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Not in our town may never be true here • Daily Montanan [1]

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Date: 2024-12-07

During the course of many years now, I’ve watched my friend Adria Jawort transform from a brilliant but very unhappy young man to a still brilliant and powerfully brave trans woman.

When I met Adria, who is Northern Cheyenne, we learned that we shared a passion for trying to create some kind of platform to promote healing between the Native and Non-Native communities, so in 2015, we organized a symposium at the Billings Public Library, called the Native American Race Relations and Healing Symposium. The event lasted an entire day and drew a crowd of about 100 people, most of whom stayed for all three panel discussions.

Adria was writing for several publications at the time, mostly National Native News, and when we decided to continue this project by hosting monthly speakers at the library, it became clear to me that Adria had a drinking problem, which culminated in an arrest for DUI that landed Adria in a six-month treatment program.

I invited Adria to move in with me when she got out of that program, just long enough to get on her feet, and she has been renting out the back of my house ever since. And has also not had a drink since. But I was pretty surprised one day when Adria came out of the house and was suddenly not a him, but a her.

Adria came out very publicly when she was writing an article about transgender issues for National Native News, and decided it was time to address an issue that had been haunting her for years. Since then, she has been very public and more brave than I think I would be if I were in her shoes. She has written many articles about her journey, and worked as a lobbyist in Helena for LGTBQ issues. While working that job, she was accused by a right-wing extremist publication of threatening a Republican legislator on the steps of the Capitol, a story that was completely fabricated, and she ended up winning a lawsuit against that man, Jordan Hall, who has since folded his tent and left the state.

During the past year, Adria worked as a canvasser for an organization that gathered signatures for issues like abortion, and she knocked on doors all over Billings, being chased by one guy when she responded honestly to his question about whether she used to be a man.

But just a few days ago, someone decided to post some flyers of Adria all over our neighborhood, warning parents to keep their children away from this “pedophile.”

After all the work that Adria has done to create a comfortable life for herself here in Billings, which as most of you know, is the birthplace of the “Not In Our Town” movement, it made me sick that someone would go to the trouble of creating these flyers, based on absolutely nothing but hatred, just to hurt my friend.

Adria’s journey has been a painful one, and after going out with a friend to tear down as many of these flyers as she could find, I watched her retreat to her room for a few days in despair. And it just reminded me yet again that even when Billings rose up and spoke out against those hate groups back in the 1990s, triggering a national movement, the claim that this won’t happen in our town wasn’t true, and probably never will be.

These people will always be lurking, and sadly, with our current political leaders, they have been more bold than ever about expressing this hatred in very public ways.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/12/07/not-in-our-town-may-never-be-true-here/

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