Attorney Owen Daniel-McCarter usually begins every meeting he leads or every email he sends with the words "Beautiful people."
It is a philosophy that has guided his life, despite a childhood beset by the kind of merciless bullying that would leave anyone with an understandably negative view of the world.
However, Daniel-McCarter's belief that there is inherent value in every human being, no matter how flawed they may appear, has been so infectious in his attitude and so pervasive in his activism that the countless numbers of people he has touched would describe him as a "Beautiful person."
On July 1, Daniel-McCarter officially took on the role of executive director of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance—an organization that "promotes safety, support and healthy development for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning ( LGBTQ ) youth, in Illinois schools and communities, through advocacy, education, youth organizing and research," according to its website
He will be moving from his former position of policy and advocacy director to succeed Anthony Papini, who left Chicago for his hometown of Seattle in April.
Daniel-McCarter has made history as the first openly transgender individual to take the helm of a major LGBT nonprofit in Illinois.
He is proud and humbled to be sure, but, in his habitual way, more excited about the possibilities which lie ahead to ensure that no child in Illinois has to know the awful feeling of dread the night before school.
He sat down with Windy City Times in the children's reading section of Chicago's Edgewater library. His genuine smile and unassuming nature obliterated any discomfort with the hushed backdrop to a deeply personal conversation.
Where Daniel-McCarter does his work or presents his training seminars is not as concerning to him as the people he affects. Wherever he may be, he never seems to forget that he's seen worse places.
Born in Milwaukee, Daniel-McCarter lived primarily with his mother. Although he credits his father and grandfather as special because they were influential in his life, he said his mother is "important to who I am as a person. She is very much a feminist and an activist and I can remember, as a small child, going to gay-rights marches, pro-choice rallies and protesting the Gulf War."
Just as significant to Daniel-McCarter's outlook was growing up in poverty.
"I remember my mom working a lot of jobs. There wasn't money for childcare so I went to her work quite a bit," he said. "She was a single mom and working and going to school. When she was getting her Master's and then her Ph.D., I would go to a lot of her classes."
His own education was just as unforgettable but for an entirely different reason.
"I had so many hard things happen in school," he said. "When I was in kindergarten in Milwaukee Public Schools our teacher was physically abusive to students. It was mostly the Black students who were physically punished in front of the others."
The bullying never relented even in daycare.
"I was picked on a lot because of my size because I used to be a very big kid," he said. "I would also get sexually harassed."
He was 11 when Daniel-McCarter's mother received her Ph.D. and they moved to the Chicagoland suburb of Oak Park.
Far from easing the level of harassment Daniel-McCarter received, his new home only intensified it.
Bullying can have devastating psychological effects on most children, but it turned Daniel-McCarter into an activist.
"I remember that I wanted to do something to change what was happening," he said. "I'm also a Pisces so it was hard for me to just think about myself. Instead, I knew that if it was happening to me it was happening to other people. For me, it was less internalizing the problem and more protecting mom and dad from knowing about it. When you grow up without a lot of money and you see how worried your parents are, you don't want to add another thing for them to be stressed about. "
In the sixth grade, the bullying Daniel-McCarter suffered was so horrendous that, one day, he marched into the principal's office with a list of demands.
"I wanted an apology from the student," he said. "I wanted there to be more of a presence of teachers in the area of the playground where they could not see what was happening between the students."
It was the first of what would be many successes.
"The student had to apologize to me, which was a huge win," Daniel-McCarter said. "It was one of those moments of validation where somebody who caused harm actually said they caused harm."
One year after Daniel-McCarter moved to the Chicago area, his grandfather came out as a gay man.
It was an equally transformative moment.
"It motivated me to do a lot more work around LGBT issues before I ever did it for myself," he said. "It also made a lot of other things make sense—systemic homophobia leading to a lot of personal heartbreaks in the family."
Daniel-McCarter described his junior high and high school years as "hard but aren't they always?"
He won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Latin School on Chicago's Near North Side.
"I didn't feel comfortable there," he said. "It was my first time being around a lot of people with excessive wealth. It's hard to learn in an environment where you don't see people like you around you. I was commuting from Oak Park and so I was seeing Black people in really destitute poverty in areas like Garfield Park and Austin and then going to this really affluent area of the city where parents are paying for an education that is more expensive than most colleges. Even as a kid, it just felt so wrong. "
Once again, Daniel-McCarter faced-off with the principal in order to provide him with an unsolicited education.
