S3 E13 | Nathan Bruemmer

Nathan Bruemmer:

I became aware of the bar sending letters with my legal name, dead naming me, and I was like oh boy, because that had not always become a topic of conversation, and so when one individual brought it to my attention and said, “Hey, I know you’re trans. I didn’t know what your birth name was, but I do now. I just want you to know that this is probably going to be going out to everybody.” I then did get a little bit concerned.

Luke W Russell:

Welcome to Lawful Good, a show about lawyers and the trials they face inside and outside the courtroom. I’m your host, Luke W. Russell. I’m not a journalist. I’m not an attorney. I’m trained as a coach. I love human connection and that’s what you’re about to hear. My guest today is Nathan Bruemmer. Nathan is a Florida native who grew up the adopted child of older parents. He was assigned the female gender at birth, but as he headed into high school he became increasingly aware that there was a big difference between his experience of the world and the expectations others had for him.

After a long process of self-discovery and advocacy for others, Nathan enrolled in Stetson Law at the age of 40. He now serves the LGBTQ+ community in a wide variety of roles, including his position as the LGBTQ+ consumer advocate at Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. In this interview we discuss Nathan’s years teaching in the public school system, the presence and loss of the strong women in his family, and what it’s like working for the government in the midst of a culture war. Nathan, would you be willing to take us back to your childhood home?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Sure. I grew up in South Tampa. The first house I lived in, we were only there like three years because I’m an adopted child and my parents, professional, science minded people, adopted my little brother and we outgrew the house. What I didn’t know then, of course, is that they had built that house with my Uncle Brian, who was an architect.

Luke W Russell:

Wow.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Then we found our childhood home, which I still own, actually, but we were the only second family to live in this old 1920s Mediterranean/Spanish house that had an empty lot on either side, which became well, a lot of fun to play as a kid. We used those yards, which in the middle of a neighborhood in South Tampa was a little bit unusual.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

But we were outside kids in a big way.

Luke W Russell:

When you were outside, what kind of activities were you doing? Were you maybe playing in sports stuff? Were you digging up rocks?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah. There was a lot of digging in dirt. First organized sports I played was YMCA T-Ball, and then I played soccer, Little League a little bit later, but not at first. My little brother was interested in playing ball, and then I went along for the ride when he was getting registered at seven or eight, and then I was like okay, I’ll sign up too. That ended up being something kind of fun, but we rode bikes around the neighborhood and it was a big deal to go several blocks. There was a 7-Eleven a bit of a ways, and so to go get Now and Laters, that was a favorite thing and to get Slurpies. I mean, early on of course, they were quite cheap, maybe a nickel apiece, and they’re terrible for us, but there might have been a family member that snuck us a little cash to get treats. My parents were very healthy and it might have been my mother’s mother. Grandmothers are good for that.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah, so you had other family members that were geographically close that were part of your youth.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yes and no. My grandmother was a snowbird, so growing up in Florida she raised my mom outside of Chicago, was a very strong influence. She would come down after Labor Day, maybe late September, early October, and stay through maybe March or April, although it always seemed like she would stay a little longer. She was with us pretty constant, and my mother was an MD, a practicing physician and a surgeon, which was something quite unexpected. Both very strong female figures in my life. My grandmother went to law school at a time when women didn’t go. She ended up being the only female that graduated in her class from DePaul, and I think my mother at the time was in high school, early high school. Then my mother became a physician when women weren’t really starting those careers, was the first female physician on staff at Tampa General here in Tampa. Yeah, women ahead of their time, and both of them under the same roof at the same time.

Luke W Russell:

I love that. I heard that your dad was a researcher who studied citrus fruits. Is that right?

Nathan Bruemmer:

He was. He was a biochemist. Mom and Dad actually met working on their graduate degrees. He was a biochemist with the US Department of Agriculture and citrus was his specialty, which for Florida is a pretty big deal, and so he spent most of his career and retired from the US Department of Agriculture. I didn’t understand a lot of what he did. I will say it made my science fair projects challenging. There was a lot of expectation. I couldn’t even tell you the reading material he would sometimes leave for me.

Luke W Russell:

I love that, and were both of your parents present in the home?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yes. Oh, yeah, but both very professionally focused. Dad was a research scientist with the USDA laboratory that was about 50 miles away, so he left early and came home late, and every once in awhile his research meant an overnight stay. He was in Winter Haven, which is a little drive from Tampa. My mother had a medical practice, an individual practice, and was a surgeon. She was an OB/GYN by specialty, and not too long after my brother was born, maybe three, four years, she ended up dropping the obstetrics because delivering overnight babies when you have little ones is tough. But we had fun because we’d get to go to medical conventions with her, and there’d be meetings and all the other doctors’ kids would be around with activities, so our family vacations as kids usually involved science and other doctors and things like that.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You mentioned you were adopted. Were you adopted at birth and was it a closed, open adoption?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, oh yeah, closed. They were also much older than I was, so my father was 50 years my senior. I’m basically the age where my parents chose to adopt me, so they had pretty full lives and Dad was 49 and Mom was 46. We had 50 years difference and graduating from high school, that generational dynamic was certainly informative for my upbringing. I even had a teacher, my dad was a World War II veteran, and so he used to tell me stories or not tell me stories because that generation really didn’t talk about that war. He was in the European theater and his brother was in the Navy in the Pacific. Slowly over the years he shared, and I had a teacher when I was trying to do a report about my dad, tell me that I must have been a liar because my father most certainly couldn’t be a World War II veteran. But he was.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You were presumably at the hospital. People looked at your baby body and said she’s a girl. They assigned you female at birth. Growing up in Florida did you have this sense of something about my experience isn’t connecting with the people around me who should be having the same shared experience?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I was a pretty outspoken child from early on. As my mother would put it, I was a free spirit, and my little brother, so we had 3 1/2 years between us so we did everything together. My dad, as a researcher, his side project was a farm. We had 75 acres of dirt with citrus trees and cattle and a place to run around and a pond to go fishing in. My experiences were just outdoorsy adventure things and my parents tried to create intellectually challenging and physically challenging things and didn’t really say no to much. If I asked can I play soccer? Sure. Can I do judo? Sure. Then Mom would say well, then if you’re going to do that let’s do violin or piano, so there was always this balance.

I don’t think early on there was an awareness because I was free to be me, not that Mom didn’t like to put fancy outfits on me and have adorable family photos down at the JC Penney or whatever the studio was nearby at the mall. I don’t think it was until maybe junior high that suddenly the roles, and I went to a private Catholic all-girls school, and the boys and the girls were across the street from each other. There was this huge separation and we were all doing sports together. We were in after school programs together. It was all fine, but suddenly, and maybe it was around 6th grade to 7th grade, which is funny because it ends up being I taught 7th grade, and there’s a lot that happens between 6th and 7th grade for students and adolescents.

All of a sudden it’s like you can’t be so rambunctious. You can’t be so competitive, and it was this imposition of the expectations of the external world and of society, and I’m like just doing what I’m doing, living life. Then begins some different introspection. What does it mean? Am I, in fact, different from everyone else? I mean, I was a pretty academic and intelligent kid and not really focused on a lot of the social things anyway, a little bit too smart, a little too precocious, I think my teachers would say. I challenged their notions and I wanted explanations, and often they would say well, you’ll learn about that in high school or you’ll learn about that in college. I didn’t like those answers very much. Then high school, ooh. High school’s a battle.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah, and at that point in time, there wasn’t much available for you to sort out the things you were experiencing.

Nathan Bruemmer:

There was no internet. There was no research material. We were still looking in card catalogs to do our research projects and putting them on index cards and organizing our outlines. I’ve got some gender identity things and sexual orientation questions, which is a part of adolescence, but there was no language and terminology for this. I don’t know what to do, and there was sort of this moment. I can look back now and say oh, I clearly, with my best friend who I’d known for years, I clearly developed a crush and we had a huge fight and a blow-up, and I didn’t understand now why after 10 years of really great friendship, she just wasn’t willing to be as close a friend.

We never really reconciled it, but I recognized I was different and I couldn’t put my finger on all the reasons, but even without conversation she knew our friendship was one that was very close, but we were becoming different people and it just didn’t make sense anymore, and we didn’t need fancy definitions and terminologies. But it was upsetting and I was like I don’t belong here, and that was junior year of high school. I thought well, the solution is I’ll go to public school, which I’d never been to. That didn’t work out very well.

