On The 6: Confronting the Mortality of Girls Like Me
Feature Image via Shutterstock.
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.
Today is Trans Day of Remembrance, the day we look back and remember the trans people who’s lives have been taken in the past year. This was an especially bloody year for the trans community, resulting in a record number of murders against trans people in the US, all of whom were trans women, and nearly all of whom were Black and/or Latina. The names of the trans women who have been murdered this year in the US include Papi Edwards, Lamia Beard, Ty Underwood, Yazmin Vash Payne, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Penny Proud, Kristina Gomez Reinwald, B. Golec, Keyshia Blige, Mya Hall, London Chanel, Mercedes Williamson, Jasmine Collins, Ashton O’Hara, India Clarke, K.C. Haggard, Shade Schuler, Amber Monroe, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Tamara Dominguez, Keisha Jenkins and Zella Ziona. For a more complete list of trans people killed around the world in the past year, please visit the Trans Day of Awareness website.
Assembling myself for the daily interrogation of my femininity is a careful procedure. As a woman in New York City I must be desirable enough to navigate public spaces of transportation comfortably, but subdued enough to be left alone. As a trans woman, getting catcalled is the relief of my gender being read correctly muddled with the fear of my name appearing on social media in honor of my life the next day. When I’m riding the uptown 6 train on my way to work in the very privileged and beige Upper East Side, violence isn’t supposed to exist. Trauma wasn’t meant to happen at 9 a.m. on that August morning. Not when I was running on time, and somehow missed the long line for the day’s first cup of coffee. Nothing could have warned me that the meticulous construction of my person would be unraveled while my peers watched from their own cocoons of solitude.
Before that day in August, I associated the 6 train with Jennifer Lopez’s first album, On the 6, referencing her daily commute from the Bronx to Manhattan. It was the only album of my older sister’s that I was not allowed to touch, which only cemented its importance in the tapestry of femininity that I was assembling. With lyrics like If you want to live your life, live it all the way and don’t you waste it we followed J.Lo’s lead into our earliest concepts of agency and re-claiming space. The dance beats and affirming lyrics could mean whatever we needed them to mean as we co-existed in our own varying degrees of girlhood. I imagined a purposeful Jennifer riding into Manhattan, drowning out the voices of catcallers with the promising vibration of the city that would eventually launch her into the small blue stereo that my sister kept beside her bed. When I arrived in New York City, I was able to call upon the memory that resonated across all the distinct representations of girlhood in my family. On that unassuming morning in August, my attacker intruded on this fortifying recollection. Every train ride has turned into a return to the scene of the crime, with my time being spent calculating the minutes between each stop until I reach my destination. Sexual assault has stained the details of my life while revealing itself in my daily actions. The decision to wear a skirt has become a confrontation with my mortality, and the mortality of girls like me has become a trending topic.
While commuting during the 9 o’clock hour, one must maintain the appearance that they are on a solitary mission, looking anywhere but the eyes of the people pressed up against them. On that morning I was successful in mirroring the performance of my peers until I felt an unwelcome intrusion on my backside. I was ready to chalk it up to someone’s gym bag, but gym bags don’t lift up your dress and grab your arm. All of the feminine voice training disappeared, and I could only plea for help through desperate glances around the train compartment. As he exposed my flesh to the cold air conditioning of the train, I knew he was moments away from discovering the part of my body that had caused an incorrect assignment when I entered this world. I felt myself becoming a social media fixture, my Instagram selfies being shown across news stations.
As the headlines misgendering me appeared in my mind’s eye, the train stopped and I was able to pull myself free and stall the death that had felt inevitable ever since my first injection of estrogen. By this time my voice had returned, and my cries were unapologetic. The morning continued all around me, and New Yorkers granted me privacy while on their own linear paths. I had become one of the distractions that cause everyone to turn up the volume on their headphones.
