22 Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Women Athletes Who Changed the Game

It’s a common misconception that the women’s sports world is a hotbed of lesbian activity. Like the sports world as a whole, women’s athletics have been dominated by the patriarchy and homophobia for basically ever. In recent years, dozens of women athletes have come out as gay and of course one very famous athlete came out as a trans woman, but this development is relatively new. Women who came out before the last few years risked everything to do so: their endorsements, their fans, their spots on their teams, their livelihoods, and sometimes even their own lives. Below are 22 lesbian, bisexual and trans women athletes who changed their games and changed the game for LGBTQ people by choosing to live openly.

Note: I’m not endorsing or making qualitative assessments of their overall personalities or actions — inclusion on this list does not mean all these women are heroes or angels or activists. The criteria is solely that they are LGBTQ and that they made a significant impact in both sports and queer culture. 

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Freda du Faur

Mountaineer

Freda Du Faur was the first female mountaineer in New Zealand, and in 1910, she became the first woman to climb Aoraki / Mount Cook. After her success, she refused to wear dresses or climb with chaperones. She wrote in her journal, “I was the first unmarried woman to climb in New Zealand, and in consequence I received all the hard knocks until one day when I awoke more or less famous in the mountaineering world, after which I could and did do exactly as seemed to me best.” Freda fell in love with her first climbing instructor, Muriel “Minnie” Cadogan, and the two lived together for 19 years until Muriel passed away.

Marion Barbara “Betty” “Joe” Carstairs

Speedboat racer

When reviewing her 1998 biography, The Queen Of Whale Cay, The New York Time called Carstairs “a cross-dressing lesbian who had tattoos on her arms, smoked expensive cigars, called herself Joe and was a world champion speedboat racer.” All true! But it gets better. Carstairs moved to Paris when she was 17 and had her first lesbian experience with Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s niece, about which she wrote: “My God, what a marvelous thing. I found it a great pity I’d waited so long.” Carstairs won the Duke of York’s Trophy, the Royal Motor Yacht Club’s international race, and the Lucina Cup. Then she bought her own island where she kept photographs of the 120 girlfriends who visited her there.

Lily Parr

Soccer

In 1921, the FA banned women from playing soccer on affiliated grounds in England because women were starting to draw bigger crowds than men, largely because of Lily Parr. Standing six feet tall, she started playing professional soccer when she was 14 after she took a munitions assembly job at Dick, Kerr & Co and joined their soccer team for ten schillings per game. She played against men and women and reportedly shot the ball harder than any man. When the women’s league was effectively banned in England, her team traveled to the United States to play exhibition games. Here, newspapers labeled her “the most brilliant female player in the world.” She lived openly as a lesbian with her partner, Mary, until she died of breast cancer in 1978.

Helen Stephens

Track and Field

Helen Stephens reportedly never lost a sprint race in her entire life, including the two gold medal races she won in the 1936 Olympics. During her life, she held world records in the 50 meters, 100 meters, 220 meters, shot-put, and standing long jump. She also played professional basketball on a team she owned and managed. Stephens was good friends with Jesse Owens, running in exhibition races with him before the Olympics in Berlin. Sharon Kinney Hanson’s biography, The Life of Helen Stephens: The Fulton Flash, explores her complicated relationship with her own lesbianism. She never came out of the closet. She was, however, instrumental in protesting the IOC’s gender testing methods, which she was subjected to after setting a world record in 1936.

Roberta Cowell

Autoracing

Roberta Cowell is the first known British person to undergo gender confirmation surgery, which she did in 1948 after she came out as a trans woman and met her life partner, Lisa. Roberta had been a celebrated auto-racer before leaving the sport to become a fighter pilot during World War II. She returned to it after the war and after coming out, racing into the early ’60s, and owning fast cars with big personalities for the rest of her life.

Jackie Silva

Volleyball

In the 1996 summer Olympics, Jackie Silvia won the gold medal for Brazil in the inaugural women’s beach volleyball tournament. But that wasn’t her first Olympics. Playing for the national indoor team, she helped take Brazil to their first Olympics in 1980 at the age of 14, and then again in 1984. In 2014, Silva married her partner of ten years, dancer Amália Lima.

Babe Didrikson

Literally Every Sport on Earth

Lots of sports historians consider Babe Didrikson to be the greatest athlete of all time. She played golf, basketball, baseball, tennis, billiards, and ran track and field. She won two gold and one silver medal in the 1932 Olympics, breaking the world record in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin. Then she started her own professional women’s basketball league, which she called Babe Didrikson’s All-Americans basketball. After traveling around the country doing that for a while, she decided to learn to play golf. She did. And she won 10 major LPGA championships. It was on the golf circuit that she met Betty Dodd, who, despite Didrikson’s marriage, became her lover and lifelong partner. Dodd was with her until the day she died.

Megan Rapinoe

Soccer

Megan Rapinoe was one of the first popular athletes of the modern sports age to come right out of the closet without apologies. She did so right before the 2012 Olympics in an interview with Out, and then helped lead the USWNT to a gold medal. She also starred on the 2015 team that won the FIFA Women’s World Cup. She’s been nominated for dozens of soccer awards, inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame, and recognized for her philanthropy and volunteer work, especially with LGBTQ organizations. Rapinoe made evem more headlines in 2016 when she knelt for the national anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick before a NWSL game.

Billie Jean King

Tennis

Billie Jean King is regarded by many historians and sports writers as the greatest women’s tennis player of all time, although she’s hinted in the last few years that she thinks Serena Williams actually owns that title. She won 39 Grand Slams; founded the Women’s Tennis Association as a pushback against the gender pay gap in the sport; and, perhaps most famously, defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes in 1973. She’s been Sports Illustrated‘s Sportsman of the Year, Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and won a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The WTA trophy is called The Billie Jean King Trophy. The USTA tennis center in New York City where the U.S. Open is played is called the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. King was outed in 1981 by her girlfriend, Marilyn Barnett; after losing all her endorsements in a single day, she called the relationship a mistake and went back into the closet. She began a relationship with her doubles (and now life) partner, Ilana Kloss, in 1987 and ultimately came out and became as relentless an advocate for LGBT rights as she always has been for gender equality.

Brittney Griner

Basketball

At Baylor University, Brittney Griner became the first basketball player in NCAA history to score 2,000 points and block 500 shots, stats that propelled her to three All-American titles, an ESPY, and AP’s Player of the Year award. They also led to her being the first pick in the 2013 WNBA draft. Griner came out right after the draft in Sports Illustrated, saying, “It’s hard. Just being picked on for being different. Just being bigger, my sexuality, everything.” She’s been to the WNBA all-star game four times, won a WNBA championship, and this year she led the league in scoring.

Martina Navratilova

Tennis

Another lesbian, another contender for greatest women’s tennis player of all time. Martina Navratilova played professional tennis for four decades and holds records for being ranked the world’s number one player in singles and doubles at the same time (over 200 weeks each). She won 18 singles Grand Slams and 31 doubles Grand Slams. Navratilova came out in the New York Daily News in 1981, after becoming a U.S. citizen. In 2014 she married her longtime girlfriend, Julia Lemigova, after proposing to her at the U.S. Open.

Renee Richards

Tennis

Dr. Renée Richards was a professional tennis player in the ’70s. After coming out as trans and undergoing gender confirmation surgery, Richards was denied entry into the 1976 US Open. She took the case to the New York Supreme Court and won. Judge Alfred M. Ascione ruled: “This person is now a female.” Ascione called the Barr body test, which the USTA wanted Richards to pass to play, “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and a violation of her rights.” Richards is one of the first openly trans athletes and was an outspoken advocate for trans equality in sports for decades, even after she left the tennis circuit to become an ophthalmologist.

Sarah Vaillancourt

Hockey

Sarah Vaillancourt, who spent ten years on the Canadian women’s national hokey team roster, won two Olympic gold medals, a gold medal in the World Championships, and four silver World Championship medals. A nice addition to the Patty Kazmaier Award and the Ivy League Hockey Player of the Year Award she won at Harvard. Vaillancourt came out during her time there, telling a reporter later: “There were other gay girls on the team, but no one ever talked about it or went on about it. I came in and was like, ‘I’m into girls,’ ‘I think this girl’s hot,’ and that’s just how it is. Some of the girls were traumatized, but now when we have reunions, we laugh about it.”

Abby Wambach

Soccer

Abby Wambach is one of the most celebrated soccer players in history. With 184 goals to her name, she’s the highest all-time goal scorer in international soccer (for both men and women). She played on the USWNT for 13 years and took home FIFA World Player of the Year honors in 2012. She has two Olympic gold medals and a FIFA Women’s World Cup. She was the first soccer player to receive the Associated Press’ Athlete of the Year award. Wabach married teammate and longtime girlfriend Sarah Huffman in 2013, telling reporters at the time that she’d never felt the need to come out of the closet because she was never in the closet. After their marriage ended, Wambach married “Christian mommy blogger” Glennon Doyle Melton.

Diana Nyad

Swimming

In 1975 Diana Nyad swam around Manhattan. In 1979 she swam from The Bahamas to Florida. When she was 64 years old, in 2013, she became the first person in history to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Not long after, she won the ESPN Sports Science Newton Award for Outstanding New Limit and was named by Marie Claire as participating in one of the 8 Greatest Moments for Women in Sports. (Billie Jean King also made that list.) Nyad has spoken repeatedly about how her journey into competitive swimming started because she was trying to overcome the anger she felt from being sexually assaulted, beginning when she was 14 years old by her swimming coach.

After her historic swim from Cuba, Nyad talked about coming out in her 20s: “The president of ABC News and Sports used to have a lunch every Wednesday and I’d take my girlfriend and people would pull me aside and tell me not to. But if you said to me today, ‘You would have been the next Diane Sawyer but you’d have to totally closet that whole gay life and be out about town with a nice-looking guy’, I’d say, ‘Not in a million years, never.'”

Seimone Augustus

Basketball

From the moment she walked onto the court at LSU, where she went to three Final Fours and won two Wooden Awards, Seimone Augustus has been a superstar. Actually, she was a superstar before that. In high school Sports Illustrated For Women called her the next Michael Jordan. Rightly so. After being drafted first in 2006, she’s won four WNBA titles with the Lynx, played in seven all-star games, and been named one of the league’s 20 best all-time players. Oh, right, and she has two Olympic gold medals. In 2012, when Minnesota’s election included a referendum to ban gay marriage in the state, she came out, saying: “Everyone thinks that the WNBA is one big lesbo party anyway.” When she married her longtime girlfriend, LaTaya Varner, she wrote a beautiful essay in the Players’ Tribune called “It Is So Ordered” and it is 100% guaranteed to make you cry.

Gigi Fernández

Tennis

Tennis superstar Gigi Fernández was the first Puerto Rican-born athlete to win an Olympic gold medal. In fact, she and her doubles partner, Mary Joe Fernández Godsick, won two. The first in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the second in 1996 in Atlanta. She also won 17 Grand Slam doubles titles in her career. She is married to former LPGA superstar Jane Geddes and is, to this day, an outspoken advocate for LGBT and racial equality, recently going in on notoriously anti-gay tennis legend Margaret Court on Twitter and remaining a critic of the Trump administration, particularly in the face of Puerto Rico’s recent humanitarian crisis after Hurricane Maria.

Caitlyn Jenner

Decathlon

Caitlyn Jenner is likely the most famous trans person in history. Her coming out was covered by media outlets all over the world and witnessed by millions of people, many of whom watched her reality series I Am Cait which included crossovers with the Kardashians and even a guest visit by Kanye West. Jenner, of course, won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, breaking her own world record for a third time in the process. Jenner is the quintessential Wheaties box athlete and was the first American to take a victory lap with the flag after winning an Olympic event.

Ireen Wüst

Speedskating

Of the 110 medals the Netherlands have won at the Olympic Winter Games, 105 of them have come from speed skating. Ireen Wüst brought home eight of them. And she’s not done yet. She was the youngest Olympic medalist from the Netherlands at just 19 and she’s got her eyes set on PyeongChang in 2018. She’s won so many world championships and European championships that Reuters elected her Sportswoman of the World in 2014. Wüst has been one of only a handful of openly gay athletes competing in the last few Olympics, something that brought her even bigger attention than usual in Sochi in 2014 due to Russia’s anti-LGBT laws/state sponsored propaganda. She was the first gay athlete to medal at those games, and ultimately won five medals, making her one of the most decorated athletes of the Russian games.

Natasha Kai

Soccer

Natasha Kai was one of the first U.S. Olympians to come out, which she did casually in an interview with NBCOlympics.com in 2008 by mentioning that was going through a breakup with her girlfriend. As one of only three out athletes on the U.S. Olympic team in Beijing, she helped the USWNT bring home the gold medal that summer, scoring the winning goal in overtime to lead the U.S. past Canada in the quarterfinals. As with her sexuality, Kai never shied away from talking about the pressure of playing soccer at the highest level. Last year she wrote a powerful, candid essay for Vox called The dark side of being an Olympic athlete: it’s a roller-coaster ride.

