to try to fit in, I realized, “Yeah, I’m bi and gender non-conforming.” I hadn't quite got to the non-binary steps or the trans steps yet. For years at this point in time, I'd been a huge advocate for breaking traditional gender roles. “Men should be able to wear dresses, men should be able to wear makeup. If I want to wear a dress, I should be able to wear a dress. I should be able to wear a skirt. This is dumb.” Once I accepted I was bi and queer, I was like, “Okay, I want to start doing this stuff.” The first thing I did, and this was definitely a gentle, soft move: I went and bought nail polish, and started wearing nail polish regularly. LR: I'm going to come back to that. But I'm curious, as an educator, what the pandemic was like for you to go from in-person lessons, to immediately having to teach online for over a year. EO: It was interesting. We ended up shutting down in late March, Davis County School District. We really only had two months of that first year of classes left. It was easy in a way that I'm not happy with now, because what the district had set as an expectation was, “Have office hour availabilities and have a certain number of hours’ worth of content for students to work on each week for your content area.” It 22 was very easy for me. I created a couple of lessons with video instructions and whatnot, and it basically became like an asynchronous online class. Students didn't have to attend classes. Grading was easy. I could literally create the assignment at one in the morning, submit it and sleep in, and grade assignments at whatever time. In hindsight, it was horrible for these students' education to be dropped suddenly into this isolated, supportless system where they had to take the impetus to reach out for help if they needed it. It was very stressful, because we all remember what the beginning of the pandemic was like. It was very traumatizing and very confusing. There was still a lot of panic as a teacher, but my workload decreased drastically, and I tried to be very creative and make sure that I was engaging my students. I did feel that disconnect between me and the reason why I loved teaching, which was providing opportunities for students and helping them. LR: Having all this time now for self-reflection, not having to deal with society telling you what you should and shouldn't do, when during this time did it just click that, “I'm a trans woman, and it's okay?” EO: It's funny because it's still such an ongoing journey. I'm sure you hear this all the time. I think it was late 2020. As part of my D&D roleplaying experience, I followed a couple celebrities within the environment, one of them being a man by the name of Matthew Mercer. Anyone who's ever heard of Critical Role, it’s a digital streaming group of voice actors who would get together and play Dungeons and Dragons together. It was very popular at the time. He had sent out a tweet about this collective of DJs known as Bootie Mashup who were streaming on the streaming service called Twitch. I thought, “This seems interesting.” So I hopped on and found that I loved being able to hop into and listen to these DJs. They had this Zoom call where people could go into the Zoom and dance on camera as the Dance 23 Commander Disco. It was like being at a club in your room by yourself with a bunch of other people. One of the things I loved about and still love about this community, the Dance Commander Disco, is it's incredibly queer with a lot of gender nonconforming people, a lot of trans people, a lot of non-binary people. One of the first things I remember is there was this male-identified cis man who was wearing a skirt. I was like, “Yes, this is what I'm talking about.” Everyone was encouraging him and supporting him in the chat and it was so enthusiastic. That'd been the thing that had held me back; I was terrified of how people would react to me and that I would be just ostracized from my community. The next week I went on Amazon. I bought a skirt. I wore that and it felt right. “I was like, “This is more than just wanting to be a guy wearing a skirt.” From there I said, “Okay, the gender binary is nonsense. I'm non-binary.” Once I allowed myself to start thinking about that, dysphoria started occurring more frequently, things that I hadn't been able to label as dysphoria. Like the fact that when working out, I refused to gain muscle mass. I would focus on anything that kept me toned but not buff because I hated the idea of being like a big buff person. That was dysphoria, but I just didn't realize it at the time. All the pieces started connecting, and I was like, “Okay, I need to start looking at hormones. I need to start looking at transitioning.” I started to feel uncomfortable with my voice, and so I started working on increasing pitch and tone. Eventually I just kind of realized that the binary is still nonsense. I don't think I'll ever identify as a binary trans woman. I'm still not binary transfem, but the body that I have is not the body that I want or the body that I feel is right for me. I started medically transitioning about three months ago. That part is very recent, and I've been socially transitioned for almost a year. 24 LR: Going back into the in-person classroom environment. Having begun this outward transition, how accepting was the school of that? EO: My principal was amazing. My principal was actually one of the first people outside of my friend group who I came out to. We were in her office having a conversation about something, and she made a comment, something along the line of, “You know, as a white cis man, you understand?” Without thinking, I just said, "Well, you're right on one of the two." That's how I came out to my principal. She was in my corner from day one. She immediately turned on a dime. “Wait, are you not?” and asked my pronouns, asked if I was changing my identity, how I wanted