Luke W Russell:

It sounds like education was pretty important to your family, and at that point your parents had been paying a lot to keep you in private school. Did you have to convince them to take you out?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I fought tooth and nail my parents. Of course they’d invested a lot in my education and in my future and didn’t think it was a good decision. I couldn’t make this decision and then go back on it, but they saw my reasoning and mid-way through my junior year, without really saying goodbye because I didn’t know how to, we left for Christmas break and I left one school and I went to another, and it was just down the road. About a month in, the bullying and the taunting and the outing began, and very quickly I was down a different pathway and I didn’t belong for different reasons.

You know, when you’re with the same group of, there was probably a group of 25 of us or so, or 20, core group that had been together in school since first grade, that was intense and now I was amongst strangers for the most part. I thought oh no, I know some of them because I had played ball with them in Little League. At that time it would have been softball, of course, but it turns out reputation and popularity, which I hadn’t really been confronted with as much, in a public school setting mattered a lot more than I realized. I didn’t fit in, and by February my life had changed, and probably by April I was acting out and trying to fit in. Acting out meant not behaving and talking back to teachers, and challenging authority and going out on the weekends and experimenting with doing a little drinking, which isn’t the worst thing but it was definitely not healthy.

I didn’t really get credit for that year, so I had been academically in advanced courses and gifted, and ended up in trouble with no one to turn to. At some point, I don’t know exactly when it happened, I ended up in the principal’s office and this gentleman basically told me I wasn’t going to amount to much and get the blank out of his school. My options were to get a GED or go to night school and he didn’t know me, because I was new in his school setting. He just knew I was trouble in his opinion. Turns out I was taking so many advanced credits, I only needed one class to graduate high school my senior year. I only needed English 4, which I took in night school. I had been not fitting in to lots of places and systems, and it was at night. The teacher in charge of that program, I was gruff and tense and distant, and doing the teenage angst thing.

Luke W Russell:

Sure, yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, it was clear she was like what are you doing here? Everyone that was there had a story. What’s yours? I basically told her and she was like you just get this done. There’s no attendance requirement. Just do this and you’re good, and I’m like well, I can whip that out for you in nothing, which seemed awfully silly, and I did. Maybe you had to do a minimum number of days, I don’t remember, but I wasn’t there very long, and then I was done. No graduation, just here’s your piece of paper, and now figure your life out.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. What was your relationship like with your parents? How did that shift and change in your high school years?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah. I probably blew their mind. My mom would probably say, I mean both my parents are gone now, so I’m thinking about some of the conversations we had a little later, I think ultimately my mom would say you know, we know we went through some rough patches with you but we were never worried about you. We knew you would figure it out. We were really worried about your brother. You’re a fighter. Your father and I are never going to worry about you. You’re going to make it, kid. We’re not worried about you. Watch out world. There’s room for you at the top.

There were these same things she would say year over year, which was a lot of truth to think about, knowing later, as an adult, what her history was, as learning a hard science, getting a Masters and a PhD with my father when women didn’t do that. Mom and Dad met at Mizzou, University of Missouri, and when Mizzou held an alumni event here in the region in southwest Florida, and they were doing the golden, they did the 50 and the 40 and the 30, well, Mom was past that and they had everybody who had gotten a Masters degree stand up. She was the only woman and they had everyone that’s got a PhD stand up, and she was the only woman.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Your high school finishes off with you doing night classes. You’ve largely split from all these relationships you had had for a decade. What was your outlook on the future at this point?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, you know, lost. I mean, honestly I think, if memory serves, and there’s a lot of mismatched memories back then, I was having a lot of fun and doing youthful things, not respecting my parents’ rules. I actually moved out of my parents’ house for awhile and rented a room because I had a job. Of course my parents wouldn’t let me take the car they had given me access to. Of course I thought that was unfair, but rightly so. We had a lot of disagreements.

Luke W Russell:

Sure.

Nathan Bruemmer:

But eventually I moved back home and that was the question, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to college? A year and a half before there was Ivy League dreams and oh, the speech and debate. I had been very successful. I had competed and won awards at the state and national level. All that was gone. As often has happened in my life, random circumstance, I saw a news story about some exchange students coming to the Tampa Bay area that were desperate for host families. They’d gotten off a plane and people had just canceled on them and they were looking for host families and I was like what? You can go to another country and study?

Again, no internet. I went to the Yellow Pages to find exchange programs and I found a couple, and I did all this research, narrowed it down to one company and based on the timing they had very few countries left. You have to understand the commitment and learn a foreign language, and I guess, in a crazy way, I didn’t know how to be me or I didn’t even know who I was here, and I thought oh, for sure, I’ll go find out. I think basically I was running away, but I recognized I want to learn and I just needed to get out of here. I think that was ultimately what it was, but again, based on what my parents require, there was a proposal necessary. I completed the application and we had a meeting, and I made the case and I said I don’t think I’m ready to go to college, but I don’t want to stop learning. Will you support this?

Mom’s like we have to apply and you have to get accepted. I mean, I don’t know if we can make a decision. Your father and I will discuss it while you go through the steps. I did, and I got accepted, and it was narrowed down to I think France, a country in South America, and maybe Germany. My last name is German. That was too close to home, and then Sweden, which I thought oh, everybody’s gorgeous and blond there, or Norway, and I picked Norway, of course not realizing people are gorgeous and blond. It’s another Scandinavian country, but like a month later or so, I mean, I had to fast track a passport and a visa and all this stuff, but I was on a plane to live a year in someone else’s house in another country.

Luke W Russell:

Wow. Wow.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Boom, gone.

Luke W Russell:

So you’re 18, 19 at this point?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I graduated high school at 17.

Luke W Russell:

Seventeen, okay, so you’re 17 years old. You’re flying across the ocean to go live with another family while you’re also dealing with this tension of not fitting in.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yes.

Luke W Russell:

That’s a lot.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, yeah, but I ended up in what was known as a Handelsgymnasium, which is a business school, and Scandinavian, a lot of European education is really different, but I end up in the third year of gymnasium in Norway, and they have nine years of matriculation and then you take a break for some public service and then you come back and you can pick your pathway. You could go agriculture, liberal arts, business and a couple of other things, and I end up in the third year with everybody who was basically 20 or 21 and I’m 17 turning 18, and I don’t speak Norwegian.

Luke W Russell:

Right, so here you are, you’re in a foreign country. You’re living with new people. What experiences, or was there maybe a moment in which you felt like maybe you could have gone left, you could have gone right?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I felt, I think, free, and I felt like I can write my own story. I didn’t know what it was, and so I look back now and my host family was remarkably young. They technically could not have been my parents. I felt like they treated me like a human and an equal. My teenage angst at home, I didn’t think my parents understood me. I went from parents who were 50 years older than me to living with somebody who was barely a decade older than me.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I don’t know exactly how I reset, but my classmates became friends and I had more friends than I had ever had before. Frankly I didn’t think a lot about identity or anything. I just was the only American in the school, and so that was interesting. A lot of Americans don’t adjust well to culture shock. We do a training, an orientation. A number of Americans got sent home. They were in their teenage angst, and they were not able to adjust. I felt free and like an adult. I got a very small allowance monthly to spend any way I wanted. I went out. I mean, my bad choices, okay. I started smoking cigarettes because it was Europe and everybody did that. That was bad, but I stopped that when I got home, and at 18 I could drink, but it wasn’t rebellion. It was just social.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. How long were you over in Norway?

Nathan Bruemmer:

It was just about a full year, and then I came home and I transitioned back, which was also awkward. I had a bit of an accent, and then I also had to decide what was I going to do, because I had missed all the application windows to obviously apply to go to school, and so the easiest option was just to go to community college and you could get in any time. I tried to do Hillsborough Community College. I was not enjoying that, and then I ended up at USF and transferred some credits, and then all the things of adolescence came roaring back.

Luke W Russell:

Okay, tell me about that.

Nathan Bruemmer:

The short story is I ran into people who I had known who were like where have you been? I’m like well, I’ve been living in Europe for a year. Now it sounds very fancy, right? A lot of them were people that I was at the private school with as well, and they were all like oh, well, you should rush a sorority. I’m like do what? I sometimes do let the wind take me wherever it wants to. I’m like eh, I don’t have anything better. Let’s just go with it, so I pledged a sorority. It went well. There’s a little scandal involved.

