‘Tear me down all you want’: KC trans homecoming queen defiant amid tirade of hate

The hate hit its mark at first. It stung. It was dehumanizing. Tristan Young won’t deny that, especially coming right after such a triumphant night.

There she was two Friday evenings ago, Sept. 15 — 17 years old, a transgender high school senior, long purple gown, sparkling silver tiara, blue sash announcing that the Oak Park High School senior class had chosen her as one of five candidates for 2023 homecoming queen.

The winner, voted on by the student body of 1,500, was to be announced at halftime of the football game. Young, the last to step beneath the stadium lights toward the 10 yard line, heard the roar of her classmates cheering and applauding at the sound of her name. She had a sense that moment. And she was right.

She was queen.

“I was so overwhelmed,” Tristan said, seated in her Northland home, her first interview since the ensuing eruption. “I thought I was never going to be in this position. And, in that moment, I had tears welling in my eyes because I just felt so supported. And I just felt like, this school wants me to be who I am, and not who other people want me to be.”

It was one of the most gratifying moments of her young life.

Then, by the next morning, the ugliness hit — not much from the Kansas City area, as far she could tell, or at all from her schoolmates — but from across the country in a deluge of social media malignancy: on Facebook, Instagram, on X, formerly known as Twitter. Her sister, Francesca, 20, named Oak Park’s homecoming queen in 2020, called from Boston where she attends college, asking if Tristan was all right. She had been reading the barrage of hostility.

“She was worried about Tristan being safe,” said Chari Young, the young women’s mother.

“The comment that has stuck with me,” Tristan said, “was that I should have been dragged off the field by my hair and beaten up.”

How the world came to know that Tristan is trans is still a mystery to her, she said. No one announced it. The North Kansas City school district didn’t mention it in its congratulatory notice. Tristan isn’t even the school’s first transgender homecoming queen. In 2015, senior Landon Patterson was named, leading to a protest outside the school. It also generated largely glowing stories at the time in publications such as People, Buzzfeed, London’s Daily Mail and Seventeen.

Tristan’s crowning, too, has received affirming coverage. But for more than a week, the onslaught against her has been intense and hasn’t subsided.

“Missouri high school names a boy as ‘homecoming queen,’” the right-wing Breitbart News, with its more than 5 million Facebook followers, wrote.

“Oak Park High School just got sent a message loud and clear: boys are just better at things than girls are. Even at being a girl,” Libs of TikTok, a site that mocks what it considers LGBTQ political correctness, posted to its 2.5 million followers.

Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer and right-wing commentator who rails against trans athletes in sports, wrote to her more than 700,000 followers, “Another reminder to all girls that men make the best women. … Who’s to blame here?”

In posts, Tristan was called “disgusting,” her body vilified. The principal should be fired, some wrote, and the students who voted for her should feel ashamed. Her mother called Oak Park’s principal. The district turned off comments on the social media announcement of Tristan’s homecoming win. Tristan switched her Instagram page to private; extra security was ordered for the Saturday homecoming dance.

It was a tsunami of hate that might prompt some teens to turn inward, hide, even buckle.

“I’m just not one of those people,” Tristan said. “I like to stay strong. I don’t really buckle unless something is really wrong. Right now, what’s happening is people are trying to turn a joyous thing into something that I should regret. But it’s going to stay a joyous thing.”

Some comments referenced religion.

“Well,” Tristan said, “in the Bible, Jesus says ‘Love thy neighbor.’ Love everyone as they are. This is who I am. … I’m proud of who I am. You can tear me down all you want. I’m not going to give back the crown.”

After her win, Tristan posted a note on her Instagram account to her schoolmates: “Thank you so much oak park. i am so overwhelmed with love and gratitude, and it is all your doing. … i have had a very difficult high school journey, but having the support of my friends, family and oak park has helped tremendously, i truly don’t know where i would be without it.”

Media ran with it, she said, but got it wrong, assuming that her “very difficult high school journey” spoke to the difficulties of her transition.

It didn’t. It referred to the tragic death of her father, Jason Young, a sergeant and 20-year veteran of the Independence Police Department, who in January 2020, at 48, was killed by a driver of a pickup truck in a head-on crash in Gladstone.