Nicola Adams

Boxing

In 2012, British boxer Nicola Adams became the first woman to win an Olympic boxing title. In 2016, she won another gold. It had been her dream since she was a little girl, a decade before women’s boxing was even considered as an Olympic event and at a time when her asthma was so bad her doctor told her mom not to let her run. After winning her first professional match last year, she proposed to her girlfriend, Mexican-American boxer Marlen Esparza. You should do yourself a favor and read The Guardian’s profile of Adams, which includes this glorious paragraph:

Esparza is with her today, advising her on the photoshoot, telling her how hot she looks. The pair seem deliriously in love; and theirs must be one of the most romantic stories in the history of boxing. In her new autobiography, Believe, Adams says that when she was first introduced to Esparza, she was so taken by her she could not speak – nor the second time they met. The third time, she couldn’t stop talking. While Adams is having her photograph taken, Esparza tells me this is all true; that when they met she thought Adams was plain weird. But not for long.

Sheryl Swoopes

Basketball

These days you can’t turn around without seeing a WNBA player come out, but when Sheryl Swoopes did it in 2005 it was a bombshell that absolutely rocked the sports world. Swoopes was the first player to sign with the WNBA, after leading the 1996 Olympic team to a gold medal in Atlanta. She was the most known and most recognizable women’s basketball player in the entire world for decades. She even had Nikes named after her. Sheryl Swoopes wasn’t a basketball player; she was the basketball player, the one on whom women’s professional basketball put its hopes and dreams when it toured around the country in 1995 trying to get people excited enough to support the women who would ultimately make up the WNBA. In total she won three Olympic gold medals, the Naismith Award, four WNBA championships (and dozens of individual WNBA awards), and has already been inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

When she came out, she told ESPN: “It doesn’t change who I am. I can’t help who I fall in love with. No one can … Discovering I’m gay just sort of happened much later in life. Being intimate with [Alisa Scott] or any other woman never entered my mind. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that when you fall in love with somebody, you can’t control that.”

Swoopes’ relationship with Scott ended in 2011 and in 2017 she married her male partner, Chris Unclesho. Much has been written about Swoopes’ decision to call herself a lesbian and not bisexual during her relationship with Scott, but as is always the case with these discussions, queer language is constantly evolving and never precise and everyone’s decisions are informed in real-time by their own experiences. The fact that remains is that Swoopes risked as much coming out in the sports world in 2005 as Ellen did coming out in the TV world in 1996. She changed everything.

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A Reminder Note: I’m not endorsing or making qualitative assessments of their overall personalities or actions — inclusion on this list does not mean all these women are heroes or angels or activists. The criteria is solely that they are LGBTQ and that they made a significant impact in both sports and queer culture.

22 Women Who Came Out Or Got Girlfriends In 2015

Another year, another batch of newly-minted queers helping the world gradually understand that it’s only a matter of time before everybody is gay. That’s right: everybody. 

This year’s coming out stories happened with much less fanfare than in years past, and a majority of the people on this list didn’t even make an official coming out statement, they just casually entered into a public same-sex relationship and waited for the world to notice. We’ve also finally gotten to a place in Hollywood, at least, where calling a spade a spade (e.g., acknowledging a same-sex relationship exists just as easily as we would an opposite-sex relationship) isn’t considered defamatory enough to warrant outrage.

Oddly, some of this year’s biggest coming out stories came from people who the community-at-large has very mixed feelings about — a pop star with a rocky history of racial appropriation and disregard, a reality TV star who rose to fame by placing her infant daughter in child beauty pageants, and a transgender woman who endorses a political party that advocates against her community’s best interests (amongst other sins).

Without any further ado, here are the 21 women and one gender-fluid person who came out in 2015!

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January

Stephanie Allynne, Actress / Comedian

Allyne identified as straight when she met Tig Notaro on the set of In a World. But as they described in the documentary Tig, which came out in July, what developed between them transcended Allynne’s prior conception of her own sexual orientation. Although their relationship wasn’t a secret, it became common knowledge on January 1st, when Notaro announced that the pair had been engaged for 53 minutes and so far, it was going very well. Allyne is a member of the Los Angeles Upright Citizens Brigade and an experienced comedian who has appeared on shows including Comedy Bang Bang, 2 Broke Girls, The Mindy Project, Key & Peele, Maron, and Kroll Show.

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February

Patricia Velásquez, Actress / Model

Although rumors about supermodel and actress Patricia Velásquez had been swirling since her relationship with Sandra Bernhard in the early ’90s, the woman considered by many to be “the first Latina supermodel” made it official in February with the release of her memoir, Straight Walk.

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Ali Liebert, Actress

She made you swoon playing gay babe Betty McRae in Bomb Girls, and then she made you swoon playing another gay babe in Lost Girl… and THEN she made you swoon again this year when she went public with her relationship with her girlfriend Charlie. Interestingly, she also appeared briefly in The L Word, as did the aforementioned Patricia Velásquez.

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Halsey, Musician

This past February, Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, known as “Halsey” to her fans, identified herself as a mixed race bisexual woman on Twitter. Frangipane has also been open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, describing herself in an interview with Billboard magazine as an “unconventional child” and an “inconvenient woman.”

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April

Ruby Tandoh, Chef

Ruby Tandoh made it to the final round of The Great British Bake-Off, writes about food for The Guardian and, in April, came out as a very funny gay lady.

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Angel McCoughtry, WNBA Player

Atlanta Dream hoopster McCoughtry came out on Instagram, sharing a photograph of herself and her fiancée, declaring, “I understand we all judge and its in human nature, but the more i speak to God i never feel judgement front he man upstairs, even tho he has all the power too! He tells me to fall, learn, and grow because thats life. But to always keep my heart pure and believe totally in him. All i know love is a great feeling and GOD is Love.”

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Kendra Fisher, Hockey Player

Fisher, an elite ice hockey goalie for Canada, was already out in her private life, but spoke openly about her lesbian identity for the first time at the Canadian Olympic Committee’s #OneTeam round table. “There’s this assumption that it’s not necessary for women in sports in particular to come out publicly,” she said. “It’s failing to understand the importance of having the conversation and being in that place. I came through in a generation when the transition of being gay was just supposed to happen quietly. I started a relationship with a woman and it just wasn’t talked about. Only in having conversations with people have I realized the need for me to talk about this.”

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Faustina “Fuzzy” Allogey, TV Personality

Fuzzy Agolley, an Australian TV personality who co-hosts The Voice Australia and co-hosted Video Hits for five years, came out on her blog in celebration of her 31st birthday. “As black as my skin, as Chinese as my blood, and as Australian and British are my nationalities, I’m also a proud Gay Woman,” she wrote. “Most importantly though, I’m a happy human being.”

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Pumpkin & Mama June, Reality TV Stars

Pumpkin and her mother, Mama June, of the TV show Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, came out as bisexual on Inside Edition this past April.

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Caitlyn Jenner, Athlete & TV Personality

This was the big coming out story of 2015 — the Olympic hero, lifelong Republican, reality television star and lapsed member of the Kardashian clan came out as transgender on Diane Sawyer after decades of speculation.

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May

Ursula Halligan, Journalist

As the vote on marriage equality in Ireland drew closer, 55-year-old prominent broadcast journalist Ursula Halligan came out publicly in an op-ed. She called on religious communities to support the measure and shed light on how homophobia had impacted her.

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Miley Cyrus, Musician

Although the headline of this article indicates that this is a list of “women,” Miley Cyrus does not identify as a woman; she identifies as gender-fluid. 

In a series of interviews and announcements beginning in May 2015, problematic pop star Miley Cyrus came out as pansexual and genderfluid, and revealed that she’d come out to her mother as bisexual at the age of 14. She recalled being the go-to hookup for other “sexually curious” girls as a teenager and having prior relationships with women. Although she’s lately been more interested in relationships with women or non-binary folks, she told TIME Magazine that “If I end up in a straight relationship, that’s fine — but I’m not going to be with f—ing slob guys who are watching porn, making all their girls feel ugly.”

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Tatum O’Neal, Actress

Tatum O’Neal, the youngest actress to ever win an Academy Award (in 1974, for Paper Moon), told People magazine that she’s loving the ladies these days, saying that “I like women. I definitely have been dating mostly women recently.” Regarding her sexuality, O’Neal says, “I’m not one or the other.” Since that time, rumors have swirled regarding her alleged relationship with lesbian pioneer Rosie O’Donnell.

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Rosie Perez, Actress

In a speech for the Trevor Project Live in June, Rosie Perez revealed that she had a lesbian relationship in junior high school, which makes her luckier than most of us. “All I wanted to do was hump her. And I suppressed the urge and suppressed the urge and suppressed the urge until Michelle one day started humping on me.” Perez says she is not “lesbian, gay or whatever” but rather “quasi-straight,” and that she wishes she’d had somebody to talk to during her relationship with Michelle: “If I had other people, specifically adults, if I was just able to call up and they said, ‘Oh, I humped the Michelle-type person, too. You’re normal, don’t worry.”

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Danielle Brooks, Actress

The Julliard graduate and Orange is the New Black star was open about her relationship with filmmaker Nneka Onuorah, which ended mid-year. Does she like girls forever? Will she date another girl? Will that girl be you? Maybe, maybe not! We’ll see!

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June

Ingrid Nilsen, YouTube Personality

YouTube star Ingrid Nilsen came out in — where else? — a tearjerking YouTube video in which she talks about struggling with her sexuality growing up in an enivronment where it wasn’t okay to be gay. The community met her with open arms, as did fellow queer YouTuber Hannah Hart, who is now Ingrid’s girlfriend!

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Ramona Bachmann, Swiss Soccer Player

In an interview at The World Cup, 24-year-old soccer player Ramona Bachmann told Swiss Publicaiton Blick, “I’m very open. I do not care if someone is with a man or a woman. In Sweden we deal with this issue fortunately also very open and easy.” She also revealed that she is currently in a lesbian relationship with a 21-year-old student named Camille Lara, who she frequently featured on her instagram account.

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July

Janae Marie Kroc, Weightlifter

World champion powerlifter Janae Marie Kroc came out as a “Transgender/genderfluid Alpha male/girly girl Lesbian in a male body” in July.

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August

Kristen Stewart, Actress

Broody lesbian crush object Kristen Stewart became the first celebrity in coming out history to be outed by her mother, in June, but the actress didn’t more-or-less publicly confirm her mother’s claim until a Nylon Magazine interview in August. After having her sexual orientation be a subject of speculation for basically her entire career, the revelation barely made a splash. Stewart herself downplayed its importance in a statement reflective of a growing acceptance in Hollywood (while ignorant of a lack of acceptance elsewhere), stating, “I think in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or straight. It’s like, just do your thing.”

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Lily-Rose Depp, Actress / Model

The 16-year-old French-American actress and model, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, appeared in i0 Tillett Wright’s “Self Evident Truths” project, a “a photographic document of 10000 people in the USA that identify as ANYTHING OTHER than 100% straight.”

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November

Holland Taylor, Actress

Although Taylor was not, to the best of our awareness (which is pretty aware!), an out lesbian, she said she’d always “lived out” in an interview with WYNC for a podcast this past November. But now that she’s fallen madly in love with Sarah Paulson (it happens), the truth is definitely out for real — Taylor, at the age of 72, is a lady-loving lady.

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December

Jill Soloway

Although Soloway has long been immersed in the queer community and has a transgender parent and a lesbian sister, she told The Advocate in 2014 that she still identified as straight (although that may be changing). In a profile published in The New Yorker this winter, Soloway went public about falling in love with somebody I have also been in love with for quite some time: poet and author Eileen Myles. Mazel tov!

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KeKe Palmer, Actress & Singer

This is a late-add to the list, as the actress/singer revealed to People Magazine on Deember 16th that she does not want to label her sexuality, which means she’s not straight! Hurrah! The revelation came after rumors related to her lesbilicious music video with Cassie and snapchat photos of her and Cassie kissing. MERRY CHRISTMAS, WORLD!

Kicking Off Trans Awareness Week, the Trans Stories of the Past Year, Recapped

It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.

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It’s November 14, and the first day of Trans Awareness Week. Awareness, at its most basic level, is just knowing what is happening in the world of trans people, or in our case, mostly specifically trans women. So to start the week off, I’m going to take a look back at some of the trans news, coverage and stories that we’ve featured in the past year.

Not every trans story from the past year is going to be featured here, there are tons of trans women and I’m just one person. The point of this list is just to provide a cursory glance at the lives of trans people and the trans coverage we’ve had here on Autostraddle in the past year, so please forgive me if I miss a few things.

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November

30th – Amazon Prime’s Emmy winning show about a transgender woman, Transparent, hired Our Lady J as its first trans staff writer.

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December

5th – Just two short weeks after Trans Day of Rememberance 2014, another Black trans woman was murdered. Her name was Deshawnda Sanchez.

12th – With issue #37, Batgirl undid the good faith they had built with trans fans. The comic had featured Alysia Yeoh, one of the first trans characters in  mainstream comics, but in this issue they relied on tired transmisogynistic stereotypes with their villain and even had Batgirl herself shout out “you’re a man” when she pulled off the villain’s wig. The creative team was quick to apologize, though, reached out to trans women to figure out how they could do better, and even changed the issue for the trade paperback. Way to step up.

19th – New York State decided to start including trans healthcare in their state Medicaid coverage.

22nd – A group of trans women of color were featured on the cover of Candy Magazine, and reminded us that living as a TWOC is a radical act. Some of the trans women featured include Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Geena Rocero, Isis King, Juliana Huxtable and Gisele and Carmen Xtravaganza.