"I told him that you can't just bring kids that don't have a lot of money into your school and then not change anything to make us actually feel comfortable here," he recalled.
Despite the pleas of his principal, Daniel-McCarter had made up his mind to leave. In his new public high school in Oak Park, he found his creative side in poetry and the creation of 'zines. Meanwhile he tutored homeless individuals in G.E.D. course work.
After graduation, he attended the University of Vermont, where he majored in women's and gender studies.
"I felt unhappy in Chicago," he said. "I just needed more space and autonomy. I didn't know if I would ever come back."
At university, photography became an important part of Daniel-McCarter's life.
"I would always have my camera with me. I took a lot of pictures of people," he said. "I captured moments and essences of a situation. For me, the process of developing the pictures was the most fun part. There's little tiny things you can do differently that can change the outcome quite a bit."
He joined the school's LGBTQA campus group Free 2 Be as an ally, eventually becoming president. There, he was instrumental in starting a national one-day event called the Translating Identity Conference ( TIC ) which "explores a wide array of topics in discourses regarding gender and transgender identities, expressions, communities, and intersections."
It is now in its 12th year.
He also helped start an LGBT studies minor course at UVM.
Daniel-McCarter found time to lobby the Vermont State legislature during an internship in his senior year.
"I was lobbying around bullying laws," he said. "We were trying to get gender identity protected in anti-discrimination laws. There was a Republican-controlled house and a Republican governor. We got the bullying law passed but we did not get the anti-discrimination legislation."
Since 2005, the University of Vermont College of Arts and Sciences has offered the Daniel-McCarter Award. "Named for Owen Daniel-McCarter '04 in recognition of his dedication to LGBT concerns at UVM," it says, "this award honors outstanding scholarly and creative coursework on LGBT/queer topics by undergraduates."
When Daniel-McCarter met celebrated transgender attorney and founder of New York's Sylvia Rivera Law Project Dean Spade, it set him on a journey that would as much change other lives as it did his own.
"It was the first time I ever saw a lawyer say things that I felt were deeply true to me," he said. "He was connecting The World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] to the criminalization of trans women in the United States. There were connections on how systems are working together to enforce gender norms. I was so inspired, that I decided to go to law school."
He attended the City University of New York ( CUNY ). There he met a "a lot of other rabble rousers," he recalled. "It was an amazing place to go to law school."
An internship at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project politicized Daniel-McCarter around prison abolition.
"The first time I ever went inside a prison was when I went to visit two trans women at the Great Meadow Correctional [Facility] who were clients of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project," he said. "It's a maximum security men's prison in upstate New York. My skin is crawling thinking about it but I remember going into these tiny little cages to meet the women. Everything in my body about the prison itself was saying 'this is wrong.' It was a complete area of moral clarity. The fact that prisons exist and what it means to be a person in a cage was something I had not spent a lot of time thinking about until that moment. I was horrified and I felt compelled to make it stop."
That passionate need to end the prison system eventually brought Daniel-McCarter back to Chicago.
"I started to realize that there were all these LGBT organizations that did not do criminal defense work," he recalled. "I wondered why they were not thinking about the criminal legal system as one of the primary tools for harming LGBT people."
Daniel-McCarter envisioned an organization that focused on issues such as prisoner's rights, criminal defense and the collateral consequences such as complications in transgender names changes with a criminal record.
A fellow student at CUNY Avi Rudnick—who at the time was working with the advocacy group The Bronx Defenders—collaborated on an idea that would eventually become The Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois ( TJLP ).
"He convinced me to start it in Chicago," Daniel-McCarter said. "There are fierce political lawyers in Chicago, but there was not a lot of organizing happening around trans advocacy and defense. We also had the legitimacy of being from there."
The four founding members of the TJLP took their first case in 2008. The collective then set about "filling the urgent need for holistic, abolitionist criminal legal services for transgender and gender non-conforming people in Illinois who are targeted by the criminal legal system, and to address gaps in the mainstream LGBT civil-rights movement."
