Gina Duncan is a big fan of Grant Drain.
She’s the statewide transgender inclusion director for Equality Florida, and Drain’s an advisory board member of TransAction, a branch of EQFL. He’s also director of communications for the Florida Transgender Alliance, and as such he’s a frequent spokesman on trans issues.
Why’s he so good at what he does?
“What is impressive about Grant,” says Duncan, “is his polish, his poise, his confidence. He’s an amazingly articulate advocate for the transgender community.”
Plus, she adds, he makes for “a great visual — a good-sized guy with a black beard and a radio voice."
In other words, as Grant Drain says himself, he’s got “passing privilege.” He doesn’t read as transgender; he reads simply as a guy — a guy, as it happens, who works as an auto buyer for CarMax. “I’ve had to start speeches that I’m a transgender man and people think I’m a man wanting to transition into a woman — you can watch the gears turn.” And when it comes to debates on bathroom bills, he says, “that’s the bomb I get to drop on an audience.”
Such bills rarely mention trans men. But, as he points out to lawmakers, legislation that would require him to use the restroom that matched his birth identity would mean he’d have to use the ladies’ room — “which would put people who look like me in the bathroom with your wife and daughter.”
Drain, 30, has now lived longer as Grant than in any other identity. In his early teens, before he transitioned from female to male, he came out as a lesbian. But then he began reading about transgender issues, and “the more I read the more I heard my own story echoed.”
Happily, he grew up in an unusually supportive family environment, with parents and an older brother who accepted and eventually embraced Grant’s realization of his gender. When it became clear that his health benefits would not cover gender reassignment, his father, who worked at the corporate level of a tire company, got funds to cover part of the costs from the company’s HR department — so that by the time Grant was 16 he had begun chest reconstruction and hormone replacement and had undergone a name change. (He refers to his given female name as his “dead name.”)
“After my transition, I lived in what’s called ‘stealth.’ I kept my identity in the closet; I said, ‘Hey I’m Grant,’ not ‘Hey, I’m Grant, I’m a trans guy.’” He found success in customer retail in a number of different companies, but constantly wondered, “Will I lose the respect of my team? What if my friends find out? What if, what if, what if?”
Finally, the secret-keeping got to be too much. In October 2014, just prior to his joining CarMax, he made a “coming-out party announcement” — and all the workplace what-ifs were replaced by “a feeling of being able to focus solely on my productivity. I’m not waiting for a shoe to drop.”
He’d already gone through an arguably more difficult coming-out. He met the woman who is now his wife, Jen, in 2005, at a movie theater where they were both working. They were friends for two years before he told her he was transgender. At that time in his life, he had a “hard and fast policy: If you’re not family, you’re not going to know about it.”
But with a mutual spark developing, he decided it was important to tell her the whole story before the relationship progressed any further. “She was wonderful,” he remembers. “She said, ‘I like who you are. Whatever it took to get you here I’m on board with.’” The couple married in 2009.
But there was another step still to go: telling Jen’s family. That disclosure would necessarily be a coming-out for Jen, too. “We had to worry about what she would lose if she went to her family. That prolonged the silence.” But when they finally did break the silence last October, the reaction was not anger but hurt: Why didn’t you tell us sooner?
Now that Drain is not only out to friends and family but a very public member of the trans community, he’s conscious of an extra responsibility. “I want to be an ambassador at all times. If someone meets me, and I‘m the first trans person they’ve ever met, I want that to be a wonderful experience. It cools the rage and anger in the face of some of these tragedies, helps pull me to love and light.”
Our conversation took place two days after the Orlando shootings. “The magnitude of this hate crime,” he said, “is that it has framed the LGBT community in the context of their families in a way they’ve never been framed before.” The wrenching scenes of parents and friends in mourning makes it “harder and harder for people to disassociate themselves from us.”
There are fundamental differences within the LGBT community — for one thing, the LGB represents sexual orientation and the T represents gender identity. But the most important part right now, he says, is unity and equality.
“The trans community is small, but our loved ones are huge.”
