Not ‘Threatening or Extraordinary’: Transgender Teen at Center of ‘Bathroom’ Debate Tells His Story

Gavin Grimm Is Just a Boy Who Wants to Be Treated Like Every Other Guy

Gavin Grimm is starting school like every other high school student, but he has been relegated to using a unisex bathroom, unlike any other student in his Gloucester County, Virginia school district. Gavin, now beginning his senior year, is transgender. And the school board has a problem with that.

“I’m not unisex,” Grimm says in theÂ CNN video below.Â “I’m nothing particularly threatening or extraordinary, I’m just another 17-year-old kid.”

“I have 17-year-old fears and worries and I have 17-year-old motivations, which is just to get out of high school and have fun with my friends and family. There’s just nothing about me that is predatory or dangerous, or warrants the kind of response I got from the community,” he adds.

Grimm’s mother told high school officials he has transitioned and is a boy, and that wasn’t an issueÂ â€“ until a member of the community decided to make it one.

Gavin says that during two public meetings, he “felt very small in there, because I knew the majority of individuals who were in there were not very positive towards me.”

“You don’t see other people’s genitals in the bathroom unless you’re looking, which is inappropriate in and of itself,” Grimm told CNN. “If an individual was to behave incorrectly in the bathroom, their crime would be misconduct in a bathroom, it would not be existing while transgender.”Â

“The bottom line is I’m a boy like anybody else,” he says. “I’m not a freak — my very existence is not a perversion. I’m just a person who is trying to live his life like anybody else, and that I have to think about my bathroom usage is unacceptable.”

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