‘I’ve never lost a fight.’ Fearless LGBTQ advocate Janice Allison dies in Charlotte
In her typically fearless, defiant fashion, Charlotte resident Janice Covington Allison once told a reporter: “I’ve never lost a fight.”
“And standing 6-foot-2 and wearing 4-inch heels is not trying to blend in.,” she said.
When she made the remarks to a Charlotte Observer reporter, Allison was fresh off getting a police escort from a women’s restroom at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center in 2015.
Allison, a transgender woman, visited the restroom on purpose, amid a contentious Charlotte City Council debate about whether Charlotte should extend nondiscrimination laws to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
For Allison, the debate was real.
She had been a soldier, volunteer fire chief, construction business owner and the first transgender woman elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
No way she was going to tolerate being excluded from a restroom. On behalf of not only herself but other transgender persons, she was taking yet another quite public stand.
Janice Covington Allison, 74, died at a Charlotte hospital on Friday after a lengthy illness.
Allison was “a wonderful soul, who worked tirelessly for her country and her community,” friend September McCrady of Statesville said on a Go Fund Me page she established to raise money for Allison’s funeral expenses.
McCrady confirmed Allison’s death in an update on the page.
Praise from NC Democratic Party
In a statement Saturday, the North Carolina Democratic Party said Allison was “a fearless LGBTQ+ advocate and champion for the transgender community. “
“We ought to honor her legacy as we continue the fight for full equality and justice,” according to the statement.
LGBTQ advocates compared her restroom visit to Blacks who sat at all-white lunch counters in the 1960s. Opponents said she was a lawbreaker.
Allison?
She expected to make both sides angry, including a part of the lesbian and gay community that chided her on social media for producing “negative” publicity for their cause, the Observer reported at the time.
Allison said she’d considered suicide, “but I can’t give in and give them what they want,” referring to critics of the transgender community.
A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Allison first realized she was different at age 11, she told the Observer in 2015. A nurse examining children interested in playing sports noted how Allison was “not physically developing exactly as a boy should.”
Dad’s anger
A doctor suggested weekly testosterone injections for two years, she said, but after the first month, her father began verbally and physically abusing her, she said, “because I was evolving as a girl and not as the boy he wanted.”
“The pain was unbearable, both physically and mentally. … After several trips to the basement, my mother could not stand my screams anymore. She came down to the basement with a butcher knife and told him that if he touched me one more time, she would kill him.”
By age 16, Allison said, she kept a padlocked box of women’s clothes in her bedroom. She wore the clothes visiting another transgender person.
Her father broke into the box one day, but by then, she said, she was too big to beat.
Army during Vietnam
She enlisted in the Army as a male at age 17 in 1964 and served in Vietnam and Korea as a combat engineer. “I did it for patriotism but also because I was pretty much alone in the world,” she told the Observer
Her first job out of the military was as a room-service waiter at San Francisco’s historic St. Francis Hotel. She said she waited on Ronald and Nancy Reagan, actor Gene Autry and the 1960s singing group The Supremes.
She also was arrested a few times, she said, when San Francisco police raided gay nightclubs.
For years, she lived privately as a female but dressed as a male for work.
She met her future wife, a North Carolina native, in 1971. They soon married and had the first of two children.
Double life
They moved to the Charlotte area in the 1970s. Dressed as a male, she was a volunteer fire chief in Cabarrus County.
“I was living two lives, yelling at men to get on a ladder and put out a fire by day, and going to clubs at night as Janice ... wearing a miniskirt and heels,” she said.
She finally stopped pretending in 2005, she said. “It was just time,” she said.
In 2012, North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District elected her to be the first transgender woman to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte that year.
In 2013, she was elected the first transgender member of the Mecklenburg County Democratic Women’s Association and a voting member of the state Democratic Women’s Association.
She ran unsuccessfully for chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party back then but remained the party’s chair of Diversity and Outreach.
“Bravest person ever”
After Allison entered the Convention Center rest room and got hauled out by police, O’Neale Atkinson of the gay rights advocacy group Time Out Youth called her the bravest person he’d ever known.
Calling her friend “an amazing advocate for LGBTQ folks,” September McCrady said on Go Fund Me that Allison “could light up a room with her smile, and fight like hell for justice when she saw a need.
“She shared her interesting stories with me over the years of a life well lived, and I cherish those and am so grateful to have had her as a friend,” McCrady said.
This story was originally published October 2, 2021 at 2:30 PM.