The organizers behind Oak Park’s 2025 Trans Day of Visibility event have cancelled the Oak Park Pride event they were planning but still plan to make their inclusivity goals for the village known in other ways this month.
Organizer Aaron McManus said the event organizers didn’t want to compete with “Out in the Burbs,” the Chamber of Commerce and village-sponsored pride month event taking place in downtown Oak Park Saturday, June 7.
“We wanted to focus on a bunch of other stuff and not really compete with the chamber,” McManus said. “That’s definitely not the goal. That led to us saying let’s table it and focus on some real need of the community and move on from there.”
McManus said that the event they’d been helping to plan for June 14 would’ve been a bit lower key, focused on storytelling and been less business oriented than Out in the Burbs.
McManus said the event organizers will now look to put their energy this month into campaigning for the village board to consider adopting an ordinance making Oak Park a queer and transgender sanctuary city.
Several U.S. cities including Boston, Kansas City and Sacramento have passed such ordinances.
McManus said they’d drafted a report on what taking that step could look like for Oak Park and forwarded it to all the trustees, but that they haven’t heard back from anyone on the board.
“We haven’t gotten the momentum we wanted,” McManus said.
They said that they and other supporters of the idea plan to speak about it at June 3’s village board meeting.
“We’re going to show up and do the public comment exercise and then see how much social media exposure we can get to keep pushing for it,” McManus said. “I definitely don’t want to slow down on this.”
In a March interview with Wednesday Journal, Oak Park Village president Vicki Scaman said she’d support an ordinance making Oak Park a transgender sanctuary.
“I think there’s additional sense of urgency with the rhetoric coming out of the federal government,” Scaman said. “I think you have to respond to how painful that is. For some trans youth, it’s life or death.”