Luke W Russell:

Okay.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I secretly found out that my chapter president was having an affair with another one of the girls, another one of the sisters, and I was very, the term back in those days was tomboy, still competing. Now I’m 19 years old, and I’m still acting like I’m 12, and women are like you can’t do that. The boys aren’t going to like you, and I’m like so?

Nathan Bruemmer:

They’re like, “You can’t do that. The boys aren’t going to like you.” And I’m like, “So?” And then time goes through this whole thing, this whole semester, and then I ended up having a crush on one of my friends, and I made the mistake of telling somebody that was in the group, one of the sisters. And apparently that was not okay.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Because I wasn’t really sure what it all meant, you know?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” And like, “Well, haven’t you dated?” And I’m like, “Not really. I mean sort of, kind of. I went to dances.” I mean, when you’re a kid, what was the… I think they would say, “Would you go out with me?” And they would just ask and then that was like… Now you’re connected, and I’m like, “That doesn’t mean anything. Oh, we’re going out together.” Well, you didn’t actually go anywhere.

Luke W Russell:

Right.

Nathan Bruemmer:

And it became a thing. And then there was rejection again, and it was a bit of high school all over again. And then it was a decision like, yeah, you’re not up to the moral standards of this group. And so we’re not going to let you stay. And then I got to leave and I was like, “Well, that’s not fair,” because I knew about these rumors, mostly verified probably, but I’m like, “Well, that’s not fair.” Anyone else in this group, another sorority sister has apparently got similar experiences, but it didn’t matter. And so I was asked to leave again, and USF sort of lost its charm. And I started looking for someplace else to go, and then I ended up in South Bend, Indiana.

Luke W Russell:

I missed that in my research. So you ended up in South Bend, Indiana.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I did.

Luke W Russell:

How did you get from USF to South Bend? That’s a little bit of a geographical and different place.

Nathan Bruemmer:

So my mother’s brother was a professor of architecture at Notre Dame. So Notre Dame, St Mary’s and then a third school by the name of Holy Cross College, the brothers and the sisters that run the educational institutions are all connected, and it’s a two year college. And then a lot of folks then transfer in. Funny thing, by that time I had seen the movie Rudy and I was like, “Oh, I get it.” I had no football glory dreams. I don’t think, not really. But my mom said, “Well, your uncle and your cousins are there.”

My grandmother, her health had started to decline, but still had connections to that area. And so it was like family adjacent. And she’s like, “Why don’t you think about that? Just start fresh.” And I applied and I was accepted, and I went up there and the first year was good. There was a relationship that went south. I was living with someone as well. And then the second year things started to go downhill again. There was this recurring unfinished business of who am I really?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

How am I going to be successful if I don’t know who I am? And just the joy and the happiness just never quite got… It was always just out of reach. And so I’d made the dean’s list. I was really firing in all cylinders and then everything tanked, and my mom in a very generous way, I think, sort of recognized I was crushed again. And she’s like, “Just come home. Just pack the U-Haul and come home.” And I was like, “Well, I can’t fail again.” And she’s like, “Just come home. We’ll figure it out.”

Luke W Russell:

So you moved back home, and there is a 10-year period where you’re working pretty steadily. What kind of work were you doing at that time?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I end up in IT, in technology, as we’re approaching Y2K, just to give you the context. I was doing pretty good. I was working. I was getting raises and promotions, sometimes making more money. And I think seemingly happier than my friends who had gotten their undergrad degrees pretty quickly and then had quit and were servers at Applebee’s now and lost. And then I get told, “Well, you can’t go any further without a degree.” I was like, “Oh, well, you just issued a challenge.”

And so I don’t know what happened. I just put in the afterburners, and I ended up taking a whole lot of credits and I got my associates pretty quickly from the community college, transferred to USF and then just rocked it. And my very last semester, I was like, “I got to get out of here.” I think I took 21 credits that last semester. I’m like, “I’m done.” And it was almost 10 years start to finish to be done. I was like, “I just got to be done.” I didn’t want to work in technology. I didn’t finish my degree until just after Y2K. But that experience told me computers and I are not friends.

When I finished my undergrad at USF, one of the things I thought about doing was law school. And my parents for a gift had bought me a Kaplan course to study to take the LSATs. And the deal was, dad said to me, “If you get into law school, your mother and I will pay for law school.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s a big deal,” because we had put money aside and you didn’t use it. So we’ll do that.

So I went through the motions. I took the LSAT, and I went back to have the meeting with the parents. Remember, the proposal, the meetings. We have to have a formal thing. And I brought it up to my dad and all of the sudden he’s like, “I never said that.” And he took it back. And, Luke, the thing is what I didn’t realize as my dad got older, there were some cognitive issues, but my mom hid them from me. And this was probably the first indication that had happened.

And I looked at my dad and I thought, okay. I was a pretty unruly kid. Maybe I misunderstood, but I was like, “Mom, you bought me a Kaplan course,” which I think those were probably $1,000. I mean, they’re not cheap. He went for weeks, and he took it back. And I’m like, “Well, I can’t afford to go to law school.” And then I just said, “Forget about it.”

Luke W Russell:

So yeah. So you’ve got your degree now. You’ve graduated. And is this at the point to where you head to the classroom to be a seventh grade teacher? Are we there yet?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, we’re there. Yeah, that was leading into that. I started as a sub and then at my first sub assignment, the principal comes in after my being there all week. And just says, “You have a real knack for this. Have you thought about doing it full time?” And I’m like, “No.” “Well, would you like to?” And I’m like, “Sure.” Again, I go where the wind takes me.

And the biggest thing when you’re coming in as a sub, of course, is discipline. And these students were predominantly advanced and gifted students. We had fun. We had a lot of fun and I love science. So my parents were that background. I got to be a teacher involved in getting the kids ready for science fair.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

So we’re back to-

Luke W Russell:

Yes.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I mean, seventh grade science is a comprehensive, it’s like a survey course where you do a little bit of all the sciences. And I’m like, “Well, I love that.” And sure enough, at the end of the year, I was at a very desired location. The position went in the pool, it went really quick. And then I was subject to the transfer of wherever the district wanted to send me. From ’99 to ’09, I ended up at five different schools for different periods of time, under five different administrators. And that was a time that a lot of different things were happening in education, around policy and student-centered learning.

And when I do something, I go all in. I put my whole mind into it. I ended up coaching. I was an assistant coach for soccer and softball and Odyssey of the Mind. And then there was science fair and anything the principal asked, come early, stay late. And then speech and debate came back again. I got to coach speech and debate, and that was awesome. And then I got pissed because my kids weren’t learning. They were food and housing insecure. And I just felt like I could do more. I needed the next challenge.

So I stepped away and pursued a job in advocacy and ended up doing homeless advocacy at an administrative agency that oversaw grants and coordination of programs in the county where I was teaching. So I ended up doing that a couple of years and then doing it as a consultant. What I ended up realizing is I was reading the federal register a lot. And what I understand now, of course, that was a lot of administrative law, statutory language. I was fascinated by it. That’s troubling. I think tax lawyers would understand this too. If you love reading tax code, good luck. If you love reading administrative law, work for a regulatory agency.

But I was in charge of implementing an unfunded mandate by Congress. I ended up project director for implementation of the homeless management information system in Hillsborough County. And at that point, the implementation had basically failed. No one supported it. There was no money. It involved technology, which I didn’t really love myself, but it also involved teaching because people just needed to understand the benefits of the system. But it also involved surveying people coming in to a shelter situation or entering the system, the continuum of care. And who they were as they showed up was often a barrier to getting that service.

And no one wanted to talk about gender identity or sexual orientation. That doesn’t have anything to do with being homeless which, of course, we end up having a lot of research. We know that’s not in fact the case, and it presents challenges to service delivery, but I got just again, baptism by fire. And I appreciated that experience and helped grow that agency, wrote a lot of grants. I came in as the second employee and then it grew and I left and it’s been through a lot of iterations since then, but still serves a very important role. But after I left and did some consulting for about a year, I missed the kids, and I just went right back to the classroom.

Luke W Russell:

Do you remember when you first started thinking about transition?

Nathan Bruemmer:

So in the background I’d had some different relationships with some phenomenal humans, some beautiful women. I dated a woman that I was teaching with. We met at one of the schools, but what kept coming up… Now I’ve sorted out the fact that I appreciate and know I enjoy the company of women. And I think at that point by terminology at that time through the ’90s, I left the tomboy phase and was basically identifying as a butch. And now, of course, the internet is developed and research and I was pretty happy professionally.

