Indiana Public Broadcasting spoke with transgender Hoosiers in their 50s, 60s and 70s about growing up and living in Indiana during a period of social transition. (IPBS file photo)
Jeanne Smith, 72, grew up Peru, Ind., long before sex and gender were discussed in public. By the time Smith was 5, she knew she was different. But there was no word for what she was and nobody with whom she could share her experience.
“You felt alone, you felt like you were the only person in the world. And shame,” Smith said, “Even though I was never caught and never told to be shameful, the society told you that.”
Rachael Jones, 64, came in age of Brown County and became a Mennonite at 11. But she says she knew she was transgender from her earliest memories at just three years old.
“I thought, ‘Well, God, this is just a sin, and I need to try harder, and it's just me,’” Jones said. “It wasn't till later that I realized that this has been through history.”
Rebecca Haviland, 52, was raised by a conservative family in Salem.
“It was very confusing for me as a little kid because no one was explaining to me why I was being attacked,” she said.
There are around 25,800 transgender adults in Indiana according to the UCLA Williams Institute, just under half of 1 percent of the state.
For transgender youth living before the internet, there was hardly any information available for them to understand their identity. They scoured dictionaries, textbooks and porno magazines.
“One of the best articles still to this day that I read on being transgender was my stepfather had at all times two or three girlie magazines hidden that I wasn't supposed to know where they were, and I knew his hiding place,” Smith said.
Veronica Pejril, 60, serves on the Greencastle city council. She’s the first - and so far, only - openly transgender elected official in Indiana history. She came to Indiana as an adult but was raised in Chicago.
“After a football game, I’d go home and cry because I was wearing pads rather than being part of the cheer squad,” she said.
Like Jones and Smith, Pejril was married before her transition and presenting as male. Others like Haviland and Symone Nelson risked harassment and abuse by presenting openly as trans from a young age.
Nelson is a resource coordinator for Trans Solutions LLC, a community organization in Indianapolis focusing on transgender and non-binary communities of color. She’s originally from Mississippi but transitioned in Indiana.
“Growing up trans in this community and growing up trans in Indiana, it was kind of hard because you have your society and different things fighting you as well,” Nelson said.
Haviland said that even if they didn’t know what it meant to be transgender, adults in her life realized there was something about her that couldn’t be changed.
“Even if only probably to their selves, they intuitively understand this is just what the kid is,” Haviland said. “Even if they don't understand, beating the child without ever explaining why.”
Researchers coined the term transgender in 1965, but until the 1990s they were mainly referred to as transsexual. Transgender Hoosiers sought community within gay and lesbian spaces in cities such as Indianapolis, Bloomington and Fort Wayne.
Jones remembers going to Bullwinkle’s, a gay night club in Bloomington that closed in 2006. Smith wanted to participate but was afraid of being outed.
“Literally, I sat outside of Uncle E's (Elizabeth’s), which was a gay bar across the street from the Showers building, and I was scared to go in there,” Smith said.
Pejril was pursuing her master’s degree on the East Coast, finding connection with other queer people as the AIDS epidemic began to tear through New York.
“Part of what we call now the LGBTQ community was facing the sudden and at the time unpreventable die off,” Pejril said. “It was really frightening.”
These encounters with queer culture were often discrete. Trans adults worried about the reaction from their communities, especially in rural parts of Indiana.
“You had to fight,” Nelson said. “You couldn't go in a certain neighborhood, people wouldn't hire you on the job because of the way you was.”
Being outed could be a matter of life and death, driving some to extreme secrecy.
“My ex-wife had told a girlfriend of ours, and no one knew. And she was drunk at a party, and it was just too juicy for her to contain,” Jones said. “She told everyone.”
For transgender people in Indiana prisons, the situation could be even more dire. Haviland spent nearly 30 years incarcerated. Until the 2012 Prison Rape Elimination Act, all trans women were housed with male inmates, a practice that still continues in places today.
“Sometimes you would have staff who are gang members like, OK, let's move this tranny over from this working housing unit, put them in a dorm controlled by their gang just for sport,” she said.
Nelson works with clients and coworkers at the resource center who have been incarcerated.
“It puts people at risk of different things going in there because we don't have one single place that we can go where they're gonna put trans people, besides being put in maybe solitary,” Nelson said.
Despite the risks, many trans Hoosiers choose to live openly as their gender, navigating life among both left-leaning and conservative friends.
“I remember being 50 thinking, well, if I came out now and lived half my life as a woman and half as a man, that would be a pretty complete life,” Smith said. “And yet, it took me another five years.”
“I've done my best, especially since getting elected in 2019, to be out and representing in places that aren't always so familiar,” Pejril said.
After she was outed, Jones opened Rachael’s Café, one of the most visibly queer spaces in Bloomington. She continues to live among friends and neighbors she’s known her whole life.
“Things have changed so much and growing up thinking how my life would be ruined if anyone knew in Brown County,” Jones said. “Now I walked down the street, and somebody honks that's driving by because they're a friend. Who'd have thought?”
Haviland maintains connections with conservative friends.
“I believe that in their mind I’m kind of their token, you know?” Haviland said. “Trans people in general make them feel uncomfortable, but they're okay with me.”
Jones and Haviland described acceptance by friends and family who still espouse transphobic ideas on social media. Haviland says that in spite of greater visibility, not much has changed from the perspective of a trans woman living without secure housing.
“I never experienced so much bigotry, so much conservative bigotry in Bloomington until I was out pounding the street every single day, mostly walking, trying to get a job,” she said.
The political landscape is changing. While transgender Hoosiers are living visibly in a way many never felt possible, recent legislation in Indiana and other states has them worried for the future.
While laws in recent years have targeted trans youth, older transgender adults contend with both growing visibility and rising hostility.
“We have people coming in and they'd be ready to leave because there’s nothing for them here, or they wasn't able to be helped here because of the funding for trans, it's not really a lot here,” Nelson said.
“I may not be here I may leave, which is very hard to say after living your whole life in Indiana,” Smith said. “But if I am here, I'm going to be one of the people who's going to be out.”
“I've thought of places out of the country that would be a place to go, but I have a community here, and a lot of my friends are politically right wing,” Jones said.
But even though they’ve thought about leaving, many would rather stay and fight.
“Well, of course I have,” Haviland said when asked her about leaving. “And then, on the other hand, of course, why should I? I mean, I've been a pride warrior my whole life. And I got the scars to prove it.”
Pejril is now running for Indiana Senate. She wants young transgender people to enter politics, not just to defend their own rights but to advocate for causes they care about beyond their gender identity.
“I love this community too much to leave here,” she said. “I love this state too much to leave here.”
