Caitlyn Jenner, the woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner, made her debut in a big way.
We're achieving greater and greater visibility in society.
Transgender visibility might be moving from the margins into the mainstream,
but what does it mean?
As long as trans women of color are suffering and dying in the streets, I’m going to hold
off a little bit on the celebrations.
The eighth trans woman murdered in the U.S. this year.
Every breath a trans person takes is an act of revolution.
And while transgender people helped kick off the fight for gay equality, progress in their
fight for civil rights has been decades in the making.
Trans lives matter!
What's shocking is not Bruce Jenner coming out. What's shocking is the way people treat us.
That female side is part of me.
When Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, told the story about being born with a body that
didn’t match her internal sense of who she is, many people gained a better understanding
of what it means to be a transgender person.
Well, finally, people have woken up and realized that they know someone who's transgender.
With an award winning TV show about a family patriarch changing gender….
This is me.
… And transgender actress Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time Magazine, you might think
society has reached a new level of understanding. Activist Lourdes Ashley Hunter says you would
be mistaken.
The community that I work for is wondering how they’re going to eat tonight, wondering
if they’re gong to have health coverage, wondering if they’re even going to make
it back to the shelter where they’re staying. I don’t want people to watch “Transparent”
and say, “This is the lives of trans people.” Because it is not.”
In 2002, Hunter came to New York City at age 26, on a one way bus ticket from Detroit with
$20 in her pocket. She planned on doing community service work in exchange for a place to stay.
But when she went to a women’s shelter, she was turned away for being transgender.
Then, she says, things only got worse.
And so I found myself homeless and ended up having to be assigned to a men’s shelter
called Wards Island. Wards Island housed about a thousand men, and every night there
was a fear for me. I couldn't sleep. I could remember a time where I went to take a shower,
and a man came into a shower and raped me. And he had a razor blade. And there was
nothing that I can do. When I went to the shelter staff to tell them what had happened
to me, they blamed me. They told me that I didn’t have to be there, that it was my
choice to live this lifestyle that I was living. And so, for me, having to have those experiences
is just a snapshot of what we have to go through, just to live. Most trans people would rather
sleep under a overpass, or in the park, than have to deal with that type of violence.
Hunter runs the Trans Women of Color Collective – to provide leadership and raise awareness
not only about current events, but historical ones as well.
We come from a rich legacy of revolutionary freedom fighters. Historically, those stories
have been erased from the history books.
What history remembers is the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising, the birthplace of today’s
gay rights movement.
A routine police raid on an unlicensed bar; The Stonewall Inn,
a gay bar in Greenwich Village.
But what’s been largely forgotten is the role transgender women played in kicking off
that movement. Activist Randy Wicker describes how there were restrictions against serving
alcohol to homosexuals in the 1960s, and…
Being in drag was illegal in those days. Dancing was permitted, although, of course, a white
light would come on if a policeman came and then you had to stop dancing or find a member
of the opposite sex to dance with. They really reached a point where they said,
"We're tired of this."
And so the next time the police raided, things took a different turn.
Suddenly the customers were giving the police a hard time.
For the first time, the clientele sort of fought back.
The protests lasted for days, and transgender people were among the hundreds who took part.
Transgender people were the most motivated to fight back because they had been abused
the worst by the system. But also the second thing they had nothing to lose. For them it
was a great opportunity to get up on the soapbox and really give it to society. What have you
been doing to us, you know? You’re so wrong.
One of the early icons in the fight for transgender rights was the late Sylvia Rivera.
Sylvia always thought of Stonewall as the beginning of her activism to make changes
in the world.
I was grateful to be there to see the revolution being born.
She really was the mother of the transgender movement.
Sylvia was a Puerto Rican street drag queen who, along with her friend, Marsha P. Johnson,
created Star House, a refuge for transgender runaways.
These kids were going to end up being just ground up by the system you know, not being
able to find jobs, being forced into prostitution. Sylvia and Marsha had lived it so they knew
what they were doing.
The survival instincts that made Rivera a fierce advocate were at odds, she said, with
a gay rights movement that was trying to establish a more conventional identity.
We do not fit into their role of Main Street gay men and women.
Rivera stormed the stage after being excluded from a 1973 gay rights rally in New York City’s
Washington Square Park. She demanded that transgender people be recognized as part of
the burgeoning lesbian and gay rights movement.
You all tell me, go and hide my tail between my legs.
I will no longer put up with this shit.
She was considered kind of disruptive and a loudmouth.
I believe in us getting our rights or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights.
Sylvia Rivera died in 2002. That same year, New York State passed a gay rights bill that,
despite Sylvia’s dying wishes, did not include protections for trans people.
Even on her deathbed, she fought for the rights of her people.
Across the country, in California, three years before Stonewall, a similar uprising had taken
place. It had mostly been forgotten, until historian Susan Stryker stumbled on an obscure
San Francisco gay magazine.
I found this beautiful document and I open it up and in the centerfold is this thing
that says "on a hot August night in 1966, Gays rose up.”
At Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24 hour diner popular with transgender women, another routine
police sweep erupted in spontaneous violence. Stryker made a film about the uprising.
A police car was destroyed, the corner newsstand was set on fire and years of pent up resentment
boiled out into the night.
It was the first collective militant action against police harassment that we know of
in US history by trans and queer people. The cops thought they were dealing with people
who were like the lowest rung of society.”
Decades of those kinds of attitudes have taken their toll on the estimated 700-thousand transgender
people in the U.S. About half are believed to be trans men, says Nick Adams, who works
for GLAAD, an LGBT advocacy organization. There isn’t a lot of statistical information
about the community, but it’s a diverse group. Adams says the focus now should be
on those most in need.
Visibility really needs to translate into legislative changes that make the world a
safer place for those transgender people who are really struggling.
When you don't have resources it makes you more susceptible to physical violence. Because
now you're disposable. No one cares about you.
Whatever people think is shocking about transgender people's lives is nothing compared to the
injustice that we have to face every freaking day.
Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan teaches in the English department at Barnard College
and has written a best selling memoir.
To be trans means to be visible. If you walk out your door it can mean you are at risk
for violence.
Many transgender people have been the targets of violent hate crimes. They're also at
greater risk for suicide -- as was the case of an Ohio transgender teen.
Alcorn’s suicide note ended with a plea. ‘My death needs to mean something. Fix society
please.’
What's shocking is that young people like Leelah Alcorn have to throw themselves in
front of a truck, rather than live their lives.
Transgender teens and adults say they routinely endure discrimination in employment, housing,
access to public bathrooms and government willingness to acknowledge their gender status
in official documents.
People fire us for being who we are.
The trans community has been left out of legislative advances by the gay community. Our gay and
lesbian counterparts moved on, and are celebrating life in ways that we have yet to experience.
The priority is not marriage - not for black trans women.
And while momentum now may be on the upswing, the movement that began nearly half a century
ago still has a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Silvia would be pissed the hell off that we're still fighting, and struggling,
and we're still dying.
We’ll know that our work is done when everyone can live the life that they love
with honor and dignity.