I’d sort of started to decide to get a master’s degree, but teaching didn’t… I would start at 6:00 AM, go to 6:00 PM, trying to get to night school, too much. Plus I had activities on the weekends because I was coaching speech and debate, but I wanted more intellectually. I wanted more and the relationship was good until it wasn’t. And honestly the conversation that kept coming up was this discussion about my energy. That person, at that time just was really troubled by how masculine my energy was. And I’m like, “What are you talking about? I’m just me.” Pretty much that relationship ended and it came to a head.

And then as that relationship ended, I ended up reconnecting with an ex who… We had also had this conversation. We had gone so far to say, “Do you think you want to transition?” And I remember the first time we talked about that, I was terrified what that would mean, what that would look like. And when we got back together, it took a minute, but the conversation came up again. And this time I was like, “I do need to do this.” I’d spent my whole life with these pieces sort of coming together. And she was like, “All right, let’s figure out how to do it as a family.”

And both of these relationships had children in them. And so I’d also been a parent, and I recognized the implications of doing that as a family and the timing. And so we made a family decision and there were no resources in Florida at the time that we were making the decision. A very pivotal moment also happened for me. My father passed away. I had lost my grandmother about a decade before that. And after losing my grandmother had made the decision to settle down in a house, not too far from my parents, which was good. And I had been there for a long time, and I was sticking around because dad’s health was poor and we ultimately made the decision that we would move out west.

We debated where to go. We had a little fun making the decision. It started with a little bit of morning my having cocktails at a bar, and the two of us were out. And we decided for fun to see if we could name all 50 states, which is fun after two or three rounds. And then because, as a great tradition, one must learn all the state capitals. And then we were trying to remember those. That was much harder. We failed at that, that didn’t, but at the time we could name the 50 states, and that started a conversation.

Well, if we wanted to go anywhere, where would we go? I had never at any point in my life… Because it had always been just a struggle to exist and survive. I’d never been intentional about where to go. And now I was, “It’s time for me.” And she’s like, “We have to think about that.” So we compiled separate lists. We turned our backs, on a napkin, cocktail napkin. We made the list of the states and we combined the list. We created a point system and narrowed it down and we ended up with Portland, more affordable than Seattle and I moved her and our daughter out there. And then I came home because I had another year, I had a contract, I could stay another year and I wanted to stay with my mom. So then that was a pretty important year to be with mom that year after my dad died. We spent a lot of time together that we didn’t really get to do during my tough years.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. What was it like for you sharing that year with your mom as she and you are processing grief? But together as you’re both in these transitional stages of life, but in very different ways.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yes. That’s a pun there, isn’t it? I mean, my parents had been married almost 60 years at that point.

Luke W Russell:

Wow.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Mom had to figure out who she was without dad and I needed to figure out, I think, also who I was separate from my parents and I couldn’t have left right then, but I think I spent the whole year getting ready to move out West. As soon as I got out there, I had a doctor’s appointment and transition was like immediate, you know?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

It wasn’t like I had very far to go either frankly, but mom and I talked about it a lot and she knew what was coming and she’s a physician. I mean, she’s a researcher as well. And so there was a lot of science talks about what this was going to do and concerns about now I’m getting older. What is this going to mean for your health? And of course what I didn’t know and I found out as the years went on, mom started to go to different medical conferences, but basically to become informed herself on the endocrinology of transition and about my healthcare needs. So that was her way of supporting in the way that she connected to the world through medicine. And I was fascinated by recognizing, “Wow, there are presentations happening. This is being discussed.” And this was early 2000s. So we moved. It was great. There was a recession. It was really hard to find a job.

Luke W Russell:

Geez. Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I really couldn’t teach. I was disappointed to find out I didn’t research this properly, but I didn’t realize in the time that we had made the decision to go and I actually got there, the rules had changed and they required a master’s for starting teachers. And none of my years teaching would count towards that. So now I have almost six years teaching experience, a bachelor’s and I can’t go teach, which is what I now know and love.

Luke W Russell:

Wow. Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I got this resume under this other name and now I’m going to move forward. When am I going to get to the place where I have what is referred to as passing privilege? Maybe I never will. I mean, I’ve got to go to the courthouse. I’ve got to navigate legally changing my name and updating my records and getting a driver’s license and a social security card and figuring all that out. I had no idea what was involved with that. And the only job I could get was commission only, was sales. And I got one job and I didn’t like it. It was terrible.

And then I ended up in insurance, and I had a really good boss who appreciated my personality and recognized that I was good at building relationships. And I told her the truth and she appreciated and respected that. And right out of the gate, she said, “Well, all right.” Called me by my chosen name.

Luke W Russell:

Wow. It’s great that she was so supportive of you, especially considering the generational differences there. How did you handle the transition at work?

Nathan Bruemmer:

The difficulty was that the home office, I had to go to Chicago for training with this company until all my paperwork was done. I was going to have to go to this training under the old name. I didn’t realize there was a roommate situation and there was rooming involved. So I get to this training and I have professional attire. I have a suit and a tie and I have a short haircut. I mean, I kind of look like an insurance salesman. I’ve been accused of that for many years. I mean, visually you have to… I’m a clean cut Irish guy with blue eyes and light brown hair.

When I knock on the door, my roommate of course assumed that I must have knocked on the wrong door because I’m a few months in now. There are some changes happening and there was a very awkward moment with her. And then basically, I stopped really being just me and I sort of tried to figure out how to seem less masculine and put her at ease. We go to all meet and there was a dress code requirement and apparently I wasn’t allowed to wear a tie. And I was like, “What?”

Luke W Russell:

Wow. Heaven forbid.

Nathan Bruemmer:

And in a suit, and they really they’re female identified agents to wear skirts. So now I’m violating the dress code and they did so, and they made this big deal. They outed it. And they asked the question in front of the entire group. So as I’ve learned to do often, one of my coping mechanisms is to make light of things. And a lot of folks do this, that have been put in tough situations. You make everyone else feel comfortable. And I’ve done that for far more years than I realized. And I did that and I just brought out a little personality and wit and slowly most of the classmates became friends and it was fine. And they sort wink, wink, understood what they thought was happening, but not really. And onward we went.

I stayed with that job until I knew that I could move to the next job. And I ended up working for State Farm. I worked for that agent, then I worked for another agent, but I had about five years. I loved it. I was very good at it. And I was good enough that both of the agents talked to me about opening my own office. And when the conversation got serious enough at one fabulous Christmas visit from mom. My mom, I was telling her about maybe doing it, but it took startup funding, but I’d be a business owner.

And she sort of looked at me, “Do you really want to own an insurance office?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” And she’s like, “Oh, well, let me put it to you another way. What do they need for startup capital?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, 100,000, 200,000.” She’s like, “Okay, fine. If you had $200,000 right now, what would you do with it?”

I’m like, “Well, there’s a question.” And I thought for a second. I said, “Well, Mom, I might open the office. I’m really, I’m very good at it. And I’ve got other folks telling me and willing to support me in that. But honestly, if I had $200,000, I’d probably go to law school.” And she was like, “What?” She’s like, “You still want to do that?” And I said, “I do. I’ve always wanted to do it, but I just kind of thought it was out of reach.”

So now Dad’s gone and Mom’s like, “I always felt bad about your dad taking that back. There is still a little bit of money for education if you want to do that. But I mean, not 200,000. You’re going to have to work your way through it.” She’s like, “But you decide with Jennifer what you want to do.” And so I talked it over and I’m like, “All right, well, first thing I got to take the LSATs.” So I’m working a full time job. Our kid is getting older. We’re going from the middle school to the high school years. I’m into a different groove. Who goes to law school now? That’s nuts.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I would work all day. I sent away for a series of books with a study program and I would go to the library, work a few hours at night until the library shut down. I’d go home and she’d have dinner ready. And then on the weekends, I’d go and do logical reasoning and try and improve my scores. And I hadn’t been in a classroom now for a long time and I’m like, “I don’t know, law school is hard.” And now of course everybody’s using laptops and I’m like, “Oh, but I’m an old school student. I’ll just take notes.”

But I took the LSAT or I scheduled to take the LSAT and right before my LSAT exam, as I was prepping for it… And I don’t remember exactly the timing, but as I was prepping for it, my little brother passed away unexpectedly. That hit mom and I really hard. And I had to jump on a plane to get all the way from Oregon to Florida to say goodbye. I mean, he was on life support. There always seemed to be these bigger forks because of loss. And there was another fork and now mom’s in Florida, and at least my brother had been there, but now he’s not there.