That was devastating. Her transition, meantime, was “like fairly smooth.”

From age 4 on, she said, she knew that the way she felt inside was fundamentally different from the physical appearance she presented. She recalled how, at that age, she would look at her mother, sister, aunts and three girl cousins, and “I would be like, ’Why am I different?’ I would tell people, oh, I wish I was a girl.”

She would ask her mother why she wasn’t.

“I would say, ‘You’re made the way you’re made,’” Chari Young said. “Just be you. My thing was, ‘Be yourself.’”

As herself, Tristan liked to wear dresses, makeup, get her nails done. As a child, she wore dragon pajamas that included a long hood that she draped over her head so she could pretend, “I had long beautiful hair, just like my sister.”

Thinking she might be effeminate, male and gay, Tristan in sixth grade came out as gay, but it never quite felt right. In seventh grade, she discovered TikTok videos created by someone transitioning and realized she was the same. She changed her pronouns from he/him to they/them, but knew it was a segue. In April 2022, during her sophomore year, she began using she/her.

“I told my mom,” Tristan said. “I was like ‘I am. Yeah, I am transgender. I am a woman.’”

Tristan and her mother laughed last week in their kitchen at the memory. No one who knew Tristan was surprised. Any thought that, at school, she faced a gauntlet of meanness or disapproval is the opposite of reality.

“I don’t think anyone was shocked,” Tristan said. “It was like an overwhelming sense of support from my friends, from my teachers, from everybody.”

She’s far from the only trans student at her school. “There’s many,” Tristan said.

She is a presence. “I present myself with an aura of confidence,” she said, at times striding through the halls with what she called “my model walk.” Some students may whisper behind her back, she assumes, but no one has ever confronted her directly.

A solid academic student, she’s busy: a member of student government, two choirs, four years of performing in, or working on, as many as nine plays a year. She’s currently rehearsing the role of Edna in “Hairspray.” She was Theodora in “The Haunting of Hill House,” Sister Mary Theresa in “Sister Act.”

Tristan insists that for all the ugliness hurled her way, she has received an equal or even greater outpouring of kindness.

“It’s been really gratifying,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of people congratulating me. The majority of people I have seen have been super sweet. … People who went to my school, but I didn’t know cared about me, like a bunch of boys on the baseball team, were commenting, like, ‘We’ve got your back.’”

Justice Horn, the chair of the Kansas City LGBT Commission, congratulated her, saying “I uplift this against the transphobic comments against this young person.” Patterson, the transgender student who was Oak Park’s 2015 homecoming queen, attended Tristan’s homecoming events prior to her winning. She stands behind her now.

“I told her,” Patterson said to The Star, “stay strong. You’re gorgeous. You’re beautiful. And no matter what these people say, they can’t take away this crown. They can’t take away this moment from you.”

She continued: “Everything is amplified as a kid. Choosing yourself over everyone else’s opinion takes a lot of courage and bravery. … All these things that they said about her, that they said about me, what they say about trans people, it’s truly just ignorance. They probably don’t even know a trans person. They’re just saying things to be hateful.

“Being trans is a reality. This is our life. It’s not going away.”

That’s how Tristan feels. Those throwing mud don’t know her. Even as ugly posts poured in, she went to the homecoming dance.

“The dance was fantastic,” Tristan said. “It was fantastic.”

Some students approached her, asking if she’d seen the negative comments.

“I said ‘I don’t want to think about that right now. I’m at my senior homecoming.’”

That’s how she handled the rest of the week. This is her senior year. College awaits. She’s thinking of becoming a writer.

“I’ve been told, ‘You’re handling this with maturity. What I think is, ‘What is the use of fighting back? Like I said, I can’t change anybody’s mind. So why would I waste my time?

“When I was crowned homecoming queen, why should I make my memories be about fighting back? I want to make my memories of being homecoming queen happy. And they’re going to be happy. I’m forever going to remember that moment on the field, where I’m standing with people I love the most, and they call my name. And there was a roar.

“That’s what I’m going to think about years later. I’m not going to think about all this backlash I got. Because that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me are the people that support me.”