The collective provides legal services for people targeted by the criminal justice system, educational materials and training and community support for those both on the inside and outside of a prison's walls. Their name change drive regularly helps transgender people navigate the complex legal processes involved at the Daley Center.
"I've had a lot of clients who have said that they felt seen and heard by me," Daniel-McCarter said. "That I did a lot of things that no one else had ever done for them before."
To keep the bills paid, Daniel-McCarter taught at DePaul University. He moved on to take a position at Chicago House after being approached by then-CEO Stan Sloan about the idea for The TransLife Center.
"He believed a legal program was important in making the Center a success," Daniel-McCarter said. "It was really a turning-point for me because it meant that I had to step away from a lot of things that I was committed to with TJLP. The thought of how much more I could do with the support of a large organization was an exciting opportunity."
He was right and Chicago House provided innumerable people with legal services—something the organization remains active in doing so today.
However, Daniel-McCarter felt as if he was missing something.
"I felt unhappy doing legal work without the political framework of prison abolition," he said. "It's something that is at the core of myself. I wanted to solve some of the root causes of people who ended up being criminalized. I knew that the beginning of that process happens in school. So when the Alliance reached out to me and encouraged me to apply, I knew I could combine teaching and addressing the root cause."
One could argue that, from the moment Daniel-McCarter stepped into his sixth grade principal's office demanding change, his life had been leading up to such work on a massive scale.
"I love working with young people," he said. "I feel like their creativity, anger and hope is really vital and I feel like they have a lot of answers. Because of ageism, we don't always listen to them. Policy work feels very proactive rather than reactive. When you are defending someone in court, the harm has already happened. The policy work is about anticipating the harm and stopping it so that we don't have to have more people being hurt."
Even with the additional responsibilities of his new position of executive director, Daniel-McCarter stressed that he hasn't walked away from the TJLP but is supporting other people in their leadership of the collective. He is proud of the exponential growth the TJLP is seeing.
The TJLP just filed for 501( c )( 3 ) nonprofit status and has relocated to offices opposite the Thompson Center in the Chicago Loop. The collective remains "deeply committed to the universal right of gender self-determination, a long-term goal of abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and commitment to transformative justice models as necessary alternatives to the criminal punishment system."
"It's a little bittersweet for me because TJLP was my baby and my partner for such a long time in my life," he said. "But it's unhealthy for any organization to be reliant on a single person to exist. Any one of us should be prepared to keep it moving."
Meanwhile, Daniel-McCarter has found a more romantic love with his partner Jessie. They have been together for over six years. "I can't imagine being where I am without him," he said. "He supports me in ways that I don't know I need."
It is the kind of support Daniel-McCarter has brought to children at the schools the Alliance serves across Illinois. There have been a number of success stories such as the implementation of a school-wide transgender affirming policy in Berwyn's District 100.
Elsewhere, the level of bullying Daniel-McCarter has encountered has exceeded even that of his own childhood.
"I've seen all sorts of things," he said. "Intense physical violence to the point where law enforcement is involved to deeply painful things like a trans student finding graffiti in the bathroom with their name and their assigned sex at birth. The thing that I have noticed is that a lot of these kids want to change things for others. They want it to be different. Students like [Alex McCary] in Williamsville wanted there to be a policy in his school even though he is going off to college. He wanted to make sure the next trans student didn't have to go through what he did."
"It's important for anybody who is not trans to realize that we live in a world that is actively erasing us and pretending that we don't exist," he added. "A trans student may not have any other trans students in school, they may not be able to talk to their parents about what is happening or have any allies in school or any staff. They are not going to see themselves reflected in history or literature classes."
Now that Daniel-McCarter is taking the lead in the fight for students like that, he believes it must come "from a sincere place. I don't want to just fit into the role. I want to bring my genuine Owen into it. There's a lot of organizations that are doing nonprofit leadership differently and living out their values in how they lead. That's what I can do at the Alliance. I really want to create the kind of space that my staff want to be in. I have so many ideas."
Daniel-McCarter recalled a quote to which the Alliance often refers by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. "When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void … and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard."
More than anyone, Daniel-McCarter knows just how true that is.
For more information on the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, visit illinoissafeschools.org . For more information of the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois, visit: tjlp.org .
