Indiana- Interview: Lilliana talks running for office in deep-red Indiana

By Jane Migliara Brigham

Lilliana Young is an openly transfem candidate for state office in a hostile state where Democrats have little to less power. She spoke to The Needle about the state of things in Bloomington, her city, and what she is doing about it.

Jane: Okay, we're rolling. My name is Jane Brigham. I'm here from The Needle News, a new trans publication that just started up last week. I reached out to you through our mutual friend because she mentioned that you are running for state house in Indiana. So, do you want to start by introducing yourself? 

Lilliana: Yeah, I'm Lilliana Young. I'm running for Indiana House of Representatives, district 61, which encompasses the city of Bloomington. I also currently serve as the secretary of the Bloomington-Monroe County Human Rights Commission, and I have been an LGBTQ activist and community organizer for about two years. 

Jane: Can you set the scene for our audience as to what Bloomington is like? 

Lilliana: Bloomington most famous for being the home of Indiana University (IU). It's where IU was founded. There's IU Health, which is Indiana's largest hospital network.

If anybody's ever been to Dallas, Texas, I would say that Bloomington, Indiana is a smaller, more condensed Dallas. It's a very diverse city. We have a lot of different immigrant populations here. We have a pretty large LGBTQ community. People here are predominantly left-leaning. It's a really nice city to live in. About half of the year when IU students are gone, it's also a very quiet city. If you're local, you have about half the year to enjoy the city to yourself. 

Even the counties around Bloomington are pretty liberal or left-leaning. Bloomington is regarded as the most progressive and left-leaning city in Indiana. 

Jane: I want to talk to you about the queer and trans scene in Bloomington. What is the culture there like? 

Lilliana: Overall, I would say the non-queer population is very accepting. You don't usually run into any trouble if you're openly gay, trans, whatever. The queer community itself here is a pretty large population for the city size, but there isn't any one central area where you'll find people. We do have one queer bar, the back door, which hosts a lot of karaoke and drag and trivia events and such, but it's a very small bar. You tend to just find the queer community here pretty spread out, although we actually are finally working on building an LGBTQ community center in the city. 

Jane: I want to ask about the run for State House. I did a little research on your opponent, Matt Pierce. This guy hasn't had any opposition from either the Republicans or from within his own party since 2010. It seems like he is there because he hasn't had any pushback. 

Lilliana: Most of the people that I have known in the city regard Matt as a centrist, old school Democrat. He participated in a Democrat walkout back about 20 years ago. That was the last big thing that he ever took part in. The state Democrats have been getting weaker year over year in Indiana. It used to be that the Indiana Democrats actually controlled the state house. They held the majority for a long time. And after they lost the majority, the Democrats never tried to regain it. 

I don't say that Matt hasn't put forward good legislative proposals, because he has. But they haven't been effective because the Democrats have not had any real power here, and they haven't tried to regain that power. 

It's a lack of power due to a lack of ambition. Matt's just known for being a nice guy and that’s all anybody says about him. 

Jane: What would your legislative agenda look like, especially in terms of trans people?

Lilliana: That’s dependent on a couple of things. The way that things stand at this moment. The Democrats in the state house are not just the minority party, they are the super minority, because the Republicans sit on the super majority status. 

If that holds true after the midterms, my goal will be to do everything that I possibly can to obstruct, and control the bully pulpit to highlight issues to the public. Spur people on to gather at the state house to protest things that can put pressure on the Republicans. 

If we break the super majority, which is likely because we have a lot of Democrats running this year, my goal will be to do everything possible to inspire the Democrats to act as an organized and active opposition party. My goal is to weaponize every legislative tool that we have at our disposal to slow down the legislative process. 

If we have to, I will try to get the Democrats to break quorum again and leave the state to force the Republicans into a compromise position. So these are some of my primary goals. As far as trans rights, queer rights go. My goal is to get all of the anti trans legislation that's been established by the state repealed. 

