-In what’s being viewed as a watershed moment for the trans
community, the Oscar-nominated star of the movie “Juno” has come
out as transgender.
Transgender and nonbinary visibility has moved from the
margins into the mainstream.
-MJ, please stand up and let’s give
her the ovation that she deserves to hear.
But beyond the headlines, what does this mean for the average
transgender person?
-18 trans women of color killed this year alone.
-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 celebration.
-Every breath a trans person takes is an act of revolution.
Transgender people helped kick off the fight for gay equality, but their
fight for civil rights has been decades in the making.
-Trans lives matter!
Trans lives matter!
-We don't want anything other than our humanity.
-Getting out of the shower and the towel’s around your waist and
you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you’re just like,
there I am.
With celebrities like Elliot Page describing being born with a body
that didn’t match his internal sense of who he is . . .
- Elliot Page is living his truth.
. . . and transgender actresses Laverne Cox, Michaela Jae Rodriguez
and Indya Moore being celebrated by their peers, you might
think society has reached a new level of understanding.
But activist Lourdes Ashley Hunter-Fowler says
you would be mistaken.
-The community that I work for is wondering how they’re going to eat
tonight, wondering if they’re going to have health coverage, wondering
if they’re even going to make it back to the shelter where they’re staying.
In 2002, Hunter-Fowler 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, and sent to a men’s shelter, where she says she
was sexually assaulted.
-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,
um, a overpass or in the park
than have to deal with that type of violence.
Hunter-Fowler 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, um, 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 is, 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, you know, they 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 not, no longer put up with this.
-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 been mostly forgotten, until
historian Susan Stryker
stumbled on an obscure San Francisco gay magazine.
-I found this beautiful document and I open it up, and 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 U.S. history by trans and queer people.
The cops thought they were dealing with
people who were like the lowest rung of society.
That kind of attitude is something that trans people are still fighting
against today.
-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.
Transgender people are disproportionately the targets of
violent hate crimes.
Between 2017 and 2021, the number of trans
people murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled.
Transgender people are also at greater risk for suicide.
-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.
Over the past decade, there have been hard-fought victories to
protect the nation’s estimated 1.6 million transgender people,
including a landmark 2020 decision from the Supreme Court.
-A major decision on civil rights: The 1964 Civil Rights Act, that bans
discrimination based on race, religion and sex, also bans job
decisions because of sexual orientation and gender identity.
It was the kind of protection that trans people had spent decades
fighting for, but it was soon followed by a cultural backlash . . .
-Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.
. . . and a rollback of some rights that had seemed like a given.
-The transgender community in the United States is reeling as
Republican lawmakers and prominent conservative figures try
to curtail their rights.
A record number of bills relating to health care,
access to bathrooms, even drag performances.
Hundreds of bills restricting access to gender-affirming health care,
sports teams and bathrooms were introduced in nearly
every state in 2023.
Not all of them will become law, though dozens have passed.
-When there are laws that make it legal to
discriminate against trans people, it has a visceral effect on
our socioeconomic growth and development.
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.