The Gender Marker a Judge Signed
James Finn asked us to roar for Pride. This is mine, from South Dakota
PRIDE 2026. TIME TO RAISE OUR VOICES IN A LOVING ROAR
Brian Mack changed his birth certificate to match the man he was. He started hormones, grew the beard he loved, fixed his documents, and when he died, his obituaries called him Brian. I never met him. I know his name from
James Finn, head editor of Prism & Pen, who put it at the center of a Pride essay this May and asked the rest of us to write our own.
Finn’s piece came with a frame I can’t put down. He wrote that the world seems to teeter on a cusp this year, ready to tip into deeper persecution or back toward justice, and he asked queer writers to lean on it with everything we have. He called the sound we should make a loving roar. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and I want to tell you what the cusp looks like from here. The view from a red state is not the view from a coast.
I have known what I was since before I had a word for it.
The word arrived on a television in a farmhouse den. I was ten when Renée Richards answered a CBS interviewer’s questions about her transition in 1976, and my father laughed, and my brothers laughed, and I said nothing and understood, in that silence, that what she was, I was. I was fifteen when Caroline “Tula” Cossey turned up on a late-night show in 1981, and I told myself the same thing again, quietly, to no one in the house. I had no Brian Mack. I had two women on a screen, far away, being laughed at in my own living room. It took me until fifty-three to say out loud what I had known at seven without the words, and at ten with a derogatory, hateful word, that I was transgender.
Start with the documents, since that is where Brian Mack’s life and mine intersect. On December 14, 2020, a South Dakota judge signed the order changing my legal name and gender marker. The name on that order was not invented. Grace was the name my mother would have given me if the coin had landed the other way at my birth, and Ann was her own mother’s first name. When I chose what to call myself for the rest of my life, I claimed the one that had been waiting on the far side of a coin flip my mother lost the first time around.
On January 1, 2021, I went full-time. I have lived as the woman I always was on the strength of that signature, and most strangers in this city read me as a woman in her early fifties, which is a gift, since I am now sixty years old.
This March, the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled five to nothing that no state law lets a transgender person correct the sex on a South Dakota birth certificate. The document Brian Mack was able to fix is the document my state has now sealed shut.
A signature is not as solid as it sounds. Earlier this year, I spent three months fighting OptumRX, a national pharmacy benefit chain that kept trying to flip my gender marker back to male inside its prescription claims system. A database update somewhere had reached past the order my judge signed and tried to put the old letter back. I eventually won by being stubborn and knowing how systems work.
Not everyone has three spare months and a background in healthcare informatics to spend on a fight over one letter in one field in a database.
That letter is federal policy now.
Last November, the Supreme Court let the administration enforce passports that record sex assigned at birth, with no option in between, as the lawsuits grind on. The Court did the same in May with the ban on transgender people serving in the military. Neither order ruled on whether any of it is legal.
Both let the harm take effect first and left the law for later. And in June of 2025, in United States v. Skermetti, the Court upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. As KFF reported, 25 of the 27 state bans then on the books were left standing.
South Dakota did not wait for Washington. In 2025, Governor Larry Rhoden signed HB 1259, a bathroom and changing-room ban for public schools and state buildings, and said it delivered “freedom from the ‘woke’ agenda.” This spring, he signed a trio of bills he branded “South Dakota Values,” one of which was a statewide definition of “man” and “woman” written to leave people like me outside the words.
None of this is regional weather. GLAAD’s ALERT Desk counted 1,042 anti-LGBTQ incidents across the country in 2025, more than half of them aimed at transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and called it one of the most dangerous years on record for queer Americans. 268 of those incidents occurred in June, the month we march.
Read that paragraph again. Then let me tell you why I am still going to Yankton Trail Park this June.
The cusp tips both ways, and the other direction is just as real.
The groups that track these bills, including the Human Rights Campaign, estimate that roughly 9 in 10 fail every year and have done so at about that rate for more than a decade. The flood is enormous, and most of it drains into the ground. Public opinion has softened on the two questions engineered to be hardest, sports and bathrooms, and held nearly everywhere else.
PRRI’s 2025 survey found that 72 percent of Americans still support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, and 71 percent agree that transgender people deserve the same rights as everyone else. Those are not coastal numbers. They were gathered across more than twenty thousand adults, in the country I keep being told wants me gone.
And the parade is still happening. The corporate sponsors have backed away from Pride in a hurry, the way money leaves a room when it senses risk. But the Prides built by communities rather than marketing departments are mostly still on, and Sioux Falls Pride is one of them. It will fill Yankton Trail Park on June 13, the way it has, in a state that keeps passing laws telling us we are a problem to be managed.
Here’s the turn. The people who write these bills understand something the bills never say out loud. They are not afraid of a letter on a birth certificate. They are afraid of the roar. They are afraid that a transgender man will live a life so plainly good that a Black trans elder like Brian Mack becomes someone a younger person wants to grow into. They are afraid that a fifty-three-year-old in a thirty-year marriage will come out, hold the marriage together, keep the family, keep the band, and write the whole thing down where other people can read it. They legislate the documents; they have never found a way to legislate the voice.
I came out at fifty-three. I do not get any of my earlier years back. I have written that sentence before, and I will write it again. The silence around the cost of waiting that long protects no one except the people who built the closet.
What I can do with the years I have is be honest about them on the page, run the soundboard at my Lutheran church on Sunday mornings so the gospel reaches the back of the room, coach the kids at the gym two to three weekday afternoons every week, play the Friday or Saturday gig, and sit on the board of the Transformation Project, which keeps a drop-in space open in this state for the trans, nonbinary and Two-Spirit South Dakotans, as well as all the other letters of LGBTQIA2+, who need one room where nobody is trying to manage, judge, or dismiss them.
My birth state, Minnesota, can seal my birth certificate, an absolute blessing. And, until I move back to Minnesota, which is a constantly evolving plan, a South Dakota clerk in a database can fight me over a single letter for months. The Supreme Court can let a passport policy take effect before it decides whether the policy is even legal. Every one of those is a record that somebody else controls, and each can be changed back.
The roar is the one record they have never learned to revert. The marker a judge signed, they can reach. This, they can’t.
So this June, I will be downtown for a parade, then spend the day at Yankton Trail Park, where our Pride Festival takes place, staffing the Transformation Project booth, loud, and exactly as visible as the law wishes I were not.
That is the roar. It’s mine. Make yours.
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Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA and PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Pride 2026, Time To Raise Our Voices in a Loving Roar!
This is so powerful, I loved it <3