And so I went back and sort of recommitted to studying for the LSAT and then registered and weeks went by and now I’m ready to do this thing. And then out of the blue, Mom’s like, “Well, I’m going to take your brother’s ashes up to the family plot in St. Louis where Dad is and intern your brother’s ashes.” And I’m like, “Wait, what? Right now?” It was a very last minute decision. And she, for whatever reason, I guess maybe thought that it was more like just check the box business. And I was like, “I’ll go with you. This kind of matters.” And we don’t have a big family really.

And so I jumped on a last minute flight and went. The problem is I went that Wednesday, Thursday, flew home Friday. That Saturday was the LSAT and I went and I sat like, “It’s fine. This didn’t affect me,” and I tanked it. In the meantime, I’d been doing research on schools, stretch schools and easy schools and middle of the road schools. I had narrowed my list pretty good, started to get excited and had planned to do some trips between taking the LSAT and getting the results to take tours. And I had narrowed it down to Richmond, Wake Forest and UNC and sticking and staying in Portland.

Luke W Russell:

I noticed that the name Stetson is not on that list. So how did you end up there?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I got this letter.

Luke W Russell:

How did you end up there?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I got this letter from Stetson University College of Law, from an admissions counselor by the name of Darren who is phenomenal. And I got the letter and I was like, Stetson? They were not the leading trial advocacy school that they’re known to be now, from the competition. They were not the leading legal writing. I mean, they’ve been ranked pretty high for years, two decades now for trial advocacy. And I don’t know, Stetson? And I looked at it and I’m like, oh, it’s a Baptist school. I don’t know.

So on a whim, Jennifer’s with me and my mom’s with me and we’re running some errands, and I’m like, “Well, let’s just stop by.” So just no appointment. I see this campus, it’s this beautiful sprawling campus with these Mediterranean buildings. And I go in and Darren’s there. And I said, “Listen, I’m just hear, because you sent me this letter.” I literally had the letter and it was a real signature.

This really struck me and this is important. And so we had a really direct conversation and hit it off like that. I explained right out of the gate, “I’m trans and I’m older and I don’t have time to waste. Tell me what you’re about.”

But yeah, Darren and I started talking and I got that LSAT score back, and I knew I was in trouble. And I knew Wake Forest and UNC and Richmond were out of reach. The problem is, it was so late in the timing, I’d have to postpone a whole year. And I called Darren and he’s like, “We will take a late score, but you got to come up. You got to come up a lot.” And he’s like, “What happened?” And I said, “We had a funeral for my brother the day before I took the test.” He’s like, “Nathan, why would you do that?” And I’m like, “Well, technically, it was my mother’s timing, but it’s okay.” And he said, “I have your file. I’m really impressed with who you are. I think you belong here. I’m going to keep it on my desk until we get your results back.” Which he did.

And my next score was 10 or 12 points higher at least. It was high enough for even a little bit of scholarship. And I was in. I thought, oh my God, I’m going to law school at 40.

Luke W Russell:

When we come back, we learn how the murder of a trans woman in Tampa and the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage set the stage for Nathan’s public advocacy. And he can’t take the decision lightly. Stay tuned. I’m Luke W Russell, and you are listening to Lawful Good.

Lilly:

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Luke W Russell:

When we left off, Nathan had finally enrolled in Stetson Law School at the age of 40. As we pick up the conversation, his trans status plays an unexpected role in applying to take the Bar. And an unexpected connection to a religious conservative gives him hope for the future. Where are you at this point in your transition process?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I mean, I was fully presenting as male, so I’d had what is commonly referred to as top surgery. And so I was getting settled in, I was living alone. Even though I’d been in an on again off again, 20 year relationship with my best friend, she chose not to move with me to Florida. She followed our daughter who, by the way, at the same time I was applying to law school, was applying to undergrad. So they went to North Carolina, I came to Florida. And after the first week I’m like, oh, I can’t study at home. The TV’s there. The fridge is there. I don’t have a routine. And I’m like, I’m going to go to the library.

Luke W Russell:

Room 308, right?

Nathan Bruemmer:

308, that’s the room. But I didn’t start in 308. The unwritten rule at Stetson is the higher up the quieter. So first, second, third floor. And nationally, there are more private studies rooms, this has been researched, there are more study rooms in this law library than any other law library. So I literally walked the whole library; first floor, second floor, third floor. And I find two rooms off to the side, side by side. And I see a woman sitting in one and the next room is open. And I’m like, well, this is good.

And so 307 initially became my spot. And I’m like, when I leave here and then I’ll shut down my brain. But if I have to stay until midnight every day, I have to just figure out how to get into the routine. I became a sponge. I paid attention to student activities and the website and announcements, and slowly I was figuring it out. And then the woman that was in the room next to me comes over and Kramers into my room, as we like to call it, flips open the door and introduces herself, had noticed my study habits mirrored hers, and just wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person.

Eventually, she became my study partner and my best friend through two years of law school. Through a weird twist of fate at a friend’s wedding, we ended up starting to date, which was now that’s five years ago.

Luke W Russell:

What did you want out of law school? What was it you were really hoping for this to be, or fulfill, or shift in your life?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I didn’t know. I think I hoped I would find some answers. What I thought law school would be when I was younger, I mean, my dream when I was little, little was of course, to be president of the United States, and also in Olympian. Those were two really important dreams.

Luke W Russell:

Two very time intensive careers.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Right? So those were old ideas. I wanted to stay open to learning whatever I could and to being open to the direction presenting itself. I did leadership in a number of different clubs, putting on student events. I did the Student Bar Association that ended up as our ABA rep, and then because of my speech and debate roots, tried out for all the teams. I mean, I tried out for the dispute resolution board and trial team and moot court.

One year, I got really lucky, and our team of four won a national championship. And that’s probably one of the biggest honors if you’re at a school that competes in trial team, especially if you’re at a school with Stetson’s reputation, to be a part of that long tradition. It was one of the best wins that I’d probably had for a really, really long time. I might actually be able to do this.

And then I got the bug, I guess. Maybe I should litigate. But at the same time as I was doing this, advocacy was presenting itself. As I ended my first year, we had a couple of important things happen in 2015 that were, I think significant for me. There was a trans woman by the name of India Clarke that was murdered very tragically in Tampa, a Black trans woman. She was young, and she was found near the USF, near the school that I went to for undergrad. And second, the Obergefell decision came in. So marriage equality.

And when India, when her case was known, I had started to do work again, some research for Equality Florida. Well, many years before that I had been involved in the organization, but it was prior to transition. It was a very different time. And I got a call when this case sort of blew up, and I was asked if I would do more public work and would I do media work. Would I talk about the issues that the violence, the trans folks, especially trans women are facing?

And that call came from Nadine, from the founder, who’s a friend. And I slept on it. And I talked to folks, the Yodas, the knowers, the experts in different types of positions. What’s the liability here? What’s the risk if I do this?

Well short answer, if you become a public advocate, law firms, these days just Google you, and your social media presence and whatever you do, it’s out there. And just know there are folks that just will have no interest in a public advocate of any kind, much less LGBTQ. And I was like, okay, well, let me sleep on that. And also you’re here to be a law student. If you start advocating, that’s going to be distracting and your grades might suffer. I mean, all important advice. And I’m like, yeah, but it’s happening right now. And I can do something.

And I’d done things before. I’d been I’d advocated within homeless and food insecurity issues. And I’d done a little bit of LGBTQ issues when I was in the classroom, which was a little scarier because when I started teaching, you could be fired for being out. We couldn’t even have GSAs at that time. And in fact, from start to finish, we still weren’t really allowed to have GSAs, which was part of the reason… I was not going to publicly transition as an educator in a Hillsborough or in a Florida public school system in the 2000s. There was no way that was going to happen. I would’ve been fired. It would’ve been very public. I knew that. And I made that decision and I went out west. Go west young man, go west.

But I came home to go to law school and I came home to be with family. And now I’m home, and clearly the work, because I had started some of this work before, it needed to be done. And I said yes. So I was fortunate to do some trainings and just jump right in.

