WILLIAMSTOWN — To help decide where he and his partner wanted to move from their home in Pennsylvania, Justin Adkins consulted a bleak map showing the proliferation of anti-trans legislation being introduced throughout the country.
In 2023 alone, 600 bills introduced in 49 states sought “to block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to publicly exist,” according to translegislation.com. Massachusetts saw one piece of proposed anti-trans legislation that didn’t pass.
In just the first few months of 2024, more than 540 anti-trans bills have been proposed — a stark and seemingly never-ending reminder that trans people in the U.S. are dealing with not only personal discrimination against them but institutional.
Adkins says he and his partner opted for the Berkshires because the “main thing was [we] had to be somewhere we felt safe as queer people.” And the Berkshires have, generally, turned out to be more welcoming than elsewhere, he says. That’s also been the case for Gabby Squailia and Ray Garnett. The three are trans business owners in the county who spoke with The Eagle about the importance of trans visibility both personally and professionally.
In the days following Trans Day of Visibility March 31, Adkins, Garnett and Squailia, who respectively run an herbalist shop, a bookstore and a DJing business, described what it means to be trans in a professional setting, and the relative safety they’ve felt building their lives and careers in the region.
Justin Adkins
Adkins and his partner Rebecca own Wild Soul River in Williamstown, selling goods such as teas, mushroom tinctures, crystals, candles, jewelry and other items. They hold regular events: Tarot meetups, medicine plant walks and tea and chats.
Adkins, who used to work at Williams College as the former interim director of the Davis Center, still works as a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant. He’s made the conscious decision to be “really out and open” about being a trans man. He’s worked with schools in Pittsfield, Mount Greylock Regional School District and Hoosac Valley Regional School District, emphasizing trans inclusion.
At Wild Soul River, Rebecca Guanzon and Justin Adkins offer a community space alongside homemade teas, tinctures and tarot cards.
When Rebecca Guanzon and Justin Adkins opened Wild Soul River, they didn’t expect to host quite so many community events, which range from a monthly moon circle to a weekly tarot card group to a summer foraging walk, where Adkins identifies edible and medicinal plants.
“I want young people to have an easier go of it than I did,” he said. “Parents and grandparents now meet some trans guy — [me] — with traditional markers of success, like I own my own business. I’ve met a lot of Berkshire County grandmas through my work.”
Adkins noted that parents and grandparents can panic when their child comes out to them as trans, in part because they’re concerned for their safety.
“There’s some truth to that,” he said. “Our former president was just ranting and raving about trans people recently. There are people who genuinely want to harm us. But I want to focus on the joy of being trans. It saved my life. I wouldn’t be here today if not for medically transitioning.”
There are complexities to being a trans business owner, Adkins said. As safe as the Berkshires feel, Adkins said there are people who don’t like him because he’s trans. “Not only am I trans, I’m super trans. I’m out and spreading my trans-ness, and I know there are people who have a problem with that,” he said. Depending on the business, it may be beneficial to the bottom line for people to play down their identity.
“People have to think about safety for themselves and for their business,” Adkins said. “For us, it’s a different story. It doesn’t matter how much I look like a guy, there’s no going back in the closet.”
When Adkins first moved to the area around 2007, he believed he was the only out trans person in the vicinity. But since moving back following the pandemic, he’s been encouraged by the number of out trans people in the area and by the relationships he’s built with them.
“I run an adult trans hangout group for North County — every other month we go and do something,” Adkins said. “We go bowling, we have cookouts, hike, we hang out. I have 50 people on my email list, all folks in Williamstown, North Adams, Pownal and Bennington. To go from, in less than 20 years, being the only trans person I knew, to having so many of us out, is a radical shift.”
Ray Garnett
Ray Garnett, who moved from North Carolina to West Stockbridge almost 10 years ago, co-owns Yellow House Books in Great Barrington with his aunt, Bonnie Benson. Garnett, originally an educator, comes from a family of teachers and avid readers. He loves his job, the conversation with people it spawns and has found it to be more or less immune to the pitfalls of the larger bookselling industry.
