After I finished telling him my story, Straut reflected on his own background as a Black man from Chicago. He then told me about the attitudes toward LGBTQ people in his neighborhood growing up: “We never talked about this when I was a kid.” Though, looking back, he said there was someone who lived down the street from him when he was growing up who may have been transgender. We sat for an hour, a significant amount of time for someone in a senior leadership position at the White House. I had the opportunity to humanize an issue—a group of people—for an old friend of the president and a senior
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