Chaplain Dahron Annelies Johnson is a trans rights advocate who has become a mainstay of activism in the halls where the Tennessee General Assembly meets.
Johnson is working with the Tennessee Equality Project where she serves as the statewide Community Education & Outreach co-chair and the Davidson County Committee District Chaplain. She is a licensed chaplain with the Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ, and has been an outspoken advocate for minority populations.
When you look up Johnson’s bio on social media, you will see the following: “Chaplain-y cyclist consistently calms chaos, cracks contradictions, collects conundrums, critiques culture, challenges ‘common’ consensus, committed caregiver.”
When I asked Johnson which ones of her c-descriptions she thinks come closest to who she is, Johnson homed in on “calms chaos.”
“I changed it from ‘creates chaos’ to ‘calms chaos,’” she explained. “Finding ways to maintain a sense of calm in the midst of chaos is important, and it goes with the chaplain-y piece.
“When somebody calls you into a situation and they’re in the midst of their felt or experienced crisis, it doesn’t help them when you get frantic and overwhelmed yourself. You lose your ability to help. So, for me — both for the preservation of myself and for those around me — I try to find paths forward of calm.”
You could be described as an activist chaplain standing up for equality. Why is it so important right now for people who represent marginalized populations to stand up?
Without intentionality, without conscious effort, we all fall into patterns of what we presume is “the right way of doing things.” It’s reflexive. We’re not engaged in conscious thought about how we’re acting and more importantly, why we’re acting in a certain way. We just assume that’s the way it is, and we do it.
And while that is true in all times at some level, we’re in a moment that is really trying to create substantive and monobloc structures through policy and law that define who is allowed in the center of our public spaces, and who is barred and pushed to the margins — who is being expelled from within our bounds and whisked away in the middle of the night.
If we don’t all take time to actively engage with what we’re being told is the right, proper order of the world without questioning any of that, we’re going to find more and more folks who were never a part of the “right order” excluded from our midst, either by force of law, or, by outright force.
We are seeing both happening right now.
The groups upon which such forces have an impact are pretty much all non-majority populations. We’re talking about immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, trans folks, women seeking reproductive health care, who doesn’t look like the way one “ought” to look in public; those somebodys who don’t believe in one specific type of Protestant evangelical Chrisitianity. The list of those targeted by force — of policy; of policing, of incarceration and physical violence — just grows and grows.
So we need any and all people who will give voice, who can, to ask the question publicly: “Why are we doing this?!” Because we need to be conscious of why we are doing all this.
And we need folks from both communities — those that are feeling the impacts of these paired forces of law and brute force; as well as those who are allied with them, who are in all the other spaces that non-majority populations are all too often excluded from — to speak up. We need those suffering the impacts to speak up about their experience of being at the receiving end of those various forces, those various powers. And we need those allied with them to speak up for us in those spaces where we are not. We need them to ask questions and say: “Where are we directing the force of our government, of our police, of our military, against these various communities?”
We do ourselves a great disservice if we don’t stand up for the many. And the many is made up of all of the populations that have never had an opportunity to speak in places of power; who haven’t had consistent opportunity to change things in substantive ways — or if they ever have been, are being increasingly marginalized in this moment.
That’s why I feel called to do the work that I do: work done through action; through simply showing up; through going to folks on the ground and asking them what their needs are and then acting from there.
Talk a little about your work in the Tennessee Legislature. What are your focus areas?
So, with the Tennessee Equality Project, I serve as a Co-Chair of their Nashville Committee, working with them on education and outreach. This would be on a variety of matters of importance to LGBTQIA+ Tennesseans throughout the state. Sadly, there are a myriad number of ways that the General Assembly has tried to legislate against our communities: from bathroom bills to anti-gay marriage laws; from laws barring us from sports fields to making the medical care we need illegal — and any number of other issues.
Even if LGBTQIA+ advocacy is your starting point, those issues then immediately have connection and intersection with so many others as well. So, for example, if you’re a gay person who is also Black, well, now you’re dealing with not only anti-gay policy but also with the long-institutionalized, centuries-old ways in which we have enculturated racist practice, racist language, racist policy into the very fabric of our day-to-day life.
So the impacts of that anti-LGBTQIA+ policy are magnified if you are part of any other overlapping non-majority community as well. As another example, let’s look at houselessness. Because there is such prejudice against LGBTQIA+ persons, they experience houselessness at a higher rate, which means that to work on the safety of LGBTQIA+ persons is to work on finding and building housing solutions as well.
It’s to say, even if my focus is to come in and just start most immediately with LGBTQIA+ issues, you can’t not be concerned about any and all of these other issues that are part and parcel of that.
What wins do you see?