Luke W Russell:

So by this point you are fully presenting as male. Did being a so-called passing trans person present any challenges applying to take the bar that maybe some other folks didn’t have to navigate, or did things go pretty smoothly?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, that was hard.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

And it was extra hard for me because not only am I older, the problem is now I’ve had much of my life under a different legal name. And now I have transitioned and I have to go back and research myself. Maybe some of those records have been updated, many have not. And now I have to explain myself often over the phone. No idea what the random stranger on the other end of the phone would say or how they’d respond. It was call after call after call after call, often confused by the voice on the other end of the phone. And then I’d use an old name that was a clearly gendered name that didn’t align with who was on the end of the phone.

“And wait, you’re calling for your wife? This is your sister?” “No, that’s calling for me.” “Well, I don’t understand.” “Well, I understand you don’t. I’ve had a legal name change.” “Well, yeah, but I mean, this…” The awkwardness was just constant.

And it was awkward and I mean, I sort of hemmed in hawed and just kind of worked through it. But it was in an extra level of exhaustion I wasn’t really aware would happen.

Luke W Russell:

Did you find yourself having to reprocess feelings you thought you had already moved past?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I don’t know if I reprocessed. I mean, I’m good with me. I just sort of realized, I think it was the response and the reaction. I’m fine. And then every time I had… And I will say, quite frankly, I did sometimes request a female friend just make the phone call for me. I did get to a point of exhaustion. I’m like, “Here’s my soc, will you just make this call for me? Today I just can’t, I just can’t. I’m just tired today.”

I realized the further on it went, the deeper in I got, it would just hit me harder and differently, and it would impact other things that I was doing that I wanted to be successful at. And I don’t know why I didn’t think of that early on. I could’ve just had a friend call before, but then I’m like, oh, I can’t handle it? I can’t do it? I got to do this myself. And I won’t. I can phone a friend.

I think the biggest concern came when I became aware of the bar sending letters with my legal name, and then also dead naming me, so listing underneath my prior legal name. And I was like, oh boy, because that had not always become a topic of conversation. And so when one individual brought it to my attention said, “Hey, I mean, I know you’re trans. I didn’t know what your birth name was, but I do now. I just want you to know that this is probably going to be going out to everybody.” And I then did get a little bit concerned. What if somebody reacts to that?

Luke W Russell:

So how did the bar exam go for you?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Kind of crazy, Luke. But the Monday before the bar exam, was supposed to sit in July, right after graduation. And again, my mother’s health was continuing to evolve in a concerning way. And I was doing the program. I was following a bar prep course, and everybody said you got to do at least 80%. I wasn’t really there. I was more like 60%. And I was doing some of my final exams and I was days away. It was the last weekend to do full test run-throughs. And I had this conversation with PJ, with my best friend. She’s like, “What’s the worst case scenario?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t go. And I lose the money I paid.”

It was Monday before and I was supposed to sit Tuesday and Wednesday. Had a hotel reserved, everything was ready to go. She’s like, “Where’s the bigger damage, harm? If you go and you fail, how hard is it going to be for you to keep going? If you don’t go… You’re not focused.”

Well, remember I took my LSAT days after burying my brother and thought I was fine then. Now here I am again with the last of my family teetering on some pretty serious stuff. And so I just didn’t go. And I didn’t sit for the bar for a couple of years then. I was getting recruited first to join the board of this youth center, and then they were like, “We actually need to hire a new executive director. Maybe you should do that.” So on I went. Finished, graduated, got a job right out of law school running an LGBTQ youth center, not what I thought I’d be doing.

Luke W Russell:

What did you think at the time of finding yourself… You just went through law school, that’s a whole lot of work. And now you’re executive director of an LGBTQ youth organization. How were you feeling about the direction of your life at that point?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, I love working with students. The years teaching and all the coaching and the extraneous things. I think my biggest disappointment were the relationships I had made and the work I was doing in that space because now I was still doing LGBTQ advocacy, but I wasn’t going to be doing that with lawyers in the way that I had been ramping up to do.

And so the program piece and running a nonprofit and the leadership piece was fulfilling, but my lawyer brain, which had been firing pretty actively and getting stronger, suddenly that just went silent. I mean, it isn’t that it didn’t come up. You use your JD in a position like that, but not to the depth. And I think now doing the work I’m doing now, I can look back and say yeah, that part I missed.

But I made the decision to take the job because of the timing, and frankly of the flexibility as the top person. Knowing what was probably going to happen with my mom’s health, I needed the ability to be flexible with my schedule. And this position allowed me to do that.

The program evolved and I got really fortunate to work with some school districts at that time that were expanding their understanding, and leaning into working proactively to support LGBTQ students, and started doing a lot of trainings. The communities were hungry for more and more and more. And the capacity was pushed, and my personal and professional capacity was pushed. And I did get to a point, as things progressed with mom, that it was probably time for me to step away from the position and give my mom a hundred percent of my time. Now, I didn’t tell her that.

Luke W Russell:

I don’t think independent mom wanted her son to…

Nathan Bruemmer:

No. But then in making that decision and to sort have cover, I told my mom, I sort of flipped the timing of the reasoning. But in caring for her, now what I realize, I actually had the time to bar prep. And I had a longer ramp up to bar prep, to sit, to take the exam. Oh, I’ll study for the bar because that was something mom was invested in as well. And so the way I spun it with her of course is, well, I’m going to leave the position. It’s time for me to go back and become a lawyer and finish my journey. And I’m going to do that. That’s my job. Nine to five, I’m going to study, and I won’t have this traffic anymore. I can visit you and we can have lunch or dinner together and we’ll have weekends together now. I won’t have all these extra events to do. So she of course thought that was a brilliant plan.

Luke W Russell:

So we’re in 2019 at this point. Is that right?

Nathan Bruemmer:

The end, yeah. The end of 2019. Yep. The fall.

Luke W Russell:

And when did you sit for the bar? Was that the next year?

Nathan Bruemmer:

February of 2020. So the last bar exam right before COVID.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. And so when you sat for the bar, were you maybe a little excited? Were you fairly confident in the prep you had done this time around?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I was. I was testing well, right up until the moment when I showed up and there had been some problem with the paperwork and I had to hand write my exams. So when I realized I was going to have to hand write my exam, I sort of chuckled. And I was like, yep, yep. So we’re going old school.

I cut out the noise and I went and I did what I did, and stayed at a hotel across the street from the convention center in downtown Tampa. And then I waited like everybody does, they wait.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. And so that’s February, which then we go into lockdowns, and COVID spreads. And you’re in your final year with your mother while waiting for what would end up being a very long process for getting your license. What was going on in your head as you entered into that spring 2020?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, as COVID was coming and it became apparent it was coming, I was worried about how this was going to go for my mom. She’s a little compromised. And she was 92, almost 93. And we had had a lot of visits to the hospital over the last few years. We were all each other had. And we had a pretty significant health event and needed to end up in the hospital on a day that suddenly COVID policy was changing. And basically if I left, I couldn’t come back. But I could stay. And we didn’t know if she was going to be there hours or days or weeks. It ended up actually being weeks.

I was literally there sleeping on a couch or sleeping on a chair and bar results were coming out, and I frankly could have cared less. Mom’s in a hospital room. And she had ironically finally stabilized. And so we made the decision, she was going to go to rehab. And so as a family, she’s like, “You’ve got to go home. You’ve been in the hospital for a long…” At that point, it had been weeks. “Go home. I’m going to rehab. We’re on the mend. It’s good.” And I didn’t even know exactly when the results were coming. I’d just been out of mind.

And so finally I got home and of course I’d ignored my email. And so I went in to see my email and I’m like, oh my gosh. And the first person, of course I wanted to tell, and I didn’t have my laptop with me at the hospital. So it wasn’t like I could get into all that. So PJ was with me, I’m looking at it, it’s on the screen. I don’t know, my eyes are bad. And they’re no lines. You got to go from your number, your testing number all the way to the right. And so I’m putting up a piece of paper and I’m on the screen. Is it yes, yes, yes? I can’t tell. What’s going on here? And then I would close it out and then I’d open it again. Then I’d close it and open it again like it’s going to change. I know a lot of us do this. I know I’m not the only one.