to be known. I asked her if I could come out to the staff that following school year. This was the end of the 2021 school year that I came out to her, and then she helped me come out to the general school community. This last school year, the 2021- 2022 school year, I changed my honorific to Zr. Ogaard. My pronouns were they/them and I only responded to they/them. I explained to my fellow coworkers what that meant and how they should interact with students who have questions about that. But I was very limited in what I could do because the district was much less supportive. There are a couple of people whose names I want to make sure are not thrown under any buses here. Bianca Mittendorf, the Title IX specialist who was on equality and inclusion, did everything she could to make sure that she stood up for me. She is an incredible woman, but I have a feeling that her hands were tied in a lot of ways as well. One of the things that to this day I still have a lot of bitterness about is that Davis School District told me that I was allowed to explain to my students what my pronouns were, but I was not allowed to explain to them why I used those pronouns. I was not allowed to help students because that was political, which actually created a lot of problems for me when I was that age and in the 25 environment I grew up in. Most of these students, if they weren't queer themselves or questioning themselves, had very little interaction with queer identities or with gender nonconformity. They didn't understand why. I had transferred to teaching ninth grade at this time. I'd had most of these kids as seventh graders, and they met me under a very different name and identity. They didn't understand why now I used they/them and they didn't understand what that meant. I had students who weren't opposed, they were just confused, and I wasn't allowed to explain to them why. It made the transition for them and me much more difficult and much more painful. LR: Yeah, it seems like it. In essence, your hands were tied. You couldn't answer any questions. Accept it, but don't ask questions. EO: It was very much like, ‘Don't ask, don't tell.’ The district also, within the first year– It might have been coincidence, but it felt very targeted that it was around the same time that I was transitioning. I was known for wearing a pride flag pin on my lanyard as a way to show who I was and solidarity for fellow queer students. Within two months of this, the district said we couldn't wear pride pins anymore. We weren't allowed to wear the pride flag or have the pride flag in our classroom. I had a lot of students who were very good. A lot of them struggled; most students, it took about two-thirds of the school year for them to actually fully use my pronouns, and it took a lot of correcting. But there are a couple students who– and there's no easy way to say this—they actively made my life hell. It wasn't so much them as much as their parents. Obviously, for legal reasons and for privacy reasons, I'm not going to name any names, but there was one circumstance in particular that stands out to me. As a transfem individual, I knew that my students would be more easy to accept me if they saw me in gender nonconforming roles. That meant dress and outfits because I felt like I could show them that, “No, I'm not 26 the same person I was before. Being non-binary means that I don't conform to traditional gender roles.” I thought it might help them realize what this meant. I wasn't allowed to explain to them what non-binary was, what gender roles were, any of that. I wore a skirt to work. A very conservative, we're talking pencil skirt with leggings, sensible shoes, and a very understated blouse. I had a student who surreptitiously took pictures of me during class and then sent it to their parents, who then posted on conservative Facebook groups, where parents mocked me and doxxed me. For those who might not know, doxxing means essentially telling my information to people so they know where to find me. They were careful because there's legal protections around doxxing. They didn't use my name, and they didn't state like where I lived, but they said what school I worked at, they said what grade I taught, they said what subject area I taught. This is around the same time, 2021, where these trans bills started popping up, and trans women are in the news more and trans assaults are up. I felt very threatened. This wasn't a small thing. The teachers union, unbeknownst to me, reached out and said, "Hey, if you run into legal troubles because of this, let us know. We have your back." We had to do an official investigation with the school district as to who had done this and what was going to happen. It was this massive thing and honestly, it broke me a little. I stopped dressing and presenting the way I wanted to. I still kept my pronouns and honorific, but I discovered that within West Kaysville, there were limits as to what they would accept in a queer person. I had crossed that line, and the repercussions would be dire. LR: This might not be a question you can answer, but did you have parents pull their students from the classroom? EO: Yes, I did. Several. 