“For used books, I think a lot of it is location, both being on Main Street in Great Barrington and being in the Berkshires, where there’s a huge appreciation for all different parts of arts and culture,” he said.
Garnett’s path to bookstore proprietor began in earnest when, after graduating from the University of North Carolina and teaching first grade for six years in the state, “I needed to change careers because I was not interested in attempting to go through a gender transition while being a public schoolteacher in North Carolina.” Garnett had already been helping his aunt at the bookstore during summers.
Garnett felt that the school district would not be able to properly respond to parents who had complaints about him, and knew parents were already generally nervous about the influence of teachers on their children.
“I had no confidence that I could openly transition without experiencing a lot of conflict, and I didn’t want to do that,” he said. Garnett tried to come up with a way to keep teaching elsewhere, but nothing clicked.
“My aunt offering to go into business with me was more appealing because I don’t have a boss, I’m self-employed, I make my own decisions, I’m not going to be fired overtly or covertly for being trans,” he said.
Shortly after Garnett moved to the Berkshires, he started Berkshire Trans Group. The informal group meets four times a month in North Adams, Pittsfield, Great Barrington and online.
“People share with each other. Some of them get quite heavy and serious, and some of them are very light,” Garnett said. “A lot of it comes down to sharing resources and making friends.”
On a personal level, Garnett revels in being “as open as I choose” — a benefit of changing careers and going into business with his aunt.
“I can tell anyone, customer, buyer, random passerby, anytime I feel like it. Or not. I can choose,” he said. “That’s my ideal for trans and LGBTQ folks in general, to be able to openly share their life as they feel like it, or remain private, as they feel.”
Gabby Squailia
Gabby Squailia, AKA DJ BFG, has been in the DJ business for 20 years. She started spinning in New York City during the first year of Scratch DJ Academy’s prestigious training program. After six months, she secured her first weekly gig at an Astoria Bar named Fatty’s, which accounts for her stage name, as BFG stands for Big Fat Gabby. (The BFG moniker has since been extended to “Beats for Geeks” as well as “Booty-Focused Grooves.”)
Squailia is currently preparing for a busy wedding season following a busy winter. She also plays fundraisers and dance parties across Western Massachusetts and the Hudson Valley, with a long-running monthly gig at Stationery Factory in Dalton.
Born in Rochester, New York, Squailia moved around before landing in Great Barrington in her early 20s. Her first job out of college was working at Great Barrington pizza joint Baba Louie’s.
“I moved to Pittsfield after meeting my partner, Najwa, who was instrumental in helping me move from bars and clubs into the sorts of events I play now,” Squailia told The Eagle.
When Squailia first started her business, she was closeted. When she chose to come out, despite having experience DJing, she worried, “This might be the end of my career as a performer.”
“I think there’s a greater degree of tolerance for people who don’t conform to gender norms in a performance setting,” she said. “I’ve never had a problem with anyone once there’s music coming out of the speakers. If you’re working the crowd, if people are dancing, you have a sort of shield up.”
Things can be different in other settings. “People do call me slurs from a safe distance, through the windows of their cars or homes,” she said. “But I don’t generally fear for my safety in this area, and I’m hopeful that my community will continue to have legal rights and protections … access to the medical care we need and so forth.”
Although being “visibly trans” has limited Squailia in terms of the politics of people hiring her, “one could argue that this is a limitation that helped me find my audience.” She’s built a customer base who spread the word about her skills and have zero issue with her identity.
Squailia calls trans visibility “crucial,” saying that witnessing public conversations other trans people were having, or the example they set, helped her profoundly.
“In a lot of ways, I was out of the closet in the 90s, but I didn’t have the language to describe myself, and I didn’t have positive role models, just characters in popular media who were used as punch lines,” she said. “As a teenager, I was dressing and behaving in ways that felt authentic, and I was in constant danger of assault because of it.”
To get through that, Squailia said, she needed a safe community, and to see trans and gender-nonconforming people, particularly adults.
“It means a lot to me that I get to be an older trans person who spends this much of her life on stage,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have to say a word in order to express that we’ve always been here; that we’re not going anywhere.”