30th – 17 year old trans girl Leelah Alcorn committed suicide, sparking a national conversation about how dangerous so-called reparative therapy is for trans youth.

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January

6th – Trans Lifeline, a suicide for and staffed by trans people, is here to help you out.

7th – If you want to read about a badass trans blacksmith, you can read Willow Zietman talk about her life.

8th – B. Binaohan ruminated on listening to living trans women and #JusticeForLeelahAlcorn.

9th – Papi Edwards, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Louisville, Kentucky.

13th – We wrote about Witchy, a webcomic about Asian witches who get magic from their hair. And it co-stars a teenage trans witch of color.

13th – Incarcerated trans woman LeslieAnn Manning sued New York State after being raped in prison.

14th – Madeleine Flores talked about her new comic Help Us! Great Warrior, which features a TWOC as a co-star.

17th – Lamia Beard became the second Black trans woman murdered in just eight days when she was killed in Norfolk, Virginia.

26th – For the third time in less than three weeks, a Black trans woman was murdered. This time it’s Ty Underwood in Tyler, Texas.

29th – We interviewed Londyn Smith de Richelieu about appearing on Love Thy Sister.

31st – Yazmin Vash Payne, from Los Angeles, became the fourth trans woman of color murdered in the US in January.

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February

1st – Just one day after Yazmin Vash Payne was murdered, another TWOC, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, was murdered in San Francisco.

3rd – I asked if Image comics, with at least four trans women characters, is doing trans women’s representation better than anyone else.

10th – Penny Proud was murdered in New Orleans, becoming at least the 6th trans woman murdered this year.

12th – Bryn Mawr widened its admission guidelines to allow trans women.

16th – Kristina Gomez Reinwald was murdered in Miami. At this point, a trans woman of color is being murdered about once a week in the US.

17th – Sera from Angela: Asgard’s Assassin and later, 1602: Witchhunter Angela and Angela: Queen of Hel is the closest thing we have to a trans superhero at this point.

21st – HUD told homeless shelters to stop discriminating against trans people.

22nd – Sumaya Dalmar, a Somali-Canadian trans woman, was murdered in Toronto.

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March

1st – Charges against Monica Jones, a Black trans woman, were finally dropped after she was initially convicted of “manifesting prostitution,” a crime many trans advocates referred to as “walking while trans.”

7th – Keyshia Blige, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Aurora, Illinois.

8th – Wellesley College opened its doors to trans women.

10th – Mari watched the movie Boy Meets Girl, about a bisexual trans women played by a trans woman actor, and liked it a lot.

13th – Trans teenager Jazz Jennings starred in a commercial and got her own reality show on TLC.

17th – As a transgender lesbian, I take up two letters in LGBT and I don’t want to have to choose a side.

18th – Raquel Willis talked about the “tragic” humanity of Black trans women.

23rd – In Boise, Idaho, DW Trantham, a transgender girl, stood up to angry and transmisogynistic parents who withdrew their daughter from school because DW was allowed to use the girl’s bathroom.

30th – Mya Hall, a Black trans woman with a history of mental illness, was shot by NSA security when she drives into a security checkpoint.

31st – Here are 18 songs by trans artists and bands with trans musicians in them.

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April

2nd – The 2015 Trans 100 was announced and I talked to the women on the list about how we can all support trans women.

7th – As capitalizing on the stories of trans women started becoming a media trend, a bunch of TV shows about and starring trans women were announced.

8th – Discovery Life aired a trans docuseries called New Girls on the Block about a group of trans women living in Kansas City.

25th – In an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC, Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman, making her the most famous trans person in the US. Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out is probably the biggest trans news story of the year alongside the terrifying and tragic record number of reported murders of trans women, almost all of whom have been trans women of color.

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May

4th – Janet Mock was absolutely amazing on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday.

4th – Smith College, a women’s college, will start accepting trans women.

15th – In a very unsurprising article, Audrey writes about how trans women prisoners suffer most from failures to stop prison rape.

18th – ABC Family’s show Becoming Us isn’t exactly the transgender reality show we hoped it would be.

18th – After a whole month(!) without any reported murders of trans women in the US, London Chanel was murdered in Philadelphia.

30th – Mercedes Williamson, from Rocky Creek, Alabama, became the second trans woman murdered this month and at least the 10th this year.

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June

1st – While we were up at A-Camp, Caitlyn Jenner made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair.

1st – A crack team of A-Camp staffers put together this list of 16 ways to make queer women’s spaces more friendly to trans women.

8th – Barnard College, a women’s college in New York City, announced that it will start accepting trans women!

8th – Luna Merbruja and Lexi Adsit talked to us about their TWOC storytelling revolution, Brouhaha.

12th – Caitlyn Jenner is a Pretty Big Deal on the internet, here’s what we said about how we’re going to cover her.

21st – Mari talked about how she rebuilt her relationship with her father after coming out for Autostraddle Plus.

22 – The Autostraddle staff watched the Netflix series Sense8, co-starring Jamie Clayton, a trans woman, and co-created by Lana Wachowski, another trans woman. We had very mixed feelings on it.

23rd – Jasmine Collins, a Black trans woman, is murdered in Kansas City, Missouri.

29th – US Immigration officials released a memo saying that they plan on improving their placement and treatment of trans immigrants in their detention centers, but the fight for justice for these immigrants isn’t over.

30th – The Girl Scouts of Western Washington turned down a $100,000 donation because it was given on the condition that they exclude trans girls.

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July

6th – Maddie showed you how to talk to your parents about being better trans allies if you’re cis.

13th – I watched Tangerine, a film starring two trans women of color, and liked it a lot.

14th – Ashton O’Hara was murdered in Detroit. His (reports say he identifies as a trans woman and used he/him pronouns) murder is the beginning of the second huge wave of murders of TWOC in America this year.

15th – Caitlyn Jenner is awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2015 ESPY awards.

16th- Porcelain, a character in Gail Simone’s Secret Six, is shown to be genderfluid.

21st – One week after Ashton O’Hara is murdered, India Clarke was murdered in Tampa, Florida. Just over halfway through the year, more trans women had been murdered than we know were murdered in 2014.

23rd – K.C. Haggard was murdered in Fresno.

29th – Shade Schuler was murdered in Dallas, making her the third trans woman murdered in nine days.

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August

6th – Lexi Adsit writes a terrific list of 24 actions needed to help trans women of color survive in a time when more are being murdered than ever before.

8th – Amber Monroe was the second Black trans woman murdered in Detroit in less than a month.

10th – Miss Major absolutely shuts down that horrible Stonewall movie’s version of one of the first major events of America’s LGBTQ history.

11th – Kicking off a week where three trans women of color are found murdered, Kandis Capri was killed in Phoenix.

13th – The body of Elisha Walker was discovered in Smithfield, North Carolina. She went missing late last year.

15th – Tamara Dominguez was the second trans woman of color murdered in Kansas City, Missouri this year. Four trans women of color have been found murdered in the first half of August.

19th – The director of About Ray, a new movie starring Elle Fanning as a young transgender boy, seems to not quite understand what a trans boy is.

20th – The White House hired its first openly trans staffer, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who will serve as Outreach and Recruitment Director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.

26th – Issue #17 of Lumberjanes came out, where Jo, one of the main characters, talks about being a transgender girl. This is one of the best comic issues of the year and makes Jo the first transgender girl of color to star in a popular all-ages comic.

26th – Morgan Collado wrote about her experience watching Tangerine and how it seems like the only time trans women of color get to have our stories told is when we’re experiencing trauma.

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September

4th – The White House announced that it would start requiring insurers to cover transgender healthcare.

8th – I interviewed Jen Richards, Angelica Ross and Laura Zak about their upcoming webseries Her Story, about two trans women (played by Richards and Ross) who enter into new relationships, one with a man, one with a woman. It looks really amazing!

22nd – Gabby Bellot wrote this terrific essay about how to write about trans women.

24th – Maddie wrote about the mistreatment of queer and trans immigrants in “GBT pods.”

24th – Beth interviewed Blacksmith Willow Zietman about her awesome metalwork business.

29th – I interviewed Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, two producers from Transparent, about their terrific docuseries This is Me.

30th – Law and Order aired its attempt at a Very Special Trans Episode. I, and other trans people, were not very pleased.

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October

6th – Keisha Jenkins, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Philadelphia. She was at least the 20th trans woman murdered this year and the 2nd murdered in Philadelphia.

8th – Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton met with activists including Cherno Biko and discussed the murders of trans women of color, which she called a “national crisis.”

8th – California became the first US state to officially ban the use of “trans panic” defenses in court.

11th – Diane Rodriguez, a trans activist from Ecuador, announced that her boyfriend, Fernando Machado, is pregnant with her child. Congratulations!

13th – Argentinean trans activist Diana Sacayán was found murdered in her apartment in Buenos Aires. She worked with LGBT rights groups like Movimento Antidiscriminatorio de Liberación and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.

13th – CJ Bruce wrote about how Ch4’s docuseries “Girls to Men” mistreated, mislead and misused them.

15th – Samantha Azzarano, a former Walmart sales associate in New Jersey, sued her manager and the company for harassment. After she came out as trans, Sheena Wyckoff, the manager, started calling her trans slurs, yelling at her and writing her up without reason.

15th – Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, announced that it will provide full health benefits to trans employees starting in January 2016.

15th – Zella Ziona, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She’s at least the 21st trans woman to be murdered in the US this year. According to police reports, she was murdered because she “began acting flamboyantly” and “greatly embarrassed” one of her friends in front of his peers.

19th – I tried to make a list of the 10 Best Cities for Trans Women and found out that no such list exists.

21st – Lee Daniels is creating a new show for Fox called Star that’s about a hip-hop girl group with four female leads. One of those leads will be an Afro-Latina trans woman, and the casting call is specifically looking for trans actors. This will be the first time a trans woman of color will be a lead character on a prime-time network show.

22nd – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would extend the New York State Human Rights Law to protect trans people.

24th – Bestselling YA author James Dawson came out as a trans woman.

24th – Reina Gossett talked with Grace Dunham about transphobia, activism, empathy and violence.

27th – Drew wrote about her experiences trying to find self-love and embracing her natural hair as a Black trans woman.

28th – Legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera became the first trans person to have a portrait in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

30th – How to Get Away With Murder had maybe the best Very Special Trans Episode ever.

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November

1st – Anry Fuentes, a trans girl in California, made her school’s varsity cheerleading squad after being kicked out of her home by her mom.

1st – MTV’s show Faking It announced that they were looking for trans actors for the upcoming 3rd season.

2nd – The Office of Civil Rights releases a report saying that a school in Illinois violated a trans girl’s Title IX rights when it refused her access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

3rd – Voters in Houston showed their transmisogynistic side when they voted down the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which would have protected not only LGBTQ people, but also other protected classes like race and sex. HERO failed to pass largely because of commercials targeting trans women, claiming that the law would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms where they could assault bathroom users. Men going into women’s bathrooms and assaulting people would, of course, still be illegal, and trans women aren’t men, nor are there widespread (or really any) reports of trans women assaulting people in bathrooms, but this vote showed that transmisogyny is indeed a successful political strategy.

4th – Tangerine and Drunktown’s Finest, two movies starring trans women of color (Drunktown’s Finest was also written and directed by one) are available to watch online!

5th – Janet Mock marries Aaron Tredwell in what was probably one of the most beautiful weddings ever.

9th – The Out 100 honored trans women including Caitlyn Jenner, Candis Cayne, Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez of Tangerine, Hari Nef, Juliana Huxtable, Bamby Salcedo, Breanna Sinclairé, Jennicet Gutiérrez, Andreja Pejic and Jen Richards.

14th – The Bring Your Own Body exhibit ends in New York City. In this exhibit, trans artists showed their work alongside a selection of archival documents exploring the history of trans people’s lived experiences.

2015 OUT 100 Honors Roxane Gay, Abby Wambach, Hannah Hart, Other Women You Have Crushes On

The Out 100, an annual celebration of glamorously-photographed queer excellence, debuted today with a pretty rad assortment of LGBTQ folks. In the past, the Out 100 was notorious for not only skewing wildly white and male but for always putting straight cis people on the cover. However, the straight-cover-star years appear to be behind us, and this year’s list has quite a lot of women, trans folks and people of color. (Some of your favorites don’t show up ’cause you got them last year, like Samira Wiley, Ellen Page, Lena Waithe and Evan Rachel Wood.)

99 of the Out 100 honorees are now available for your appreciation at their website. #100, their cover star, will be unveiled tomorrow. It’s not me, in case you’re wondering. I mean, it might be me, but it’s probably not me. I feel like it’s gonna be Laverne Cox. Who wants to put money on it.

The Out 100 Press Release emphasized that Caitlyn Jenner has been honored as Newsmaker of the Year. This feels like an accurate assessment as Caitlyn Jenner did, indeed, make a great deal of news this year.

Other women earning high honors include:

Carrie Brownstein

She of Portlandia, Transparent, Sleater-Kinney and your sexual dreams, is Artist of the Year. She just wrote a book called Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, I bet you’d like it.

“There’s always been a strain of humility in my work, a relationship to what is awkward and the ways I feel like I don’t belong. I don’t value a way of living that protects me from grit and dirtiness and messiness.”

