Trans teen found swastikas on their desk and was forced to drop out of school after Donald Trump was elected president
Ari and their mother Deborah Fernandez-Turner (Human Rights Campaign)
A mother has revealed that her trans teenager was “threatened” and found swastikas drawn on their school desk after Donald Trump was elected in 2016.
In a new video released by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Deborah Fernandez-Turner, a mother from Tuscon, Arizona, opened up about the shocking “overnight” changes that happened to her trans child after Trump’s election.
“Ari has always been just an amazingly great kid, just makes everybody around them happy, because they’re so happy,” Fernandez-Turner explained in the emotional video.
“They went from that to barely being able to get out of bed. It was right around the beginning of junior year, which was August of 2016. They came out as trans, and then, early November, at the time of the election, things changed dramatically, and I mean overnight.”
Mother says her trans child was afraid to be in school because of the horrific abuse they received after Donald Trump was elected.
She continued: “It wasn’t just walking down the hall and being called a name, it was being threatened, finding swastikas on their desks. It’s out loud, it’s in your face. It was to the point where my kid was afraid to be there.”
The abuse became so bad that Ari was forced to drop out of school in January 2017.
“I think this is America now, but this is definitely not the America we want to be,” Fernandez-Turner said.
“I think we have a choice right now. We have a choir to be more than this. So my hope is there’s enough people out there that will vote differently. We’re talking about moving towards a country where there’s respect for eery human being and we have that opportunity.
“We just don’t have that opportunity while Donald Trump is president.”
LGBT+ people across the United States are anxiously anticipating the presidential election, which will take place on Tuesday (November 3), with Donald Trump facing off against Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has doggedly rolled back LGBT+ rights and has repeatedly attacked queer people. According to GLAAD’s Trump Accountability Project, he and the people in his circle have directly attacked the LGBT+ community more than 180 times since he took office.
In 2019, it was reported that hate crime had reached a decade high in the United States, with LGBT+ people among those most often targeted.
The research found that hate crimes increased by nine per cent to 2,009 cases in the 30 cities surveyed by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (CSHE) at California State University San Bernardino, which released the report in July 2019.
It revealed that the surge in hate crimes marks the steepest rise since 2015 and the fifth increase in consecutive years.