27 LR: Okay. I’m sorry. That hurts my soul. EO: It's so very traumatizing. As a teacher, I think it's one of the hardest things for me. I hold no ill will or malice towards those students, because some of those students who were removed from my class were honestly amazing, wonderful kids and incredibly accepting. Kids are so much more understanding about these things than adults are. It's very true that hatred is taught, not inherent. LR: I believe that, too. Now that we've ended the 2022 school year, this is really fresh. I'm extremely grateful for your willingness to share this because it's relevant. Watching my oldest transition and seeing his story reflected in your own, it's just amazing to me how it all just kind of fits. As you look back on the last few years and learning to be authentic, having all this opposition to being yourself, how have you found ways to take care of you? To just be okay with you? EO: A lot of it is therapy and seeking professional assistance, and relying on historical narratives to remind myself of how progress is achieved. I like to consider myself a woman in the mold of Marsha P. Johnson. She was not afraid to go to jail for her beliefs, to risk her life for her beliefs. Recognize that authentic life is better than a safe one. I don't take unnecessary risks. I try to be smart in my decisions, but I live each day recognizing that length of life is not as important as quality of life. It is better to live an authentic life and pave for others than it is to live a safe one, because we do not live in safe times as queer people. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It may be safer than other times or other places, but it is not safe. None of us have the energy to riot and rebel every day. But existence is resistance, and that's the motto that I try to live by these days. LR: Wow. Thank you. Raegan, do you have any questions? I kind of just forgot to ask. RB: No, I'm good. [To Emory] I loved everything you've said. 28 LR: Thanks, Raegan. All right, so I have two more questions. Before I ask, is there anything else you'd like to add before I ask my final two questions? EO: Yes, actually, there is. Throughout my time as an educator–and I will take record, I am no longer an educator with Davis School District. I decided this would be my last year. I carried the torch as long as I could. I will be going to do my grad program at the University of Utah in US History starting this year, so that I can teach other people to carry the torch a little further. But in my time as an educator at Davis School District, one of the things that kept me going was the knowledge that I did help students there, students who needed it. One of the first pieces of advice I received as a teacher was, “Anytime a student writes a note to you, thanking you for anything, document it and keep it. Those are what will get you through the hard times.” I have several letters from students thanking me specifically for my representation as a queer-positive role model in their lives. There's one in particular where a student who had moved onto high school emailed me, thanking me for coming out, even after the time they had left. They said something along the lines of, “I had always known there was something special about you in the way that you treated people like me. Now I understand that there are people like you out there. I have a sister at your school, and she hasn't come out to anyone, but she walks by your window every day and she feels safer because you're there.” It was very hard leaving Davis School District for me. I wonder if there will be anyone once I'm gone to do that for those students. It's hard not feeling like you've abandoned them, but that's part of the reality of being a queer educator in Davis School District. Some areas and some places might be ready for queer teachers, but there's still a lot that aren't. I only hope that the next queer teacher who stands up at that school and in that district has a little bit of a better time than I did within 29 the community, so that they can make it maybe one year longer than I did. Just in time for the next queer educator to come and make it just a year longer than they did, until eventually that community's safe enough for someone to stick around. Not just for our own sake, but for our students’ sake. LR: Thank you for sharing that. You already answered my question, but I'm going to ask it still because you might have another thing to say. How does your experience here in Northern Utah within the queer community compare to other places you've lived? EO: Northern Utah and Utah is an interesting dichotomy. The number of people in vocal opposition is thankfully fewer than other places. Blatant homophobia was much more frequent in Idaho and Arizona, in my experiences. The queer community is stronger here because there are so many mutual things that we have to bond through. Many of us have the same religious traumas and experiences there, and a lot of us have lost family and had to create new ones as a result. But I would not say that Utah, and Northern Utah in particular, is a healthier place to be a queer person. The harm here is silent and pervasive in the sense that it's easy to dismiss someone with blatant homophobia, transphobia, or bigotry. It's the quiet dismissals that hurt, people who actively promise that they are our friends and care about us and love us and then vote to take away our rights, and call our causes ‘political’ or ‘corrupting’. Those are the things that really hurt, because when someone says they're your friend, then treats you like an enemy, they could make you look like the bad guy when you respond negatively. LR: My last question, you also kind of answered, but I want to give you another opportunity to build upon it. Talking to yourself as a young queer person, not understanding, what advice would you give that person from where you are today? EO: If I were to give advice to myself or any other queer youth, I would say, “In those moments when you feel angry, hurt and abandoned, the best revenge is living. Live 30 safe, authentic, and proud. It is not your fight to be the poster child or mascot for queerdom. Do what you can, but do it for you. There are no promises that it will get better, but there are promises that you will find people who will make it better. Every queer person who lives in Utah is a spit in the eye to the people who don't want us here.” LR: Thank you so much, Emory, for your words and your time. I'm extremely appreciative of everything that you've said. EO: Absolutely. 31