Abby Wambach

She just retired much to our collective sadness and is OUT’s Athlete of the Year:

“I feel so lucky, because when I was first on the team, there were really no gay people. The girls were like, ‘No, we’re straight.’ They had long hair and ponytails. And now you see this eclectic group of people from all different places, who are different colors, with different preferences. That’s the thing I’m most proud of.”

Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza is the co-founder of Black Lives Matter and special projects director for the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance:

“To see how black people all over the world have embraced Black Lives Matter is awe-inspiring. The best moments are when black people stop me in the street and share with me the impact that BLM has had on their lives and on their faith that another world is actually possible.”

The “Fun Home” Family: Alison Bechdel, Roberta Colindrez, Beth Malone, Joel Perez, Lisa Kron

Alison Bechdel told Out Magazine:

“It’s not about sex, it’s about identity — which is perhaps even more threatening. In the play it’s a brilliant thing, but to reach that broader audience of people watching television? Who knows what the average viewer thought? Even if it’s not about sexuality, but about a child having awareness and subjective power, it’s kind of revolutionary.”

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is your favorite Bad Feminist.

“It’s OK to believe in your voice. And to use it.”

The full list includes lots your fave babes, like actresses Hannah Hart, Lily Tomlin and Cynthia Nixon. Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez of “Tangerine” also ranked, as did trans activists Bamby Salcedo, Breanna Sinclairé, Jennicet Gutiérrez and Jen Richards. Also they included Roland Emmerich, who made a terrible movie called Stonewall, maybe you’ve heard of it. You can check out the full list here.

There Won’t Be A Government Shutdown Over Planned Parenthood (Yet)

feature image photo credit Lawrence Jackson

+ It looks like the US federal government isn’t going into a shutdown, at least not yet. Congress has voted to extend funding for the federal government through December.

If you’re outside the US and are like “why would your federal government be shutting down, that sounds alarming,” or even an American with the same question, you can read about the phenomenon in more detail here, but basically: a “government shutdown” occurs when different parts of the government, like the President and one or more chambers of Congress, cannot agree on how federal money should be allocated before the end of the budget cycle. Since an approved budget plan isn’t enacted, many federal agencies don’t have access to federal funds and can’t function. This is possible in the US because the branches of government are separated, and can’t necessarily override one another if they disagree. The budget disagreement at hand right now is over whether the government should defund Planned Parenthood.

A shutdown doesn’t mean that the government stops doing stuff or that anarchy reigns; many federal agencies keep operating, but also many civilian federal employees aren’t allowed to work and aren’t paid for the duration of the shutdown. Lifehacker has an explanation of what a government shutdown would mean for the average US citizen.

Law & Order

+ The New York Times has an examination of how the fight for non-discrimination ordinances that cover sexual orientation and gender identity is increasingly becoming a local one, not a statewide legislative push.

+ If you’ve been following the career of Arizona’s Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose claim to fame is a deep passion for racially profiling Latinos and pushing the envelope of inhumane prison conditions, you might be interested in this story where his ex-lawyer talks about how determined Arpaio was to continue his racist policing.

Casey said he told Arpaio repeatedly of the difference between illegal immigration, a civil offense, and actual illegality — that is, breaking a law enumerated in a criminal code.

“If you have a truck with 16 [immigrants] in the back, and they tell you they’re here illegally, and they give a hand gesture to indicate their defiance, you still cannot hold them, you cannot detain them, they’re gone. Released,” Casey said he told Arpaio. “You’re borrowing trouble if you hold them.”

The sheriff, Casey said, would instead seek all exceptions to the rule, looking for loopholes to continue to conduct traffic stops despite Snow’s order.

+ New York City has joined the federal surveillance program “Countering Violent Extremism”, a program with disproportionately targets Muslim youth for surveillance even though, as Feministing points out, “three-fourths of law enforcement agencies in America list right-wing extremists as their biggest threat.”

+ The mother of Jeremy McDole, a wheelchair-using black man killed by Delaware police, was arrested for threatening the woman she believes called 911 on her late son.

Order in the Court

+ This Oregon bakery was ordered by the court to pay $135,000 to a lesbian couple they refused to provide service to; now they’re refusing to do that, too.

+ If you’re big on SCOTUS deep cuts, you might remember some guy shouting anti-gay stuff during the Supreme Court arguments on same-sex marriage.

Today, we unexpectedly get some closure on that: Rives Miller Grogan, apparently an experienced shouter at public political events, has plead guilty to the shouting in question and faces up to one year in prison.

Research and Data

+ New research finds that school “districts that have a higher proportion of white students get substantially higher funding than districts that have more minority students.”

+ HRC has a new report on bisexual visibility in the workplace.

Grab Bag

+ Did Kim Davis meet with the Pope this week? Kim Davis’s lawyer says so, and the Vatican says it “does not deny the meeting took place”.
Unsurprisingly, LGBT Catholics are not thrilled, especially since LGBT advocates were denied an in-person meeting with the Pope.

“It was a kick in the stomach this morning,” said Nicholas Coppola, a Catholic New Yorker, referring to the meeting between Kim Davis and the pope at the Vatican Embassy in Washington. “I was the most hopeful with this pope and so this has been the biggest letdown.”

+ After facing public criticism, Whole Foods will stop selling goat cheese and tilapia produced with prison labor.

+ A Detroit Black Lives Matter mural, and an explanation of why it doesn’t say “All Lives Matter.”

+ Nicolle Gonzales (Diné) and Brittany Simplicio (Navajo/Zuni) are planning the first-ever Native American birth center.

“There is this huge disconnect between the cultural teachings and our bodies as women. [I want] to advocate for taking back our teachings about our bodies that our ancestors knew before the boarding schools or Indian Health Services came,” says Gonzales. “I’ve worked at Indian Health Services. I was not happy with the care that the Native women were receiving there. I needed to do something to step up and support Native women.”

+ Elizabeth Warren exposed a self-serving corporate-complicit think tank, and now the scholar in question resigned.

+ Caitlyn Jenner will not be charged for the car crash on the Pacific Coast highway last year.

+ Skylar Marcus Lee, a 16-year-old trans activist, took his own life this week. He is mourned by his community in Madison, WI, and a memorial service will be held on Friday. He was a beloved youth leader who wrote and spoke powerfully on LGBT rights and racial justice.

+ Southerners on New Ground (SONG) attempted to make a statement at North Carolina Durham Pride in solidarity with #SayHerName, and had the mic taken away from them. Here’s their statement on what happened:

“A large #BlackLivesMatter Contingent made up of approximately 50 local activists and organizers with groups including Southerners on New Ground, Queer People of Color Coalition, El Cambio, and Get Equal was forcibly silenced and removed as they attempted to march in the NC Pride Parade, held annually in Durham, NC. The group began the parade with a banner that read, “No Pride for Some of Us Without Liberation for All of Us: We Can’t Breathe.” They were greeted with enthusiastic support of Pride Parade attendees as they marched through the streets chanting “Say Her Name” and “Black Lives Matter.” As registered Parade participants, the group was allotted two minutes to address the audience at an announcing venue located at the intersection of Main & Broad Streets. Spokespeople for the group approached a Pride Committee official who was serving as parade mc and requested use of the microphone, which they intended to use to amplify a statement of solidarity with countless murders of black queer and trans women as contingent members joined arms in a show of solidarity. The Pride Committee official handed over the microphone, but not before requiring that the group not “say anything offensive.” They began to read the prepared statement: “We disrupt your Pride so that you are reminded that our Pride also matters and that we are proud of our roots. We are proud to have ancestors and kindred in folks like Miss Major, Storme DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson who actively demonstrated what resistance meant by putting their bodies and their lives on the line for our collective survival.” At that point, the Pride Committee Official physically interrupted contingent spokesperson Laila Nur, a queer black woman, local organizer, and musician — by stepping on her feet and then snatching the written statement and microphone out of her hands. The #BlackLivesMatter contingent was then surrounded by Pride Security and Durham Police and told that if they did not leave the area they faced immediate arrest.”

Thought You’d Enjoy This

+ Indiana’s Memories Pizza, which vowed to never cater a gay wedding, appears to have now catered a gay wedding unwittingly.

+ This is a dude who was invited on live television to talk about Edward Snowden and just talked about Edward Scissorhands instead.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Lauren Gets The Girl And The Super Powers On “Lost Girl”

Starting next week, Boob(s On Your) Tube is making the leap to a twice weekly column, so I can more promptly cover all the fall TV shows that feature queer characters and provide a fun place to talk about the fictional ladies we love. This column will now run on Tuesdays and Fridays. I’m more excited for this coming TV season than I have been for any TV season in a long time — possibly ever — and not just because rumors are flying everywhere that Cookie Lyon is coming out as bisexual on this season of Empire! (I mean, that’s a huge part of my excitement, but not ALL of it.)

Also, I just want to shout out one of my foster kittens, Miss Frodo Baggins, who helped me write this week’s column.

She is very excited about potentially queer Cookie, too.

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

No queerness to report on Chasing Life this week, although I have been meaning to tell you that if you like John Green books/enjoy a cathartic TV cry, this show regularly passes the Bechdel test and will provide you with all the tears you need in your life.

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

I Am Cait finished its first season by celebrating Caitlyn’s accomplishments over the last four months with a “renaming ceremony.” She invites the trans women who have guided her on this journey, including series regulars Candis Cayne and Chandi Moore, plus all her friends and family. And the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Choir. And Boy George. It was uplifting and I even cried a little bit because I am really happy that Jenner has been able to come out and transition, and that she’s received so much support for both of those things from so many people.

The show ends how it began, with Cait doing a confessional in her bedroom alone with a camera. She says, “I want to help people in my community. We’ve got a long way to go, but at least we got a really, really, really good beginning. And that makes my heart feel good.”

So much of this show was the trans women in Cait’s life coming trying to help her understand that the trans community is her community, that it’s “we,” not “them.” And it seems like she got there, in terms of the narrative of this docu-series. So it was really disheartening that she seemed to reverse course on that during her press tour last week, telling Matt Lauer that she was a-okay with that Halloween costume of her that been making the rounds, and:

To be honest with you I’m the easiest on people. Now, the community—you know, GLAAD, all the people in the community—are like “Oh my god, you have to get the pronouns right; you have to do this, you have to do that.” I’m much more tolerant than that. I mean, I understand that it’s difficult for people to understand this.

She also told Ellen that she’s not sure if she supports marriage equality.

Trans woman Casey Plett, who reviewed the series for The New York Times, shared some poignant thoughts after the season finale:

The show tried. It really did… So yes, the show probably did a lot of good — yet isn’t the measure for quantifying that impossibly difficult when it comes to art and entertainment? What answer is there to lonely trans kids (so frequently, hand-wringingly invoked) who can’t relate to “I Am Cait” and/or find it tedious? Not only that, with positive representation of trans people still so nascent, checking that box alone is not really an indicative barometer for a show. Praising “I Am Cait” as excellent TV because it puts trans people in a warm light is like giving five stars to a pizza when you’re starving: Just because it was necessary doesn’t mean it was good.

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Survivor’s Remorse

Saturdays on Starz at 9:30 p.m.

One of the most interesting things about Survivor’s Remorse is how it doesn’t shy away from exploring provocative storylines in a way that’s expresses nuanced sympathy and scathing mockery. This week’s M-Chuck story, for example, sees her and Missy and Cassie getting to know their home state of Georgia a little bit better by visiting a former plantation. M-Chuck is irate when they arrive and see black actors working in the fields, singing. It’s a real-time reenactment.

She confronts them, telling them they’re “turning slavery into Disneyland” and “I don’t see no fake Jews at Auschwitz.” She tells them they’re losing their sense of Black Pride and they tell her she doesn’t get what it’s like to be a struggling black actor because she’s Cam Calloway’s sister. M-Chuck takes special exception to the woman playing the plantation owner’s wife, who explains that she had to move home to south Georgia from New York because she failed as an actor on Broadway.

Later, M-Chuck asks her what she’s listening to on her iPod and it’s the Indigo Girls and so she and M-Chuck definitely go all in on some lesbosexy finger-banging in the former plantation owner’s house. Aaaaand a group of 8th graders on a field trip catch them cuddled up post-coitally.

M-Chuck is one of the most original lesbian characters I’ve ever seen in my life. Are y’all watching this show?

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Lost Girl

Sundays on (Canada’s) Showcase at 9:00 p.m.

Lost Girl‘s final season is finally in play, and if you figured Bo and Lauren were going to break up again because there’s just no way a human and a succubus are ever going to make it work in a long term monogamous relationship, think again — because Lauren’s got powers now! I’m not talking about just her Hermione Granger wicked smart brain; I’m talking about she injected herself with this serum she’s using to weaken the fae and has become like Rogue from X-Men! She can zap the powers of the fae who are near her, including Bo’s healing succubus powers, which came in handy in the half-season premiere when she was smashed in the face by a car while crossing the street like what happens to one in every three TV lesbians.

But she used Bo’s chi to make her own chi and heal herself.

Last night she did even more magic and freaked out everyone, including poor brokenhearted Tamisn. Bo, though, she did not freak out. Bo said, “Lauren, I love you for who you are as a person. I don’t care if you’re human or fae, just as long as you’re you.