My goals. We have no trans women in sports on any grade level grade school high school college. I want to get that repealed. I want to get the ban on HRT for minors repealed. My goal is to get LGBTQ protections codified in the state constitution. I want to see marriage equality and interracial marriage codified in the state constitution. I want to see protection on the grounds of gender identity codified in our state constitution. 

Jane: It seems like a lot of your legislative agenda is simply repealing the last couple of years. So, imagine you could sweep away all of the recent bullshit from Republicans, both relating to trans issues and otherwise. What is your agenda then? 

Lilliana: I want to see the minimum wage increased drastically. My starting goal was $20 an hour. I also want to see the minimum wage for tip-based jobs increased. Restaurant workers deserve far higher than $3 an hour. 

I want to see the strengthening of labor unions. I also want to get it legalized for public workers unionized in Indiana. That's not legal right now. 

I want to legalize marijuana, so that we can take the tax revenue from the sale of that, and apply it to funding the state Medicaid program. I want to see our state Medicaid fully funded as much as we can do. Indiana has a lot of people on Medicaid, and the budget cuts from the federal level are going to screw over a ton of provisions. 

I want to push the state into investing in public housing so that we can put forward housing for solutions for our homeless population. Indiana is suffering a homelessness epidemic. 

Our wages have stagnated and people don't make enough money to pay their rent anymore. Rent is too damn expensive all over the state. I want to put forward public housing initiatives to give homeless people a place to live. I also want to legalize rent freezes so that apartment complexes will stop raising their rent. We have housing units here in Bloomington that charge about $800 for a single tenant in a two bedroom or three bedroom apartment. 

[Editor’s Note: In middle America, that is considered to be a lot of money for rent.]

Lilliana: In Bloomington, if you're not working for Indiana University directly, you're almost guaranteed to be doing service work. I've been in the same restaurant job for 10 years, and I don't think I've known a single employee at this restaurant who has not struggled to make their rent every single month. 

Jane: I want to talk about the trans diaspora. I only know about you because there is a diaspora of trans people from rural places, especially the Midwest, who are leaving their homes to move to a small handful of urban areas, usually either on the east and west coast. How has your community been handling this? Has it been a social factor in trans life in the area? 

Lilliana: Somewhat. The truth is, most of us here in Bloomington don't earn enough to move. Moving is really expensive. I only know one or two people who have been able to accumulate enough money that they could move. 

And so, for the most part, a lot of us are just stuck here. We can't accumulate enough extra wealth to make such a big leap. But that puts its own pressure on things. You're stuck in a state that's actively hostile towards you, on top of economic issues. So the social consequence of that is that our trans community is mostly around the poverty line.

Jane: Our mutual friend mentioned extreme solidarity among trans women in the area. I want to go into your experiences with that, and how that helps you and the community around you. 

Lilliana: I think it's a fairly dominant attitude among the trans women here. Hardly anybody is making an effort to help us in a material way. So in a lot of cases, we've had to take things upon ourselves. There are trans run self defense classes in the area. 

There's been a lot of mutual aid between our trans community. When one person has accumulated some estrogen to last six months, and another one has an insurance lapse, they help each other. 

In a lot of ways, our trans community does not feel valued or heard. And it's been very difficult to get people in the city to take actionable steps to addressing the problems that we're facing. I won't name a specific name, but there is a leading city official that I've worked with who has told me that they are simply afraid to be particularly loud and defensive of the trans community. Our state attorney general, who is an over anti-trans bigot, and our state attorney general, have taken a lot of steps to crush trans rights, on top of our governor and legislators. The city official has told me that they're very afraid that our attorney general will completely cut off state and federal funding to the city if we're too loud in defending the trans community. 

Jane: If you could tell our readership anything, what would it be? 

Lilliana: Things are incredibly scary right now. But I think that even with the fear that our current political and cultural climate can distill into us, it's important to remember that none of this has ever been inevitable. It can change, and I believe it will. We as the trans community actually hold a specific power that we often don't credit ourselves with. And that is the fact that the people who have created this environment are obsessed with us to a point of utter ridiculousness. That gives us a power over them that we need to remember we have. That gives us the power to endure this, more than our would-be oppressors could ever hope to break through.