Vermillion, South Dakota

Mike Phelan and his family arrived in Vermillion, South Dakota, with a business plan as well as a load of boxes. Vermillion is a college town – home to a National Book Award-winning author, a bakery hailed by Oprah Magazine, and the main campus of the University of South Dakota.

But Mike had spotted a glaring absence: no bookshop. To fill the gap, he opened Outside of a Dog Books & Games, taking its name from a Groucho Marx quip, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.”

One of Vermillion’s attractions for the Phelan family was an easygoing attitude toward gay and trans people. Mike and his wife Jennifer, an audiologist, have a trans daughter, now 10, who was certain of her female identity from toddlerhood and found comfort in wearing dresses and being seen for who she was. In kindergarten, their daughter avoided the school restrooms by going to the nurse’s office and letting her classmates think she had an injury – until the Phelans appealed to the Vermillion School Board.

The upshot: in 2021, Vermillion became the only school district in South Dakota that would let kids go to the bathroom of their gender preference.

One school district was one too many, however, for the South Dakota legislature. In 2025, it decided that such matters were too important to be left in local hands. Effective July 1, transgender children would use the restroom of their originally assigned gender – statewide and like it or not.

Faced with the prospect of forcing their daughter into the boys’ bathroom or making her go back to the nurse’s office, Mike and Jennifer decided to move again, securing jobs in trans-friendlier New England. While they prepared to leave, Mike posted a message on Facebook, explaining their predicament and announcing that the only bookstore in town might have to shut down. “South Dakota legislators’ constant attacks on transgender people make it unsafe to continue raising our family here,” he wrote. The new law was “closing businesses” and “driving people out… telling people that their lives aren’t valuable.”

Then came a community-driven lifeline. A young trans couple, Elias and Nova Donstad – a grad student and a nurse’s assistant – stepped up as potential buyers. With a local GoFundMe and widespread support, Vermillion residents raised more than $20,000 to keep the bookstore going.

On Mike’s final day, 100 residents came to the store for a farewell party. Mike thanked the town for giving his daughter a rare gift: a sense of dignity and belonging. For a while, anyway.

At one point during the party, according to the Washington Post, a man in his seventies  “pointed to the Phelans’ daughter, who was playing Old Maid with two other girls,” and asked his wife: “What did that little girl do to hurt anybody? Why are they going after such a small group of people?”

Posted on September 15, 2025