Lauren’s coming trouble is two-fold in my opinion as a person who has watched pretty much every sci-fi/fantasy situation ever: 1) Lauren is now the greatest enemy of the fae and she doesn’t have a handle on her powers at all. 2) She has no idea that some side-effects are coming. (The side-effects are always coming!)

P.S. Perfect, perfect Kenzi was back last night, too, breezing onto the scene in a cloud of glory talking about, “So, which love triangle candidate are we calling up on these days?”

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Carmilla

Tuesdays and Thursdays on YouTube

Last Thursday my Twitter timeline was full of people talking “giraffe shirt” with a hundred thousand broken hearted sob-face emojis, and I was like, “What in the hells bells is giraffe shirt, you guys?” It was because Laura was wearing a giraffe shirt on Carmilla, see, and getting her heart crushed into tiny little bits. (I’m not like a regular recapper. I’m a cool recapper. I know what The Kids are Into These Days. #GiraffeShirt)

For a web series about vampires, Carmilla has always been surprisingly chill in terms of blood and galaxy-shattering break-ups — until last week when Carmilla learned that Laura betrayed her in an Ultimate kind of way. Remember when Carmilla told Laura that Mattie’s necklace is a horcrux and you have to destroy that piece of her soul before you can destroy her? And Laura told Danny, for some reason I am not clear on? Yeah, well, that came full circle when Mattie had Danny’s spine in a chokehold and was about to break her in half (for dimming them all out to Vordenberg, whose soldiers killed Lophii). Danny remembered the thing and snatched the horcrux from ’round Mattie’s neck and smashed it to smithereens and Mattie died.

It was Not Good.

I mean, it was Not Good because Mattie was the coolest character on this show and the only black woman on this show and now she’s dead. And it was also Not Good because Carmilla grabbed Laura by the hair and thought about eating off her face or some horrible vampire thing, but she couldn’t because she still loves her even though she also kind of hates her?

Carmilla gives a really great speech. She’s like, “Be good for me, Carmilla! Change for me, Carmilla! Burn down everything you’ve ever loved for me, Carmilla!” But then of course she did all that and Laura broke her heart anyway, so what was the point?

She says she’s gonna murder Laura like a common Rosewood lesbian if she sees her beautiful face again.

Three weeks left! I hope they kiss more! They are so good at kissing!

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ Every Current Lesbian/Bisexual TV Character, Ranked By U-Hauling Potential
While we await new episodes of our favorite regular season shows, we thought it would be a good time to address the thing you really care about: Which lesbian/bisexual TV characters would be the best to U-Haul with?

+ Faking It Episode 212 Recap: Lesbian Nesting In Your Coop Every Night
This week on Faking It, everybody gets into costume play and makes bad choices.

Pop Culture Fix: Ellen DeGeneres Flattered By Tabloid Gossip, Bangladesh Gets First Lesbian Cartoon Character and More Super-Important Stories

Autostraddle’s Pop Culture Fix is a weekly round-up of the queer arts and entertainment news you need in your life. In the course of trying to find THE PERFECT HEADLINE STORY (I never did), I really scraped up a lot of stories off the internet today. BRACE YOURSELF.

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Human Beings

+ Atlanta lesbian party promoters Traxx Girls hired legendarily terrible person Chris Brown to introduce Teyana Taylor for “the biggest girl party in the country,” but Brown allegedly stood up the over 4,000 women at this Atlanta Black Pride Event. Brown’s face was prominently featured on promotional materials. According to The Georgia Voice, “Brown refused to enter the building once he learned that a handful of gay men were present” and the promoter was “told to take his (Brown’s) image down because he looks a little feminine in that image.” Brown has since tweeted that he was never booked for the show and has nothing but love for the LGBT community. Fortunately, Scott was able to get Fetty Wrap, who was touring with Brown, to sub in. Traxx Girls is considering legal action.

+ If you’ve seen I Am Cait, you’ve probably sensed that Caitlyn Jenner has some tough hangups about homosexuality (including the possibility that she herself might be gay, considering she’s only ever been attracted to women), so Ellen had some questions about her stance on same-sex marriage during her recent appearance on Ellen’s show. Caitlyn says she’s come around on the topic but considers herself “traditionalist.” (Just a friendly reminder that Jenner speaks on behalf of nobody but herself and that many trans people have been valuable activists in the fight for marriage equality.)

https://youtu.be/_n8QskfvUfg

Ellen later appeared on The Howard Stern Show and told Howard that being an American Idol judge was one of the worst decisions she’d ever made. Referencing tabloid coverage of her and Portia’s alleged breakup (don’t worry, they’re okay), DeGeneres noted, “We’re kind of flattered. Because for awhile no one cared about us. And we thought ‘oh, lesbians aren’t worthy of tabloid stories.’ So now we’re kind of flattered that they even care about us.” The funny thing is that we kinda feel the same way.

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The Movies

+ Sleeping With Other People, a romantic comedy about two love/sex addicts, Jake and Lainey, who reunite many years after losing their virginities to each other, will feature Natasha Lyonne as Lainey’s queer best friend, Kara. Kara’s younger girlfriend is played by Remy Nozik.

+ Speaking of Natasha Lyonne playing a lesbian, please check out Addicted To Fresno.

+ Her Side Of The Bed, a queer movie about falling for your best friend, has released a new trailer.

+ Summertime, a french film about the ’70s women’s rights movement with a lesbian couple at the forefront, will have its North American debut at The Toronto International Film Festival. It sounds and looks pretty awesome:  “Setting the film between the bucolic French countryside and the streets of Paris in the 1970s, Corsini casts a steady eye on a twenty-year-old farm girl whose homosexuality becomes a source of anguish when her very traditional parents expect her to marry a local boy who — in their eyes — seems perfect for her. Delphine (Izïa Higelin) takes a huge step in her life by picking up and moving to the big city. She finds an apartment and replaces her overalls with a leather jacket. It’s not long before Delphine is drawn to the dynamic Carole (Cécile de France), who heads up a feminist group.”

+ A new film from Kiss Me director Alexandra-Therese Keining will also debut in Toronto. It’s called Girls Lost and it sounds super queer.

+ Take Part is praising the prominence of LGBT characters in many upcoming films, including a few that we are really excited about (Freeheld, Carol) and a few that we are not (About Ray, The Danish Girl, Stonewall).

+ Despite threats from “fringe groups,” a young filmmaker in Kannada, India, is determined to release a film depicting lesbianism, called 141. Director/Producer Bhavaji told the press, “Though the movie has been given an ‘A’ certificate for the nature of content, but there are no scenes that will make the audience uncomfortable. The movie tells the story of two women, who are in love with each other and how they have to face the wrath of the society.”

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Visibility Matters

+ Bangladesh has released its first lesbian cartoon character, Dhee. She was developed by the country’s largest gay rights group, Boys of Bangladesh. A spokesman from the group told Quartz, “We have created boxes with 10 flashcards each. On the backside of each comic strip, there are general descriptions of homosexuality, heteronormativity, gender, sexuality, stereotypes, patriarchy… not like theories so very easy to understand.”

+ The Root 100 came out this week and has Shonda Rhimes and Serena Williams at the top of the charts — and a lot of LGBT women are included on the list, too: Black Lives Matter activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Marie Cullors and Opal Tometi; musician Janelle Monáe,  activist and writer Janet Mock, feminist organizer Charlene Carruthers (National Director of the Black Youth Project 100), activist Ashley Yates, actress Laverne Cox, writer Roxane Gay and filmmaker Dee Rees.

+ The Mary Sue looked at a study with some pretty interesting revelations about what men and women declare to be preferred traits in strong female characters.

+ Flavorwire talks about Why TV Is Making Such Strides on LGBT Representation — But Lagging in Racial Diversity. A big reason is stronger LGBT representation behind the camera (which I talked about last year), noting that “people who represented the gay experience were already part of the industry, and they were essentially waiting for it to become publicly acceptable to tell their stories in a mainstream forum, as it now most certainly is.” Flavorwire suggests “the entertainment industry needs to be more welcoming, not only to diverse TV shows, but to diverse professionals behind the scenes, in internships, fellowships, and more. People of color need to be given that chance to direct a first TV show, and both LGBT and minority characters need to be given a loving, fully fleshed-out treatment, not a box-ticking, clichéd kind of role.”

+ Star Wars Novels are adding three new LGBT characters, including two lesbians, and “the novel will also explore the question of what life is like for gay men and women in the Empire.”

+ So uh, Kathleen Turner will play “the mother of a lesbian ex-convict” in an Off-Broadway called Would You Still Love Me If... The play focuses on a “lesbian couple” “who are expecting a baby together — when one of them begins considering gender transition.” The playwright was apparently inspired by Blue is the Warmest Color, noting that while reflecting on the film, he began thinking, “what if one of them decided they wanted to physically change? That was the germ of the idea.” Fantastic.

+ Anita Dolce Vita has 5 Androgynous Women of Color Models You Should Know because Ruby Rose isn’t the only one!

+ Did y’all spend July curled up in an air conditioned cove watching The L Word on Showtime on demand? Be honest.

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Music

+ Wanna hear Christine and the Queens w/Tunji Inge’s new track? You can do that right now.

+ Wanna see the new “gorgeous and unsettling” video from “bipolar folk” band Kera and the Lesbians? You can do that right now.

+ Queer hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit) talk to Bitch Magazine about how awesome they are.

+ Laura Jane Grace tells bullied trans teens to take no shit.

+ Manika is releasing a new single featuring Tyga called I Might Go Lesbian. So.

Boob(s On Your Tube): Carmilla and Laura Sitting In a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Though the sidewalk outside of my apartment — which is hotter than the surface of the sun right now — begs to differ, Labor Day marks the official end of summer, and the official end of Summer Teevee. Fall TV doesn’t start in earnest until September 21st, so it’ll be a bit lullish here in Boob(s On Your Tube) the next two weeks, but then! Then! Real deal primetime TV will be back, and I’ll be expanding this column to a twice weekly event because there’s going to be so much to talk about, there’s no way we can digest and dissect all of it only once a week. More details about the days you can expect New Boob(s) soon, along with Editor-in-Chief Riese’s annual Fall TV preview!

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

Nothing queer to report on this week’s Chasing Life, except that Brenna’s new boyfriend, Finn, is like if Caleb Rivers from Pretty Little Liars was battling cancer by watching Gilmore Girls.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey survived the first season of Scream! Audrey is also (at least partially) the killer on the first season of Scream!

All signs point to Piper being the main killer, due to the fact that she confesses herself as Brandon James’ daughter and tries to axe-murder Emma and her mom in the process of monologuing about how it’s sexist to always assume the killer in horror films is a dude. Luckily for Emma and her mom, Audrey shows up in the nick of time and shoots the hell out of Piper and kills her dead. “That bitch talks too much,” is what she says as Piper is bleeding out.

Except for then, at the very end, Audrey opens up this secret compartment containing correspondence with Piper. Like maybe she even killed her own girlfriend at the beginning of the show. Who knows?

Well, the writers know. They told TVLine:

Toward the end, Piper was kind of someone that people were starting to suspect might have been the killer. Certain things were planted that hinted at it, [like] her father was murdered. We tried to let everyone have those moments of suspicion, and… we liked letting Audrey be the other half of that equation, because she felt like the very surprising element to us. Audrey is someone that I feel like the audience relates to and empathizes with, so letting her be the connective tissue between Season 1 and Season 2 is a great way to let the audience get pulled back in. They want to believe in her. They want to believe that she’s good, but there’s also a part of them that wants to think she got some justice, too. That’s an element that’s going to pull people back in a strong way.

I would call her a wild card of Season 2. The depth of her involvement isn’t yet revealed — just a connection to Piper. Like I said, not knowing if she ever donned the mask and actually killed someone is a big part of what’s going to keep people truly intrigued. And the fact that… her friends don’t know. You imagine the moment when Noah finds out that Audrey was a part of this, and you’re like, “That’s a hell of a TV moment that I can’t wait to see.”

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Gail closed out this season of Rookie Blue by hooking up with her work arch-nemesis, Frankie, after bumping into her at a wedding reception for two of their friends. It all happened off-screen, but the 37-second lead-up was super cute and I hope to see more of these two in the coming (half?) season.

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

On the penultimate episode of I Am Cait, Caitlyn Jenner gets ready for and delivers her moving ESPY’s speech. She and Candis Cayne visit Chandi Moore at hospital where she runs a program for trans kids; the kids talk to Caitlyn about their struggles with changing their names, their physical transitions, and being harassed when their IDs don’t match their real gender. Once again, it opens Caitlyn’s eyes to her privilege. Cait also has dinner with her family, and it’s much more chill and lovely than when they hung out in the season premiere. And Caitlyn renews her country club membership and grapples with whether or not to use her real name because the club is really conservative and she doesn’t know how people will react. But Candis brings the truth bombs in glorious fashion, like always: “It’s not about what they think; it’s about how you feel. They’ll get over it. Just sign your name as Caitlyn from now on and move on.”

Next week, Caitlyn and Kris are supposed to meet on-screen for the first time and the most Kardashian moment of the entire season. It’s the thing I’m least looking forward to.

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Survivor’s Remorse

Saturdays on Starz at 9:30 p.m.

