‘I love a place that hates me,’ how two transgender Oklahoma teens navigate current events in their home state

• Robby Korth
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Robby Korth covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma. He grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma and Fayetteville, Arkansas and is a graduate of the University of Nebraska. Before working at StateImpact, he covered higher education for The Roanoke Times newspaper in Virginia.
• Kateleigh Mills
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Kateleigh Mills returned to KOSU in December 2019 as Special Projects Reporter, following a year-long stint at KWBU in Waco, Texas. Previously, Mills was a news assistant and All Things Considered host for KOSU from March to December 2018. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Central Oklahoma in December 2017. While studying journalism and professional media, she worked with the UCO’s journalism staff to reinvent the campus newspaper for a more multimedia purpose – joining with the campus radio and television stations for news updates and hosting public forums with campus groups. The Edmond-raised reporter was editor-in- chief of her college newspaper when it won the Society of Professional Journalism award for Best Newspaper in Category B. Mills also received the Oklahoma Press Association Award for ‘Outstanding Promise in Journalism’ at the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame event in 2017. She is also the Oklahoma Collegiate Media Association's recipient for 'College Newspaper Journalist of the Year' in 2017.

StateImpact is on a listening tour with Oklahoma’s youth.

The first trip took StateImpact’s Robby Korth and KOSU’s Kateleigh Mills to Tulsa, to visit with a pair of transgender teenagers and some of their friends. The goal: Hear what issues they care about and how they navigate a barrage of headlines that they feel malign them.

M.J. and Dominik are friends from the Tulsa area. They’re both juniors in high school and they’re transgender. 

The pair say they have a hard time keeping up with current events because it feels like they’re constantly under attack. But, they persevere thanks to relationships they’ve developed over time despite what they see in the headlines about which sports they can play or restrooms they can use at school.

StateImpact’s Robby Korth and KOSU’s Kateleigh Mills produced this story in partnership with Focus: Black Oklahoma. This story is part of the America Amplified initiative using community engagement to inform and strengthen local, regional and national journalism. America Amplified is a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Special thanks to Amplify Youth Health Collective in Tulsa. The organization introduced StateImpact to M.J. and Dominik and we interviewed them at their Tulsa office.