We’ve had many really amazing opportunities to let folks’ voices be heard over the years. Now certainly there are times when a win is that a certain piece of legislation doesn’t pass. Often in Tennessee in the LGBTQIA+ space, that’s the win for us, what we’re glad for — when another harmful piece of legislation doesn’t cross the finish line. But the wins we take the greatest joy from are when we see people stepping into their own voice.
I’ve been a district captain for a number of our Day on the Hill [events], and there’s a person who has come with us for the last few years. In the very beginning, she said, “You know, I just want to come and see what these conversations are like. I don’t really want to participate.” I reassured her, saying “That’s fine; whatever you need to do to feel comfortable in all this. We’re glad to have you!” And that’s exactly what she did. She joined a group of ten of us in a representative’s office and a senator’s office. Then the next year, she did the same thing.
Then, in the third year, she came in saying she was going to do the same thing. We went into a meeting with one of the Senators, and all of a sudden, right in the middle of the meeting, she raised her hand, and started telling the story of their child, and the impacts she felt a proposed piece of legislation would have on their child, and the fears that she had as a parent.
That moment was by far the most powerful moment in that meeting. And for me, probably of that whole legislative session because the whole room of us stopped and heard the power and her parental passion. That to me was the biggest win. Every single time something like that happens, that’s the biggest and best win of all. That’s better than all the legislative wins in the world in some ways.
You are also involved in local government, serving on the Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC). What excites you about that work?
I couldn’t have been more surprised and humbled when I was asked by my city council person if I would be interested. It wasn’t on my radar. After I received a nomination to the MHRC and I started reading about it, of all the places in local government that I could have been asked to consider, serving on the MHRC was absolutely it.
This is a 60-year-old body that was stood up specifically for an anti-discriminatory mission. It is the Title VI body for our city. It oversees any concerns about discriminatory or inequitable use of funds that have any type of federal tie back. And over time, the mission of our MHRC has really broadened. If you’re in equity work, then it’s got to be equity for all.
MHRC is the truth teller body that can say, “Hey, we are not treating people fairly. We are not doing things in an equitable way.” This was certainly the role we took on as part of the conciliation negotiations and agreements that happened with Metro Arts, for example. And just recently, MHRC was able to negotiate an agreement with Metro Legal that folks with lived experience [of homelessness] who served on committees would be able to continue receiving the small compensation they had been getting. It’s not a huge amount of money, but at least they’re able to get that.
Another big MHRC issue is to continue to work on a range of language services access across our government spaces to ensure that there are language services there for all populations to participate in the governing process.
One of the biggest things on our plate right now is on the Unified Housing Strategy and the zoning changes — our plans throughout the city regarding housing, regarding zoning, and trying to hear as many voices as possible about how we can make those changes in the most equitable, anti-discriminatory ways that we possibly can. It’s really exciting to be part of a body that does that.
Are marginalized people, those with lived experiences, included in solutions? Are they truly heard?
Not as much as they should be, and more is always better.
We have over time [implemented] all types of policies that make committee rooms feel really gate-kept, and separate, and beyond where I can go to offer voice, or give feedback, or heck, even attend and listen in on. For the folks doing the organizing of the meetings themselves, if we have the ability and power in these spaces to be in the spaces, have the meeting, and organize the thing, then we need to be intentional about all the real, basic stuff.
Where is the meeting going to be? What day of the week? When in the day is it going to be? How late is it going to go? Is there transportation? What types of transportation is it going to take for people to get to that particular place? Is there going to be good transportation options for people at the end of the meeting — especially for those who may have a disability? Are the meetings accessible?
I mean we need to ask all these really practical questions. The more that we do those things, the more we not only make it physically easier for a broader group of folks to come, it also sends its own signal of invitation to more people and more voices. We don’t do a lot of any of that, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the range of folks we really need in the room to help make broad-minded and equitable decisions aren’t there as much as they should be.
At the same time, we also need to have a lot of room for understanding and teaching and just patience for the variety of experiences that people might have in coming into a room like that with all its expectations and protocols. A lot of people, even those who have been coming to many meetings, don’t know the first thing about Robert’s Rules of Order. So another thing that those organizing meetings and spaces and rooms like this need to do, is to help folks feel like they have the opportunity to share their voice, regardless of how nuanced their understanding is of agendas and protocols and all the rest.
It is incumbent upon organizers, government and policy folks — even a volunteer commission like the Metro Human Relations Commission — to do everything we can to open the invitation as much as possible.
How do you find hope?
The mom in that meeting! That’s it for me. Raising her hand and speaking up after all those years just observing? That’s a sign, that’s hope, for all of us.
So many of us have been trained, whether we realize it or not, not to trust the power of our own voice. And each time I see someone step forward from that uncertainty into even the tentative first step of trying, what I see is a person realizing there is community already there and waiting for them.