Starz has already renewed Survivor’s Remorse for a third season! M-Chuck until 2016, at least!

This week’s episode focuses on Cam and M-Chuck’s mom, who decides to get a vagina rejuvination, but has to tell Cam about it because he’s the one footing the bills and he wants to know what he’s paying for. What could be a really one-note, frat-boyfest of vagina jokes turns into a really poignant commentary on how much control women really do/don’t have over their bodies, and how complicated it is to be a sexually active woman in the world without being slut-shamed. Cam’s mom ultimately tells him:

“When you were born, I was still a girl. I’ve hardly even been with anybody else since you were born, and motherfuckerer, that’s a long time. I’m not asking for your appreciation. I’m asking you for some understanding. Instead of making me feel like I’m some fuckinging beggar coming to you trying to explain my uncomfortable private fucking matters.”

Cam gets it. He promises never to ask about it again. But, look, M-Chuck had a few good moments too. When Cam first heard his mom was having a medical procedure, he thought for sure that she had cancer.

Cam: Non-Hodgkin’s is bad. People hit me up on Twitter every day for non-Hodgkin’s—it’s decimating people.
M-Chuck: We do a ton of cardio. Nobody’s getting cancer! If Mom had cancer, she wouldn’t be so vague. She’d be milking you for all you’re worth, you know that.

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Carmilla

Tuesdays and Thursdays on YouTube

Laura and Carmilla smooched! Y’all, Laura and Carmilla smooched, hot and desperate for each other over a game of vampire checkers!

Okay, because everyone decides to tag-team to keep the giant ancient fish god from escaping while some soldiers try to kill her. Remember when Laura called Lophii “Loopiformes”? I wish they called her Loopi. But the Get Along Gang can’t do the plan until 3:00 am, so everyone breaks to take a nap and/or makeout with the loves of their lives. It’s late and they’re tired and their defenses are down, and so:

Laura: Like, were you really going to drink the fish god blood and potentially die?
Carmilla: Yeah, not that it matters to you so much on account of you can’t even stand to look at me anymore.
Laura: I only don’t look at you because when I do I can never look away from you!
Carmilla: So you don’t want me to die?
Laura: No, you asshole! The thought of a world without you makes me feel like my guts are being ripped out of my body!
Carmilla: Oh. We should definitely kiss, then.
Laura: Okay, but only a little.
They: [Kiss, and Carmilla pulls away]
Laura: Wait, no. A little more.
Carmilla: [is lovestruck even more than before]
Laura: Maybe after this is all over, we can talk.
Carmilla: [endless sighing]

Perry doesn’t go with the gang to protect Lophii. She stays behind to bake pie/do evil. Mattie finds her though and Perry gets REALLY close to her face and calls her “Rook” and blurts out a terrifying death prophecy, on account of PERRY IS POSSESSED BY THE DEAN. Tumblr, you knew it! You’ve been saying this for weeks!

As if that weren’t terrifying enough, Mattie gets busted at the end of the episode for murders she didn’t commit. Without her around, everyone’s gonna get dead so fast.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ GLAAD’s 2015 Network Responsibility Index Is Its Last, ‘Cause Counting The Gays Isn’t The Point Anymore
You really need to read this. It’s so good.

+ Faking It Episode 211 Recap: Stripped and Confused
Season 2B of “Faking It” is finally here, and everybody is still lying to everybody else.

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I just realized Lost Girl came back last night in Canada for its final half-season. I’ll add it to Boob(s) starting next week!

Pop Culture Fix: Lily Tomlin, Laverne Cox and Robin Roberts Hang Out, Talk About “Grandma” And Other Mesmerizing Stories

Autostraddle’s Pop Culture Fix is a weekly round-up of the queer arts and entertainment news you need in your life.

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Big Screen Bombshells

+ Yesterday morning, the planets and stars aligned to create a gorgeous, significant moment in queer pop culture when both Laverne Cox and Lily Tomlin appeared on Good Morning America to talk to Robin Roberts about their new film, Grandma. It will be released in New York and Los Angeles on Friday and seems destined to grant Tomlin the Academy Award that has long eluded her.

Watch Lily:

ABC Latest News | Latest News Videos

Watch Laverne:

ABC Latest News | Latest News Videos

You want to know something that’s always so weird/gross when other people do it but is frikkin adorable when Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner do it? Share social media. Also, Dolly Parton says she wants to hang out with her 9-to-5 co-stars on Grace and Frankie, so get on that, gracious goddesses of pop culture. (Please.)

+ In the wise and eternal words of The Backstreet Boys, Cate Blanchett needs to quit playing games with my heart. First, she’s had many relationships with women. But then wait, no, she has not had many relationships with women. And now she is having an on-screen relationship with Rooney Mara in the first trailer for Todd Haynes’ Carol and my swooning has reached peak levels. As you know, Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian pulp novel, The Price of Salt, in which Carol falls in love with a department store clerk even though she’s married (to a really boring, really rich guy, played by Coach Eric Taylor in this movie). As you also know, Cate Blanchett + period drama + lesbianism = The Ultimate Oscars bait.

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I Want My MTV

+ The Teen Choice Awards happened this week. That is a thing where teenagers use social media to vote for their favorite things and the winners receive surfboards. Cara Delevingne won a surfboard. So did Liars who are Pretty. Ellen won also, and it was her seventh anniversary with Portia on that night and she gave the sweetest speech about being chosen and also being different.

https://youtu.be/VNeggYRqLng

A brand new season of The Ellen Show lands on September 8th, and her guests the first week are: Hillary Clinton, Caitlyn Jenner, and Malala Yousafzai!

+ Maybe Xena is coming back, after all? I can’t take this anymore! Just tell me something real, NBC!

+ The Real Housewives of Atlanta has added its first transgender cast member. Model Amiyah Scott will replace Nene Leakes on the upcoming season. I’m never going to watch some Real Housewives, but Nene Leakes was a marvel on Glee.

+ This is the hands down best thing I’ve read about Orange Is the New Black‘s third season: Uzo Aduba really wrote The Time Hump Chronicles!

“I don’t know if they have gone and taken it and now fleshed out the entire ‘Time Hump Chronicles,’ but when we were shooting it… those pages that were walking around, that you are watching in the scene, is the story,” Aduba said. “That is actually, legitimately, a story that I had to take home with me. They were like, ‘Put it in Suzanne’s words. How would Suzanne write this if she were to write this?’ That’s my handwriting, all of it. I put it out. I was crossing out things, just how I would imagine trying to pen this story. I was crossing things out and drawing because it’s supposed to be illustrated and drawing pictures… I don’t know where I was going with that stuff, but I was like, we are just going to let your imagination go.”

So when you see a woman in Litchfield — prisoner or guard — enjoying herself thoroughly while reading “The Time Hump Chronicles,” know that it’s because Aduba herself wrote each page by hand, in character. Making this story about a woman trapped between loves — including one with two, um, “instruments” — all the more personal.

WHAT! That is so amazing.

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Video Killed the Radio Star

Julia Nunes has released a video for “Something Bad” from her upcoming Some Feelings LP. It’s one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

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Queer Folks Queering It Up Around Town

+ Cara Delevingne is speaking out about sex harassment and the dangers of body image in the fashion industry. In an interview with The Times, she said:

“I was, like, fight and flight for months. Just constantly on edge. It is a mental thing as well because if you hate yourself and your body and the way you look, it just gets worse and worse … I am a bit of a feminist and it makes me feel sick. It’s horrible and it’s disgusting. [We’re talking about] young girls. You start when you are really young and you do, you get subjected to … not great stuff.”

+ Rosie O’Donnell‘s daughter, Chelsea, was missing this week but now she has been found. I’m telling you this because it has been trending on Facebook for 48 hours and I was worried but now I am not worried. She disappeared with her dog and didn’t have her medicines!

+ Kristen Stewart and Jane Lynch were not straight together on Live! With Kelly and Michael on Monday. This video is pretty amazing. Michael Strahan keeps trying to get in on the conversation and failing.

https://youtu.be/P2FOPeZf75Q

+ Remember how much everyone looooved Hannah Montana? Well, Miley Cyrus hated it.

“From the time I was 11, it was, ‘You’re a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing.’ Meanwhile, I’m this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras. I had fucking flippers.”

“I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show. I was made to look like someone that I wasn’t, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn’t on that show, it was like, Who the fuck am I?”

+ Megan Rapinoe was voted to the USWNT all-star squad.

+ Caitlyn Jenner covers Vanity Fair‘s special Trans America issue.

The issue also features Renée Richards, Chaz Bono, and Laverne Cox, and Andreja Pejic.

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Also.Also.Also.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Are Stef And Lena Going to Be Okay On “The Fosters”?

This time tomorrow, we will finally know who A is on Pretty Little Liars and I can hardly concentrate on anything else. Here are some other queer things that are happening on TV, though!

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

Stef and Lena are scaring me, y’all. They’re supposed to be the steady sun around which all these dramatic little teenage planets orbit, but they are falling apart! Stef can’t go to therapy until Callie gets adopted, and the chances of that happening are about as likely as me getting a pet Hippogriff. This week, after Stef shelved therapy, Lena made the HORRIFIC mistake of talking to Monty about how unhappy she is in her marriage. You do not talk to the woman who kissed you because she’s in love with you about the problems in your marriage! You do not do that, not now or ever! And when Lena went home to try to tell Stef her worries, Stef was busy accidentally flirting with the new lesbian plumber and watching and rewatching the surveillance footage from Jesus and Mariana’s car accident. Lena wanted to process, but Stef squeezed her shoulder and told her everything is okay.

It is not okay. :(

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

Remember how I told you Brenna met a boy named Finn at her new school, and he has cancer, and she doesn’t know it but he’s totally going to be getting saved from her anonymous bone marrow and they’re going to fall in love? That’s still happening, but in the meantime, Ford and Brenna kissed right on the lips. They did it because they were hanging out with Finn and he can’t kiss either of them because he can’t risk getting their germs on him, so they kissed each other instead. Ford says she’s not into women sexualizing themselves for the male gaze, but you know she’s always wondered what it would be like to smooch on Brenna. And now she knows!

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Only two episodes left and still no queer storylines for Charmaine. #Dang

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey was called in for questioning by the police on this week’s Scream. They’re working with a theory that she and Rachel killed Nina and Tyler because they’re the worst (Nina and Tyler, not Audrey and Rachel), and then Audrey killed Rachel (after making out with her face on camera) to make sure she didn’t dime Audrey out. One small problem is that there’s this video of Audrey raging out and threatening to murder Nina and chop her into tiny pieces and feed her to some ducks or something. So Audrey calls her pre-girlfriend, Emma, and asks her to please break into her house and find the SD card from the night Nina died and smash it with a hammer.

Emma does this. Well, she breaks into the house. She does not smash the SD card. She watches it and then thinks about how it’s terrifying that A hasn’t called her since Audrey’s been in jail. But then she realizes she loves Emma like lesbians do and there’s no way all this evidence means anything this early in the season, so she gives Audrey and alibi and a hug and promises her everything’s going to be okay — until they probably also die.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

There’s only one more episode of Complications left before the season finale, and Gretchen has firmly taken root as my favorite new lesbian TV character of the summer. This week, her sister — Ingrid, the one from rehab — gets kicked out of rehab because she let a recovering buddy crash on her couch. Gretchen can’t be mad about it because Jed is strung out on her couch while she’s on the phone with her sister. Ingrid comes on over and agrees to take care of Jed and not take any of the pills Gretchen leaves behind, and she follows through on her promise. Sister stories. I love sister stories.

In her work life, Gretchen accompanies John to prison to talk to the gang leader who’s been keeping his thumb on John all season. On the way there, Gretchen opens up to John a little and explains that she grew up in the rougher part of town with some shitty foster parents, so that’s how come she knows you have to work outside the system sometimes to be a real hero, and also why she can’t stop saving everyone and everything.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Not much Gail to report on this week’s Rookie Blue, just normal police procedural stuff and no lesbianing.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Blarg, the queerness on this show has almost disappeared completely, and without it, Defiance just isn’t worth it anymore. Queerness was so woven into the fabric of the town in the first season it felt revolutionary watching it. Now it’s just another low budget sci-fi first-person shooter tie-in. Brainwashed Doc Yewll helped Kindzi beat up her dad and begin her own personal mission for global domination this week. It should have been awesome. It was just whatever.

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

This show continues to blow my mind in the best way. This week’s episode picks up where last week’s left off, with Caitlyn talking to a group of trans women at the San Francisco Human Rights Campaign’s office. She is shocked and visibly shaken to hear stories about so much violence and discrimination perpetrated against these women. In an overwhelmed monologue, she cries and says she had no idea how much privilege she enjoyed. She also asked a producer to please help her get on Ellen to give a scholarship to one of the trans women she met, Blossom, who cannot get into nursing school because she’s trans.

She goes skating with her new friends and motorcycle-riding, where Candis Cayne teaches everyone the perfect hair flip. Over dinner, the women talk about who they’re attracted to. Caitlyn says she’s never been with a man, but is interested in it. She says she has bigger problems to worry about right now than an orgasm. Just a gentle reminder on E! that gender identity and sexuality are two separate things, NBD.