So PJ and I are having the moment and I’m celebrating with her, of course. And I’m like, I got to tell my mom. And I couldn’t go back now because these COVID protocols. And I’m like, ugh, the biggest news of my life. And I get on FaceTime in the midst of COVID and the nurse is there holding it. And there’s PJ in the background over my shoulder, and then it got really emotional. “You did it?” And I go, “I did.” She’s like, “You’re done?” Now I didn’t get into the whole, well, then I got to do the Florida bar thing. But as far as I was concerned and she was concerned, that was it. That moment I was a lawyer. And she was like, “Oh my God, you made it.” She was sure that, okay, now I’m going to be okay. For my mother who was from a different generation, when I would hear stories-

Nathan Bruemmer:

From a different generation, when I would hear stories, I asked her, “Why did you want to be a doctor? Women didn’t grow up to be doctors. That wasn’t something that was a thing.” The basis, basically, her father had instilled in her this work ethic that if you accomplish an advanced degree, you’re equal. So no man is going to take away a doctorate. So when my mom said, “You’re going to be all right,” I think she knew, for me, different than her as a woman, but as a trans human in this world, in this modern world, a degree like this could be life saving and life changing. Then I lost her not too long after that and I didn’t apply to the Florida bar right away because I couldn’t. This was a great achievement. Everybody else, you get your scores, run. Go, get your license, get a job. I’m in the middle of COVID. I’m alone. There’s a lot to do when you lose someone, much less someone of great importance in your life. Then I’m sort of like, “What now?”

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You’ve lost so many people close to you, from your dad in 2008, your grandmother passing around 2000, Aunt Mary passed at the ripe age of 100, your brother, your mom now. What have you learned about life and death and grief?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, not everything. I know that. I know that we get one shot. I know we get one shot. I know they’re still with me every day and I did have a very interesting conversation with a gentleman at a hotel bar in the middle of legislative session this year who gave me great pause. I think ultimately he gave me the greatest motivation for why I do the work, especially recognizing how much I lost. This man and I would have probably not agreed on much. It was late at night and it was last call and he came in just to order one beer. He was in town for a recruitment organization that basically helps kids, high school age kids into becoming involved with the military. Former Navy SEAL, military guy, man’s man. The news is on in the background and it’s flashing all the headlines. Some of those have very specific topics related to the work I do.

At some point, he gives me an opinion about LGBTQ folks and he is like, “I don’t know how you feel about that.” I don’t always show my hand right away, because I want to listen to what people have to say, good or bad, because doing the work I’m doing, if we’re not talking to each other, I don’t know how we evolve. I was like, “Well, I don’t know. What do you mean?” He starts talking about marriage and I believe that marriage in the eyes of God are between a man and a woman and it’s biblical and ordained. I don’t know. He gives me a bunch of quotes. I can’t quote him right because that’s not where I’m at. I was like, “Okay, I get that.” We had previously been talking about why he was involved in the service and so I had been talking about my dad who was a World War II veteran and those stories and what it was like and what motivated me to do some of that or not do some of that. This man was a little older.

He was Vietnam era guy and I’m younger than that of course. He said to me, “I just don’t agree with that, but I got to tell you, having been in the service, and your dad would probably understand this, at the end of the day, when it’s time for us to go and it’s our final hours, one of the things I’ve realized is I just don’t believe you should be alone. If these people,” air quotes, right, “but if that’s what this marriage stuff is about, that I can understand. I don’t want somebody to not have the person that they love with them, next to them when they take their last breath.” I looked at him. I had a hard time not getting emotional like I am right now. I just looked at him and I just said, “Absolutely.” I go, “That’s it right there. That’s pretty basic.”

Luke W Russell:

Today, you work for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. As an LGBTQ consumer advocate, could we just start off with what exactly that is? I did some reading about state liaisons and this and that. I was like, “I’m not quite sure what this is.”

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah. In essence, I think through the visibility and the advocacy, I got the offer to serve as an appointed official in Commissioner Nikki Fried’s administration and diversity and inclusion was an early initiative for her. So she created two positions, a DNI director and the LGBTQ consumer advocate. So our agency works within agriculture, but also serves as the state’s consumer protection agency. So fighting against discrimination and fraud, in essence, that’s targeted at the LGBTQ community and also ensuring equity of opportunity. I started June of 2020, started in July.

Luke W Russell:

What’s it like working in a government capacity as a trans individual in a state that regularly makes news and memes as regularly in the headlines of not just Florida for their anti trans, anti LGBTQ legislative action and just even the vitriolic-like language being used?

Nathan Bruemmer:

My job is to serve all Floridians, right? So regardless of identity or politics or partisan affiliations. As soon as I stepped into this, it’s about putting on a bit of neutrality, right? So I have my personal experiences. I’ve engaged with government officials at all different levels for a lot of my life. I mean, citizen lobby days when different organizations I was a part of would come up to the capital. When I was a kid doing speech and debate, we would have field trips up there to do our mock student Congress. So the grounds to be in the capital and to have a place at the table was remarkable and an honor for me, and to work for an elected official like Commissioner Fried who is very outspoken, has in her team some phenomenal people.

As I became more public or as there were committee hearings I would attend, or I would testify at, you feel the energy in the room shift as more community advocates would come. Part of my job is to also serve as a host. The best part of this session, honestly, the best part week after week was seeing more and more community members and families and clergy and young people come to the capital to have their voices heard, to sit in committee hearings and speak, if they were lucky for three minutes, because there’s a limit. Sometimes there would be so many speakers listed they’d get a minute. They would drive for six hours, seven hours, eight hours so their electeds would let them talk for 60 seconds to basically say, “I exist. I’m here. Please recognize you represent all of us.”

Sometimes the comments back were heartbreaking and crushing. So we’d have high school students in tears at the end of those just grueling hours and hours and hours long sessions. Week after week, they kept coming back. In the end, we passed a number of bills that are unfortunately going to be problematic and of concern. Two of note that have had litigation filed against, the Don’t Say Gay Bill and the Stop Woke Act. The Don’t Say Gay Bill had legislation filed days after, signed on a Monday and lawsuit filed on Thursday. The Stop Woke Act was filed on Friday and the same day, a lawsuit was filed. So now we continue the work and we wait for those decisions. Unless an injunction, something happens, both will go into effect in the state of Florida July 1st.

Luke W Russell:

Knowing that you lived in St. Pete through different periods of your life, both pre and post transition, have you ever been surprised as a trans individual having male privilege that maybe you didn’t experience earlier in your life?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Oh, yeah. Am I surprised by it? No, because I know it exists because I watched it happen on the other side. It is also my responsibility in acknowledging that I’d be very intentional. I mean, I saw it in law school. I saw conversations. I saw the men take over conversations and discussions, have no consciousness that they were excluding the women from the conversation. I watched professors do the same thing. I mean, we had some very uncomfortable conversation in crim law around rape and I had to say something. The men’s voices in the room, there were hands up early on in that class and then they stopped going up and I think it was because of the tone and where the men in the room were taking the conversation.

Now we’re all in law school to be advocates, but I just sort of hit pause and I was like, “I really wish some of the men would think about the way they’re choosing to engage in this conversation.” That conversation happened before I outed myself as trans. So for whatever reason, I don’t know, it must have been a Thursday. I don’t know. We ended up at the bar. So a bunch of the guys were having conversation about that class because of how that conversation went and those off campus conversations were interesting to me. There was a real chance to really talk about and hear what their understanding as 21, 22, 23 year old guys about what they thought rape was or how women experience rape.

I had worked in victims’ advocacy. I was a survivor of rape. They don’t know that. It creates an odd conversation to sort of, “Well, how do you know so much?” There were a lot of those conversations. How do you know so much? I’m like, “Well…” There were other conversations with professors later on when I came out as trans and there was this consciousness, oh, now I know why you know so much about these issues that you’re, as a white cis dude you’re not supposed to know about this. I’m like, “Gosh, I really hope we have much greater expectations because I know a lot of remarkable men in my life.”

Luke W Russell:

I know in the legal world, there’s more and more of a push and a movement for DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. A couple thoughts. One is I think I’ve been delighted and we all make these judgements about other people and we think this person’s that. I wish I didn’t have that, and I’ve had these times where I run into people and I’m surprised by how much they want to be allies, but they don’t know how to be powerful allies. For lawyers listening, what would you say to them to the question of how do I become a more powerful ally, as a leader?

Nathan Bruemmer:

So I think we’re the advocates for change, but sometimes we have a really hard time advocating within the profession. So some of the greatest DEI work has happened in the courtroom and some of the greatest need to do DEI work exists within our profession. So this is hard for lawyers, but I’m going to start by suggesting humility. I mean, humility about an honest reflection of where you are and that you need to learn more and an awareness in the humility that your experience or your limited circle of contacts doesn’t necessarily inform you on what should be best practice professionally. Do I really need to know more in what I do?

