A trans community advocate that changed the world for trans people in San Diego

It’s a Tuesday here in Burlington, Calif. and Amanda Watson is in surgery with Dr. Marci Bowers having gender confirmation surgery (GCS) as I’m writing this column. She’s waited a long time for this.

Amanda is a former sailor. When her time in service ended in the late 1990s, she stayed in San Diego. She first came out to the LGBT community as a drag performer — Amanda Hugandkiss — performing at venues that are now long closed. In 1999 she began her transition.

I met her first in May of 2003. I’d began transitioning in February through the Veterans Administration, and my therapist and endocrinologist there were pushing group therapy as a requirement for continued medical treatment for me. There were two peer support groups out there at the time: TransFamily and Transpire. Because Transpire met once a month at a time that was more convenient for me on Saturday evening, I went to that group, and Amanda went to that group too.

So at that first Transpire meeting I attended in May 2003, in the announcement part of the meeting she asked that as many of us as could please show up at a City Council meeting in two weeks. The reason was the San Diego City Council was going to publicly debate adding antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity and expression to the Human Dignity Ordinance (HDO). San Diego having its own antidiscrimination protection ordinance was a big deal as the Gender Non-Discrimination Act of 2003 (AB196), which now provides housing and employment antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity and expression, was not yet law in California.

San Diego’s Democratic Club pushed for this update to the HDO. Amanda Watson and Jess Durfee were the two who made the rounds to six of the seven councilmembers prior to that public Council meeting. Number seven councilmember didn’t meet with Amanda and Jess only because he already was in support of adding gender identity and expression to the HDO.

So, two weeks after coming out to the community, I joined about two dozen members of the LGBT community making a presence in support of the update to the HDO. Then District 3 Councilmember, now State Assembly Speaker, Toni Atkins was the measure’s sponsor. Other notables there in support of the bill included current District Three Councilmember Todd Gloria and our San Diego Pride Executive Director Stephen Whitburn.

Some of us in our contingent were prepared to speak; all of us newbies in the community were nervously awaiting the debate and public pushback. But, the debate and pushback never came: at the first reading, which wasn’t even read out loud at the meeting, the measure passed the council 7-0.

A few weeks later, we all showed up again, and it passed the second reading without public controversy. It became law almost immediately; I remember it became law several months before AB 196 did. (AB 196 became law Jan. 1, 2004).

Amanda Watson, as a trans community representative meeting face-to-face with our San Diego councilmembers back in 2003, is a lot of the reason why we had housing and employment protections based on gender identity in San Diego months before we had those statewide. It’s why we have city protections on top of state protections here in San Diego.

Amanda left San Diego and took a job up in the state’s central valley a number of years back. She has pretty good insurance now, and her insurance covers “the surgery.” And, Tuesday, June 2, 2015 is the day Dr. Bowers preformed this medically necessary surgery for Amanda.

Whatever activism I’ve engaged in in my life is in very large part because Amanda inspired me. Only three months out as a trans woman, I met a trans community advocate that changed the world for trans people here in San Diego. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to pay the kind of activism that Amanda gave us trans people in San Diego forward to the trans community members that came after me. She changed me. She may be a forgotten advocate to many in San Diego, but I haven’t forgotten.

I’m so honored Amanda asked me to be here for her the first couple of weeks of post-surgical recovery. She’s a friend to me, and so, so much more.