Last week, Jenny asked her if she’d gone swimming in her own bathing suit yet, and she said no. So this week, she decides to join her friends in the pool. She says she’s as nervous as she can be, but ultimately finds it very freeing.

Are you watching this yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

Orange is The New Black Episode 310 Recap: There Is A Monster At The End Of This Book
In which things start falling apart.

Pretty Little Liars Episode 609 Recap: Drunk In Love
Pretty Little Prom is a Pretty Little Disaster.

The 10 Best Gal Pals In TV History
It’s Gal Pal Week on Autostraddle.com! Let’s kick it off by counting down television friendships we adore!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Alice Pieszecki Arrives On “Chasing Life,” Alana Enjoys A Finger Wagging On “Hannibal”

If you spend most of your life with your eyeballs glued to GayBC Family like I do, you probably feel like summer is coming to a close. Why, this very night the Pretty Little Liars are going to prom! They’re going to graduate! And next week, the Big A Reveal. (No, for real this time.) (FOR REAL.) As ABC Family winds down, though, some summer TV shows are just gearing up!

Here’s the full trailer for Faking It‘s second season, which returns on August 31. Paige McCullers is definitely naked in this trailer, so.

Here’s the full trailer for the second season of Survivor’s Remorse. It’s back in all it’s M-Chuck glory on August 22nd.

https://youtu.be/KdL_1m5uzuA

This week’s queer TV roundup is a little more brief (and late) than usual. There was no new episode of The Fosters, and I’m working on a kitten-saving project that took up my whole weekend. We’ll be back to normal next Monday.

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

At long last, Alice Pieszecki arrived on Chasing Life, as Brenna’s new girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend. “Wait,” I hear you saying, “a high school senior is dating someone old enough to date Alice Pieszecki?” Ah, yes. And that is the rub. See, Margo is Brenna’s fresh-from-college film club sponsor, but now that Brenna has changed schools, they’re in the clear to see each other romantically. Brenna is a mature 17, and she’s feeling it — until she meets Alice Pieszecki, who crashes her date with Margo, wine in hand, even though Margo told Brenna she’s an alcoholic. So Margo has to abandon their date to take Alice Pieszecki home.

On their next date, Brenna discovers that Margo took Alice Pieszecki home to her home, because they still live together and share a dog. Brenna’s probably too young to have ever even seen The L Word, if we’re being honest, and this amount of drama is both surprising and unnerving to her, so she bounces up out of there without even looking back over her shoulder.

At her new school, she meets a guy with cancer. I’ll bet six hundred million dollars he is the person she anonymously gave her bone marrow to and they’re gonna fall in love like John Greene wrote it.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Coach Beiste arrived on Clipped this week, playing Mo’s mom, Dottie. (Get it? ‘Cause her name is Dot Marie Jones, IRL.) (Dot Marie Jones is an angel, by the way.) Anyway, so Dottie seems like a stereotypical lesbian and Mo’s dad seems like stereotypical gay man, and they’re getting divorced, but then they don’t because they’re actually straight, and Charmaine still hasn’t done any queer thing.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey consoles her future girlfriend, Emma, this week as she dealt with the fallout from her own sex tape getting leaked onto the internet. Will spends the episode trying to convince Emma he didn’t film their first time together, and also he spends the episode getting his ass beaten down. In gym class, it’s self-defense day, and Audrey pins him to the ground before the instructor even says go. Emma and Audrey get even more gal pal-y at a memorial service for Nina, Tyler, and Riley — which means they’re totally going to fall in love, and then it’s going to come to light that Audrey’s the one who released Emma’s sex tape! Or one of them is going to die! Or they’re both going to die! Or one of them is the killer!

Don’t get your heart involved, is what I am saying.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Gretchen is my summer hero, y’all. No one else is going to be able to come close. This week, she saved Jed’s life by forcing him to get sober and by taking him to the hospital for vigilante treatment during one of his benders when he fell right on his face and busted it up. Gretchen also saved John’s life by smashing his car window and pulling his gun from his doctor bag(!) and getting into a high noon showdown with the gang members who were beating the shit out of him to keep him from explaining the plot of this show to anyone in authority.

The ratings are pretty solid. They’ve held strong this summer. USA will probably cast its renewal net around it really soon.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

I only started watching Rookie Blue for Gail and Holly’s storyline last season, but I have fallen in forever love with Gail Peck. She’s trying to adopt Sophie, as you know, so this week she meets with the family services person who is evaluating her. She decides to help out with a community softball game to show the social worker how good she is with kids, but it kind of backfires because she turns out to be super awkward with the kids — until there’s a drive-by shooting and she flips the switch to hero mode and saves some lives! At the end of the day, she gets to hang out with Sophie for a little while. Sophie who knows and loves her for the true hero she is. I prefer puppies to children (and dogs to adult humans), but Sophie is wonderful. I hope we get to keep her.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Doc Yewll died on Defiance this week! Ripped to shreds! But actually it was only a clone of Doc Yewll! Kindzi is making clones of her and hunting them for sport. Weirdly, when Yewll finds out, it kind of turns her on? I mean, her wife also was a hardcore Slytherin, so at least her type is consistent, but YIKES. T’evgin finds Kindzi in her evil lair and yells at her about blah blah whatever I’m The King And We’re Good Aliens Now, but before he does that, Kindzi manages to stick some kind of mind-controlling device into Yewll’s head, so that’s going to end in a bloodbath for sure.

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Remember last week when I told you that Hannibal time-jumped three years? Well, it turns out Margot and Alana have been together the whole time, and they have a baby! Alana carried the baby — due to Margot’s ovaries being cut out by her brother last season, I think, before she fed him to the eels who lived in his floor — and it’s from Margot’s brother’s sperm. Now, they have an air to their pig farm! (I think.)

So Alana is working at the psychiatric facility where Hannibal is being held because she says there’s only five keys separating Hannibal from the outside world, and she’s got all of them in her pocket. She tells Hannibal this while also threatening to take away all his nice things if he doesn’t stop being a jerk to his boyfriend, Will.

“Did you come to wag your finger at me?” is what he says.

“I love a good finger-wagging,” is what she says.

“Yes, you do.” he says, “How is Margot?”

That’s the story as told to me by Stacy and also by Stef. #FingerWagging

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

I expected the second episode of I Am Cait to be much more Kardashian-y than first one, just sort of lighthearted and focused on fashion and living life in Malibu, so I was shocked when it dove right into the dissonance caused by someone as privileged as Caitlyn Jenner being thrust into the spotlight by much of the mainstream media as the face and voice of the trans movement. In an op-ed in People this week, Caitlyn said: “To those of you who have asked me for my opinion or expertise, I want to remind you that while I’ve know that I was trans since I was a small child, learning about the trans community is still very new to me, and I don’t have all the answers.”

And that’s the theme of the second episode of the show. Jenner takes a luxury RV ride up to the San Francisco Human Rights Campaign’s office with a group of trans women, including GLAAD’s Jenny Boylan, and it only takes a few minutes of discussion before Jenner’s conservative politics and privilege enter the conversation and highlight how living in a rich, white bubble has colored her view of the tough reality so many trans people face. Like so many Conservatives, Jenner has bought into the lie that people only need welfare if they’re not willing to work. That’s categorically untrue, and a belief that is hugely damaging because trans people suffer a disproportionate amount of unemployment and homelessness.

This exchange was the crux of the conversation.

Caitlyn: A lot of times, they can make more not working with social programs than they actually can with an entry-level job.
Jenny: I’d say the great majority of people who are getting help are getting help because they need help.
Caitlyn: But you don’t want people to get totally dependent on it. That’s when they get into trouble. ‘Why should I work? You know, I’ve got a few bucks, I’ve got my room paid for.

Another reality show would have cut away to commercial with some dramatic music, but E! actually cut to a confessional with Jenny Boylan, who said:

“Now I’m worried. Caitlyn has every right to be just as conservative as she chooses, but many transgender men and women need social programs to survive and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Living in the bubble is an impediment to understanding other people. If Cait’s going to be a spokesperson for our community, this is something she’s going to have to understand.”

I really appreciate the lengths the show is going to to highlight how Caitlyn’s life is a big exception to the experiences of most trans people. I also appreciate how far it’s going to show members of the trans community lovingly but firmly helping Caitlyn examine the huge gulf between her politics/lived experiences and the needs of the trans community/goals of trans community activists.

In another confessional, one of the trans women Caitlyn is meeting with says:

“Cait thinks that because she read a couple of pages in [Janet Mock’s] book that she’s in the know, but she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t realize how common sex work stories are. She could never understand how it would feel to walk in those shoes. If she’s going to be our representative, Cait needs to learn the struggle we all face.”

By showing Caitlyn’s missteps and allowing trans folks to correct them, E! is also correcting a lot of common misconceptions held by their audience, most of whom probably wouldn’t have taken the time to educate themselves about the needs and struggles of the trans community otherwise. It’s pretty surprising to me that they’ve taken this route, but I’m glad.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ The 10 Best Gal Pals In TV History

It’s Gal Pal Week on Autostraddle.com! Let’s kick it off by counting down television friendships we adore!

+ Fan Fiction Friday: 10 Sapphic Slayer Stories (Where No Witches Die)

Willow and Tara in love (and alive) forever!

+ Pretty Little Liars Episode 608 Recap: New Romantics

Aria asks Emily to prom and she says no!

+ Dannielle Owens-Reid Needs Your Help Making a Documentary About Every LGBT Character In American TV History

She knows who killed Jenny Schecter.

+ Orange Is the New Black Episode 309 Recap: Rumspringa Natural Good-Time Family-Band Solution

Leanne’s Amish roots come to light as she hammers out the tenants of Normaism, a rabbi arrives to test Jewish Black Cindy and the others about their newfound Jewish faith, and Suzanne’s legion of admirers grows.

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Starting next week, I’ll be covering Carmilla in this column, and thanks to your input last week, I’ll add Steven Universe to the line-up!

Pop Culture Fix: Interviewer Thinks Cara Delevingne Needs To “Take A Little Nap” And Other Less Infuriating Stories

Autostraddle’s Pop Culture Fix is a weekly round-up of the queer arts and entertainment news you need in your life.

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The Tevee

+ NBC has decided to stage another live musical for TV, but this time it’s going be hella rad because it’s The Wiz and it’s going to co-star Queen Latifah and Mary J. Blige, who will play the Wiz and the Wicked Witch, respectively. It’s all happening on Dec. 3, just in time for Christmas, because Santa Claus loves us.

+ At Netflix’s TCA presentation yesterday, the main thing was “we’re doing it better than anyone, duh” and also, “like you, we want more Arrested Development.” They’re going to have to duke it out with Scandal for Portia de Rossi; she was promoted to series regular in May.

+ Speaking of Netflix, there’s about a billion Orange Is the New Black season three think pieces on the internet right now, but I’m really into Casey Cipriani‘s IndieWire one about how OITNB highlights the way almost all religions fail women.

The trouble for these women is that far too many of the world’s religions consider them daughters of Eve, born of Adam’s rib and his natural subordinate, rather than those of Lilith, the mythological first woman who was created of the same Earth as Adam and was either cast out of or voluntary left Eden after refusing to be subservient to Adam. The show seems to be presenting the idea that religion has been a hurdle for these women in their past lives; for some it was even the thing that landed them in federal prison.

For many, their religion turned their backs on them, so they’ve turned their backs on their religion and look elsewhere while inside for spiritual growth. This reflects the true reality of many inmates who convert or find a new religion while incarcerated, but in a series that prides itself on its depiction of diverse women from multiple backgrounds, more often than not, their religion failed them. This is not only true for women in prison; news stories about how various religions oppress women around the world surface every day.

+ Tig Notaro landed herself an Amazon pilot!

+ MTV has renewed Scream for a second season already; here’s hoping Audrey makes it through the first season!

+ Wanda Sykes was amazing on Jane Lynch‘s Emmy-nominated Hollywood Game Night this week.

+ And so was Rosie O’Donnell. (She’s playing my second favorite Rosie character on The Fosters right now; she’s so good. Second favorite after Doris in A League of Their Own, obviously.)

+ Raven thinks Caitlyn Jenner is moving “too fast, too soon.”

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The Moovies

+ Jenny’s Wedding (aka Rory Gilmore and Izzie Stevens Big Day) opens in select theaters this weekend. Am I going to review it for you? Yes, I am.

+ Judy Greer is happy she made out with Lily Tomlin in Grandma. In an interview with Out magazine:

You’ve never played an LGBT character before, right?
I’m going to say you’re right, but I might look back later and be like, “Oh, but I did do that.” Though my role in Grandma is super “out,” in terms of making out with a woman — which is awesome. Especially when the woman is Lily Tomlin.

She also says she never has to pay for drinks in gay bars, for which she is eternally grateful.

+ (Lily Tomlin is nominated for an Emmy already this year for Grace and Frankie, and there’s Oscar buzz for Grandma as well. If anyone deserves to EGOT, it’s Tomlin!)

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The Sportz

+ Megan Rapinoe was inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sport Hall of Fame this week!

+ Minnesota Lynx superstar Seimone Augustus wrote a beautiful thing about marriage equality and her wife for The Players Tribune. You’ll cry if you read it, I promise.