A lot of times I think folks are like, “Yeah, no, I’m good. I absolutely believe in equity and fairness and I’m a lawyer. I understand how justice, equality under the law. Yeah. I get all that.” It is a lot more complicated than that and we think about DEI in sometimes a siloed approach. We think we could have an expert come in and talk about LGBTQ issues and it’s a white, middle aged, cis, gay man who has layers of privilege in all of those parts of his identity but maybe we don’t know if we’ve ever served a trans client or even had a trans employee in the office or walk in the door. So encouraging folks to go to the experts and not recognize that one DEI expert maybe isn’t the way to approach that for all the DEI work.

I mean, I work for the state of Florida. My benefits are through the state of Florida. I have a phenomenal team and a boss, all supportive, but I won’t get all my health needs covered in this state. Well, most folks wouldn’t know that. What do you mean? Well, what kind of things could come up? Well, if you don’t know, because that’s not your experience, you’re like, “Well, how is this?” What folks sometimes see, they see someone like me and they’re like, “Well, you figured it out.” I go, “But how many trans folks in leadership who are very public do you know?”

I will never know probably the opportunities that I will never get, because no one told me, because the door was closed the year when I decided to do some of the work I chose to do and it was very public. That’s okay, but it’s interesting because this is a year, for example, we heard the things that we used to hear in the decades before us. Well, I mean I’m okay with you being you, Nathan, but maybe just don’t be so public about it.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Just don’t be in our face about it. I’m like, “Well I’m just saying that I am transgender. There’s nothing in your face about it. I’m here to talk to you about consumer protection. What are you?” Well, just don’t mention it.

Luke W Russell:

Nathan, like to transition a little to talk about a tree farm.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Oh.

Luke W Russell:

If it’s all right with you, my kids would like to ask you a few questions about trees.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah.

Luke W Russell:

Does that sound good?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, I’m not an expert. My dad was the expert, but I’m in training.

Luke W Russell:

All right. So let me start getting this up. All right, kiddos. Here. Excuse me.

Lilly:

Hi.

Isaac:

Hi.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Good to meet you both.

Lilly:

Good to meet you too. What’s a tree farm apprentice?

Nathan Bruemmer:

So an apprentice is someone who’s learning how to do a job. I am not an expert on tree farms. When I was your age, I didn’t actually know my dad had bought a tree farm. I didn’t even know what a tree farm was, but basically he bought a bunch of acres of land and he has agreed to keep trees on it to make sure that the trees are healthy and they don’t get sick and to make sure he cleans out any dead trees so we don’t have any forest fires happen. He got so good at being a tree farmer, one year, the state of Wisconsin gave him an award and he became the tree farmer of the year for the whole state where our tree farm is. So when he passed away, my mom took care of it and now it’s my job to take care of it and so I’m learning. So I’m a beginner tree farmer. So I’m an apprentice. I don’t know if I’ll ever be good enough to be a tree farmer of the year, but I’m learning.

Lilly:

How many trees do you have?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Oh my gosh. I don’t actually know. I’m going to go soon for a trip and see if I can figure that out. I’m sure there is a very big math equation I could do to figure it out. How many trees per acre there usually are, but I’m going to guess, given how many acres we have, there are probably thousands of trees. Thousands. Yeah. They grow very, very, very tall. They start as a seedling and they’re maybe about as big as your hand and then they grow really, really, really tall.

Lilly:

What’s the best thing about trees?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, I love that they provide shade. I love that they recycle carbon dioxide as a part of their process because they have a fabulous thing within them called chlorophyll and they get to release oxygen back into the environment. So they’re good for the planet and you can build stuff with the trees, which is also nice because you build things with wood, but mostly I just, even though I grew up here where there’s a lot of beaches in Florida, when I think about going to a vacation place, I like to go where there are mountains and lots of trees because it makes me feel really relaxed.

Lilly:

Have you ever climbed a tree and gotten stuck in it? My dad did that once in the middle of a church service.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah. When I was a kid, I was a tree climber. We had a really good tree in my yard and anytime I could find trees, I would go. I never needed to have the fire department called for help, but I do feel like I would challenge myself to go higher and higher and every once in a while I would climb pretty high that I would get kind of nervous and I’d get a little scared, but it would have to be a little extra work to come on down, but sometimes, I made a deal with my mom. She didn’t want me to go too high because I think she was worried that would happen, but that’s funny to get stuck at church. I don’t know. I bet a lot of people saw that and that was funny.

Lilly:

Do you have any cows?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I used to. My dad, a long time ago, used to have a farm. We used to keep 75 head of cattle and one bull. So when I started out, when I was probably about your age until my dad retired, we would go visit the cows almost every weekend and then he also had orange trees. So we’d go out and pretend we were farmers. It was pretty cool. Do you know what cows like to have as a snack?

Lilly:

No.

Nathan Bruemmer:

They like molasses.

Lilly:

What?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Like syrup, but not as sweet. Do you ever put syrup on pancakes or waffles?

Isaac:

Yeah.

Lilly:

Waffles? I’ve never tried it on waffles.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah. Well, if you like maple syrup, molasses is kind of related to that, but it’s not quite as sweet and so there was this giant container he would put molasses in and then I think there was a giant salt lick too that they sometimes like to lick salt for some reason. I don’t know why.

Lilly:

Salt?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Yeah, no cows anymore though.

Lilly:

Do you make a good cow mooing sound?

Nathan Bruemmer:

I don’t know. I haven’t tried to make a moo for a long time. Should we try? If I try, will you try?

Lilly:

Yes.

Isaac:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Okay. You go first and then I’ll go.

Isaac:

Okay.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Oh, I like how you did that. That was good. You went kind of like… Okay. Also very good. Very good. All right. Let’s see. I’m nervous now. Yours were so good. All right.

Luke W Russell:

That was good.

Nathan Bruemmer:

How was that?

Isaac:

Wow. That kind of sounded like a sheep.

Lilly:

A sheep?

Isaac:

Yeah.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Maybe a sheep a little. Yeah.

Lilly:

It sounds more like a cow to me.

Nathan Bruemmer:

I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of different cows. All the moos matter.

Lilly:

Thank you.

Isaac:

Thanks.

Nathan Bruemmer:

Thank you. Great questions.

Luke W Russell:

Okay, Nathan, it’s your 80th birthday celebration and people from all throughout your life are present. A gentle clinking on glass can be heard and a hush washes over the room. People raise their glasses to toast to you. What are three things you would hope they say about you?

Nathan Bruemmer:

Well, I hope they would say, “He finally learned how to take a vacation and it better be soon before age 80.” I’m often told I seem to stay remarkably positive doing the work and I’ve stayed doing it a long time and there are a lot of folks that lean in and then lean out. I’m not exactly sure where it comes from. You just let that all roll off my back. So I hope I get to stay positive. I hope I figure out work life balance. I don’t know, some general comment of about just being a good human to my friends and to my best friend, being a good, loving, and supportive partner, which I would be for her, but I would hope to be for just my friends. I don’t have any idea where the work will go. That’s several decades into the future, but if they take my healthcare away in Florida like they’re hoping to do probably or any number of things, maybe I won’t live to see 80, so I better keep fighting right now.

Luke W Russell:

A few notes before we wrap up. Please check out our season three sponsors. Be sure to check out Jason Hennessy’s book titled Law Firm SEO. If you want the best knowledge available in the industry to any plaintiff’s attorneys who have clients in need of simple interest loans, check out the milestonefoundation.org. If you’d like to join a growing group of attorneys that are actively working to improve their trial skills, head over to trialschool.org. For personal injury lawyers looking to acquire big cases through social media, visit sevenfigurecases.com. If you want to experience rich human connection, join our LinkedIn group by going to join bettertogether.com.

By the way, are you looking for more great podcasts? I am also the host of two other shows coming out this year and you can go ahead and subscribe to them today so that as soon as we start releasing episodes, you’ll be the first to know. Check out the Trusted Legal Partners Podcast, a place where you can find good people doing good work in the industry. I am also the host of the Society of Women Trial Lawyers Podcast. There, you’ll find inspiring stories from women attorneys across the nation. You can find links to these in this show description, and they’re also available on the same places you hear Lawful Good. Thanks so much for listening this week. This podcast is produced by Kirsten Stock, edited by Kendell Perkinson, and mastered by Guido Bertolini. I’m your host, Luke W Russell, and you’ve been listening to Lawful Good.