WHRO Reports

This story aired on NPR's All Things Considered newscast at 4:33 PM on Wednesday, August 22.

Gavin Grimm had another day in court facing off with the Gloucester County School Board Tuesday. The dispute began 5 years ago when Grimm, a transgender male, wasn't allowed to use the male restroom at Gloucester High school.

"We don't know what will happen. And so whatever happens, I will see this fight through. If it takes a month more or if it takes four more years, or it doesn't matter how long this takes."

"Gavin had a diagnosis and he had a letter from his doctor saying, I'm treating this person for gender dysphoria. He should be allowed to use the boy's restroom. And so whether or not the school board agrees with the doctor's views or not, it's just not true that anyone can just say, I want to use this restroom. There are a lot of ways to “objectively” confirm that someone is indeed a transgender and using the restroom that matches their gender identity."

The School Board's legal team presented testimony to dispute Grimm's doctors from endocrinologist Dr. Quintin Van Meter. Van Meter said being transgender is a social contagion, not a medical condition. Van Meter is the president of the American College of Pediatricians, a conservative advocacy group that endorses conversion therapy and has said that gender dysphoria will disappear if it's not reinforced.

The School Board's lawyer, David Corrigan, offered no comment.

As for Grimm, he's in good spirits as he waits for the outcome of Tuesday's hearing.

"I say that I leave with optimism and with a good feeling because I believe in what I'm doing, I believe in what I'm fighting for and regardless of what happens, it's a mission that I feel positively about. Just for the future of the conversation about Trans rights."

WHRV's Gina Gambony interviews investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham, who just published his first book--This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West.

Find out more about the author here: https://www.christopherketcham.com

Christopher Ketcham has written for dozens of publications, including Harper's, National Geographic, and The New Republic. He has reported from the American West for more than a decade. This book is a product of those years in the last wild places. He currently lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

From the publisher, Penguin Random House:

“A big, bold book about public lands . . . The Desert Solitaire of our time.” – Outside

The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act–including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse–and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

This Land is a colorful muckraking journey–part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair–exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.