The first year in our relationship, I had to go overseas to play in Russia during the WNBA offseason. It was terrible. I was in a foreign country by myself, didn’t speak the language, couldn’t navigate Moscow and hated the food. I was miserable. The second year, LaTaya came with me. She found her way around the city immediately — how to get to the gym, the grocery store, the clubs. She went out with my teammates and really immersed herself in this new life. I wasn’t miserable anymore. Sure, it’s hard to travel across the world to live in a place with so many fundamental cultural differences, but when you fall in love, home is found in a person, not a city. Moscow felt like home because she did.

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Cara Delevingne

Cara Delevingne went on Good Morning Sacramento to promote Paper Towns and the news anchors were so horrible it took me like 15 minutes to watch this whole clip. They told her to go “take a little nap.” And then when her satellite feed was gone, one of the guys was like, “She was in a mood!” Between this and that Vogue guy mansplaining her bisexuality to her, I wouldn’t blame her for never doing another interview again! Anyway, here’s the clip; prepare to be bamboozled.

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Also.Also.Also.

No Filter Gives Cara Delevingne The Best Girlfriend Award, Now And Forevermore

Welcome back to No Filter, where we take time we could have spent thinking about philosophy or politics or how to save the last Northern white rhinos on the entire planet, and instead we puzzle over the relationship status of Cara Delevingne. We’re all very proud of ourselves. This week, Laura Jane Grace has a huge surprise for us, Tegan and Sara are giving us a big box of trash, and Miley Cyrus is doing suggestive things to a dessert food. Let’s get to it!

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https://instagram.com/p/5YQk_AwTad/
Internet rumours are trying to tell me that Cara and Annie broke up recently, but that can’t be true because Cara just won the girlfriend award to end all girlfriend awards. I used to think it was Cara who’d fuck this up somehow but Annie, girl, hang onto this one. She’s a KEEPER.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laura Jane Grace (@laurajanegrace)

Turns out Laura Jane Grace has been Beyoncé this entire time; nobody is surprised.

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https://instagram.com/p/5L5SAwwzL3/
Miley Cyrus and Stella Maxwell are having a wholesome time with this delightful churro. Miley, I just want to love you; you need to stop with the cornrows.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laverne Cox (@lavernecox)

At long last, Laverne Cox met Caitlyn Jenner.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laverne Cox (@lavernecox)

At long last, Laverne Cox met this dinosaur.

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Just Ellen Page snuggling a dog.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kate Moennig (@kateomoennig)

All of your favourite queermos at one restaurant, where Leisha Hailey awkwardly eats a sandwich.

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https://instagram.com/p/5Hu_6PJqFz/
SEASON 4 IS SO FAR AWAY AND I DON’T KNOW HOW I’M GOING TO LIVE.

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https://instagram.com/p/5K9e8SmFQD/

If you were very, very fast, you could have picked up a bunch of priceless Milo and Otis VHS tapes and discarded Ace of Base albums. Cannot imagine the joy of whatever nerds biked over there fast enough to sort through these treasures.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Samira Wiley (@whododatlikedat)

Samira and Lauren being the best humans, hands down.

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Join us next week, when Miley Cyrus hosts a garage sale full of pizza sheets, glitter shakers, discarded kittens and gold leaf rolling papers.

What We’re Going to Say About Caitlyn Jenner

As many of you know, I spent last week up on a mountain surrounded by 300 fellow queer Autostraddle staff members and readers at A-Camp. When you’re up there, it can seem like the rest of the world stops spinning, like the only things that are happening are happening at camp. I was reminded just how untrue this is about fifteen minutes before I started a workshop, poetically enough, on how to make queer women’s spaces better for trans women, when Morgan turned to me and said, “Well, her name is Caitlyn.”

I talked to Senior Editor Yvonne about how we should cover the news. With limited access to wi-fi and limited time, Yvonne’s neutral three paragraph, one hundred word article on Caitlyn Jenner’s debut was what ended up happening. That’s all we wrote and, in my opinion, that’s all we needed to write. We acknowledged that the cover debuted and made a place for readers to talk about it, but we didn’t act like it was the Transgender Tipping Point or anything.

As you can see, I now need to write a little bit more.

One of my jobs as Trans Editor here at Autostraddle is to curate submissions that are about trans topics. I’m always telling people that I’m looking for more submissions (especially from Black trans women and other TWOC) and that’s very true right now. In just the few days since Jenner made her debut, I’ve received the same number of submissions that I’d received in the entire two months previous. All of these submissions were about Jenner.

One of my other jobs is to watch the internet and see what kinds of things are being written about trans women and see which things we should be on top of or which things we need to respond to. Again, as soon as I got back from camp, everything started coming up Jenner.

For reasons that are pretty obvious (and some that I’m going to go over here) I don’t want to turn Autostraddle into The Caitlyn Jenner show for the next few weeks. My number one priority as the Trans Editor is trans women of color and especially Black trans women. If we keep on writing about Jenner, a wealthy white celebrity, we can’t do that.

I’d much rather publish articles about Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Miss Major Griffin-Gacy, Lexi Adsit, Ryka Aoki, Reina Gossett, Angelica Ross, Luna Merbruja, and other trans women of color who are making real differences in the lives of trans women. I’d much rather publish first person essays from trans people who want to share their stories. I’d much rather write about the importance of knowing the names and history of trans women of color. I know we need to do better, and we’re always trying to do just that (Hey trans people, especially TWOC, please submit your essays to me and let me know about stories that I should write about. We pay!).

But when the entire country is devoting rapt attention to one famous white trans woman, well, I should probably say something about that, too.

First, I want to get a couple things out of the way. Number one: I’m happy for Jenner. I’m happy that she’s able to be herself and and that she no longer has to hide. I’m happy that cis people are going to learn more about trans people and form some empathy for us. I’m happy for the trans people who will be helped and inspired by Jenner’s coming out. I also completely realize that, largely because cis people have said it is, this is a big moment for trans people. Jenner is the most famous trans person in America. More people than ever can name a trans person, more people than ever have read or heard a trans person tell their story. As soon as she was on the cover of Vanity Fair (or maybe as soon as she talked to Diane Sawyer), Caitlyn Jenner became the face of the transgender community in the United States.

Apart from being a big moment, this is also a pretty strange one. It’s strange that a trans woman who, so far, hasn’t done any work in the trans community has been crowned our queen. It’s strange that a trans woman who is famous, rich, white and conservative, four things that do not describe most trans women, is now the face most cis people think of when they hear the word “transgender.” It’s weird that people are saying that famous, rich, white, conservative and conventionally attractive trans woman is humanizing trans people to a whole new group of people. Why didn’t Janet Mock or Laverne Cox do that for them? Why didn’t CeCe McDonald? Why didn’t Islan Nettles?

The fact that it took a rich, white trans woman to humanize us probably doesn’t come as a shock to most trans women of color — or to most women of color, period. When we see our friends and sisters being arrested, raped and murdered on such a regular basis, we already know that our humanity isn’t being recognized (I say “our,” because I am a trans Latina, but I also need to say that my father is white and I often pass as white, so I’m definitely not dehumanized or brutalized in the way that darker-skinned and black trans women are). So to hear that Jenner’s coming out is finally “humanizing” trans people feels like cis people are rubbing salt in wounds that they’ve given us.

While most thinkpieces written by trans people do point out problems with having Jenner as the “face of the trans community,” since the day she first told Diane Sawyer that she was trans, some white trans people have been joining in to say that Jenner’s coming out was the moment we needed to finally humanize us. Many white cis and trans people have been coming together to once again disregard the visible and tireless work of TWOC. This moment that cis people are saying is galvanizing us is actually making many of us feel even worse.

It’s also strange that a lot of pretty respected news organizations are using Jenner’s coming out as an opportunity to release statements of trans misogyny as “opinion pieces.” Or maybe “strange” is the wrong word, because really, we should be used to it by now, but it still feels wrong.

One of the highest profile “opinion” pieces was written by Elinor Burkett for the New York Times, entitled “What Makes a Woman?” The piece trots out many of the same old arguments made by trans-exclusionary feminists for decades, the very same arguments that necessitated the creation of the term “transmisogyny” in the first place, a term that differentiates acts of discrimination, violence and oppression that trans women face from ones that trans men face on the basis that womanhood and femininity are seen as less valuable than maleness and masculinity, and so trans women and transfeminine people are targeted specifically because we are trans and because we are women.

Burkett argues that Jenner’s interpretation of “womanhood,” which Burkett defines with scorn as “a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup,” puts “women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes.” She says the idea that a gendered identity is “encoded in us” is “nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries.”

There’s so much going wrong here I don’t really know where to start. Okay, how ’bout here: she misgenders Jenner and other trans people throughout, reinforcing her original statement that trans women aren’t real women. She doesn’t even attempt to be polite about it: she uses Jenner’s birth names, “he” pronouns, and refers to how she just “became” a woman. She uses this singular trans woman, then, to represent all trans women, a group she argues against for the rest of the essay.

She also uses phrases like, “female students who consider themselves men,” showing that she and the editors of the Times had no interest in looking at GLAAD’s guidelines for talking about trans people. I know what the Dallas Morning News says (not just once, but twice), but it’s really not that hard to trust that trans people know who and what we are and to use the correct names and terminology for us.

She claims trans women have no awareness of what it’s like to be a woman, claiming we don’t know what it’s like to be afraid while walking alone at night (despite the fact that trans women who dare to walk anywhere alone are exceptionally vulnerable to harassment, assault and even murder) or how it feels to be paid less than men. To Burkett, we’re just the next “men” in line trying to tell women how to feel and think while reinforcing a damaging gender binary. I guess Jenner has humanized trans people for Burkett, but instead of seeing a human being she can empathize with, she just sees a human that she doesn’t really like. 

I could go on, but I won’t: like I said, her arguments aren’t anything new, nor are the rebuttals to them. But they were presented to the world as new, untested — and progressive — ideas because the world was paying attention to Caitlyn Jenner.

While Jenner has created a brand new level of visibility for trans people, that visibility has definitely come with a price. Because so many more people are interested in reading articles about trans people, so many more people (including many who have very little knowledge about trans issues or people) are willing to very publicly share their opinions, and be heard. In Burkett’s case, rather than question her own misogynistic judgements about the value of a feminine gender presentation or the agency of women who choose those things (because apparently those of us who like makeup and dresses are just buying into a “tidy box”), or question why the media seems only comfortable with very feminine-presenting trans women to begin with, she goes after trans women themselves. As if we aren’t already vulnerable enough. (Caitlyn Jenner, specifically, aside.)

There have also been some really amazing responses to Jenner’s coming out, many of them, not surprisingly, written by trans women of color. Janet Mock wrote an incredible blog post that not only outlines Jenner’s various privileges but also talks about how trans coverage is changing now and how we should react to that. She talks about how in the one hour after Jenner made her debut, she received more media “requests than I have received from the release of my book, the release of Laverne Cox’s TIME cover, my infamous CNN debate and the consistent deaths of trans women of color — combined.” Again, cis society is deciding that this is the issue that they finally want to pay attention to.

Cox herself also added her own thoughts via a tumblr post that largely talks about Caitlyn’s glamorous photo spread and look. Cox talks about how Jenner’s look isn’t the norm for trans women, Cox’s isn’t even, and that “this is why we need diverse media representations of trans folks to multiply trans narratives in the media and depict our beautiful diversities.” Both women were spot on. Jenner’s debut was an auspicious one, but we need much more representation and we need to be recognized for much more of the things we’re already doing.

Every year on Trans Day of Visibility I see two kinds of essays. One kind, usually from white trans people, talks about the importance of visibility. The other kind, usually from TWOC, talks about how for black and brown trans women, being visible often means being open to violence and discrimination. I see the value and truth in both. Jenner’s extremely visible debut in Vanity Fair is showing this duality perhaps better than any previous mainstream trans story.

So we here at Autostraddle aren’t going to pretend that Jenner coming out is going to improve every trans woman of color’s life or even every white trans woman’s life. We’re not going to act like she’s the hero the trans community has been waiting for; we already have plenty of heroes we need to pay more attention to. At the very same time that people are claiming that Jenner is doing so much good for the trans community, one of those heroes, Monica Roberts — one of the most important trans writers on the internet — is having to ask for donations on her website. If that doesn’t illustrate the huge gap between the experiences of trans women, I don’t know what does.

There has to be a better way to talk about the trans community (whatever that means) after Jenner’s coming out than to frame everything in reference to her. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to be publishing articles about Jenner every other day or even every week. We’re not going to keep talking about how things are “so different and so much better” now that Jenner is out. We’re going to keep trying to do better and we’re going to keep trying to focus on trans women of color. Caitlyn Jenner might have humanized a very specific type of trans person in the eyes of cis people, but until black trans women have their humanity recognized in the same way, forgive us if we feel like we still have a lot of work to do.

Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair Cover Is Very Vanity Fair

Caitlyn Jenner, Olympic gold medalist and reality TV star, made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair after coming out as a trans woman in her two-hour interview special with Diane Sawyer in April. She talked about how she struggled with her gender identity and coming out for years all while being in the public eye.

In the 22-page cover feature story, Jenner speaks with Buzz Bissinger about her life after her TV interview and her upcoming TV series. Jenner posed for photographer Annie Leibovitz during her photo shoot in her home.

Read tidbits of the interview on Vanity Fair or wait till it hits newsstands on June 9.