When North Carolina lawmakers passed a law last week targeting transgender individuals for discrimination in the most private of settings—the bathroom—an obituary of Charlotte’s Blake Brockington, an 18-year-old trans man, surfaced anew on Facebook. Brockington had committed suicide and I, seemingly like many others, immediately imagined that he had done so in response to the state’s heinous new law, which specifically bans trans citizens from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender.
But the reality was even worse than what I initially suspected. Brockington had taken his own life one year to the day before the state’s GOP lawmakers rushed a bill through their chambers and enacted it within hours—the cruelest of dedications on the anniversary of the young man’s tragic death.
Brockington was no wall flower. A year before he took his life, he had been elected Homecoming King of East Mecklenburg High School, an achievement he had felt compelled to seek for the sake of other trans youth. Brockington told qnotes that winning the title would give him the chance to raise awareness about the issue.
“I honestly feel like this is something I have to do,” Brockington said, noting few other transgender male students have had the opportunity.
He was the first known openly trans homecoming king in Charlotte and potentially statewide. In pictures of that triumphant moment, Brockington struts around, exuding royalty in his plush red robe with crown to match and flashing a youthful grin at the camera. He was ecstatic.
“I hope this makes everybody know that they can be themselves regardless of what anybody else says,” he added. “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
It was a dream come true for a kid who had overcome the barriers of biology to become the dashing prince he had always imagined being in the earlier years of his life.
As he said in the documentary “Brockington,” he longed to be “just a normal teenage boy, just doing normal teenage guy things—like homecoming king, that’s a normal teenage boy thing.”
It should have been a moment when the stars really began to align for him after enduring years of emotional torment. When he came out as trans his sophomore year, his father rejected him and he was bullied at school, mostly by boys. Eventually, he ended up in foster care and found a support network:
“It was pretty black and white; there was no gray area,” says Brockington. “It was either they were really supportive or really not supportive, and it’s still like that. … I’ve had a hard time with counselors. They’re like, ‘You’re not a boy. This isn’t your name. We’re not going to call you that.’”
But instead of that crowning achievement (one that so many teens take for granted) becoming a launch pad to better days, it was a turning point of sorts—a moment when Brockington gained a wider audience and, with it, a view into what the world would reflect back to him as a black transgender teen growing into manhood.
“That was single-handedly the hardest part of my trans journey,” says Brockington. “Really hateful things were said on the Internet. It was hard. I saw how narrow-minded the world really is.”
That’s what he told the Charlotte Observer in January of 2015, just a couple months before he ended his life.
Blake Brockington is still teaching us a lesson today. On the day I read that obituary last weekend, I noted it had about 20,000 Facebook shares. It now has upward of 30,000 and hopefully that will keep growing.
It’s absolutely tragic, as if Brockington knew exactly the harm that lawmakers who didn’t give a damn about his humanity would inevitably do. His suicide should have been a warning signal for anyone willing to listen. But North Carolina's GOP lawmakers, scheming away in their impenetrable bubble of ignorance and power, never gave Brockington or anyone like him a second thought. When South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard was faced with the same decision as Gov. Pat McCrory a few weeks earlier, Daugaard had the decency to sit down and talk with the trans youth who would have been affected by that state’s equally as hateful “bathroom bill.” He ultimately vetoed the measure. Unfortunately, the inexplicably callous actions of North Carolina lawmakers are sure to inspire more suicide attempts among one of the most vulnerable groups of kids in this country.
We have got to find a way to build a world that these kids want to grow into, where they have the space to breathe and experiment and stumble and thrive. No more Blake Brockingtons—not on our watch. That has to be our goal.