During those desperate moments of looking for empathy in any form, I called myself to task for all the times I turned up my own headphones to avoid the sounds of another person’s pleas for aid. The daily requests for kindness become part of the scenery after five years in this city. It wasn’t until I was asking for help that I realized the resentment New Yorkers experience towards the people brave enough to request a helping hand. Strength, in New York, is measured by the ability to master pain in solitude, and vulnerability is the biggest threat towards this notion. Our self imposed isolation keeps us from salvation. We resent the courageous for asking for tenderness from their peers, something largely unlearned in the name of maintaining an air of control. As we see the lives of trans women being extinguished, especially black trans women, this also becomes apart of the landscape of our virtual lives. We honor these women as long as they are not a threat to the online presence we carefully curate. Let us say the names of the lives taken from us while being proud of the trans women that have survived up until this point. Let’s allow the trans women amongst us to enrich our lives, and enable their journeys to exist alongside our own.
Extending a hand to the trans women we know, and especially to the trans women we do not know, can feel like it has nothing to do with our development or our experience. Trans women are all around us, and they have always lived among us. It’s in all our best interest to make sure these women are cared for, loved and heard. When the people we coexist with are taken care of, it heightens the quality of our own lives. When the most marginalized group in our culture is given shelter, it’s a triumph for every corner of our society. It brings us closer to the idea of community that only seems to exist in essays and think pieces. It loosens the grip of the constraints placed upon all of us by gender. It takes us from running around in circles of discourse to making sure tangible basic needs are being met. Trans women deserve to contribute to the world and no longer carry its weight, often standing at the intersections of race, class and expression, which only makes the weight heavier.
Most women, cis or trans, have been the recipients of genital-based oppression. Most women, cis or trans, have been told they are not feminine enough or not beautiful enough to deserve love. Our issues are the issues of anyone who wishes to abolish being told who you are before you have introduced yourself. The deaths of trans women this year, especially black trans women, tell us that visibility has not challenged the specific brand of misogyny that is killing us. It has only reassembled itself around the most vulnerable in our community. Women like me haven’t been able to heal from the stark reality that our bodies are unwillingly political statements, as we fear our death being the next number added to the growing list. This doesn’t end here, as we must get used to the possibility of that one of our sisters will be taken from us. A casual stroll through our Instagram feed turns into images of women like us who have been taken and debates over our humanity.
Including trans women doesn’t have to be a disruption to anyone’s lives. Adjustments of people’s language and shifts in people’s thinking can be small reminders that our lives are no longer an afterthought. Pausing for a moment before we use words like ‘penis’ to be synonymous with men, or ‘vagina’ to be synonymous with women. Dissecting the public interest with genitalia. Stopping the simplification of people down to their body parts. All of these are simple things you can do. As a woman with a penis, I’ve always felt shame during intimacy with new partners. Small alterations to the way we speak could save women like me from the feeling that words like ‘shame’ and ‘trans’ are interchangeable. This is a collective shift that begins with cis people, but could end up saving all of our lives. A shift that asks all people to question gender, and trusts they will seek out their own answers, not just requesting trans women to confront identity when we all could benefit from asking necessary questions. Releasing trans women from the responsibility of having all the answers about gender and identity. Ultimately leading us to conclusions that will allow our children to not be confined by the genders that were assigned to them, and to give them the space to have relationships with their own bodies.
Invoking the girl I was before that very public assault took place is impossible. I’ve resigned to the fact that she is now a part of the tapestry of my own womanhood that I will develop for the rest of my life. In order to ride the same train every day, I have had to bring the woman I aspire to become to the surface, and her presence can be felt in waves. I stand near other women on the train, hoping for a comrade in the diurnal scrutiny of our bodies. My comfort is in the mother, wife, and sister I envision myself to be, alongside all of the other trans women that are still using their lives as an example of the highest form of morality. The women who manage to face the world every day, despite their life expectancy being 35 years old. Now, being On The 6 means more than just my favorite childhood album, but I can still rely on the old familial practice of re-purposing her lyrics to mean whatever I need them to mean. The lyrics You gotta do it your way, you gotta prove it, you gotta mean what you say is a mantra to remind myself of the work left to be done, the hope of being alive to see the fruits of our labor, and instilling trust in young trans girls that their older trans sisters are working tirelessly to make their lives fuller and safer.
17 Incredible Autostraddle Personal Essays By Trans Women
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.
From 2009 through 2011, Autostraddle’s coverage of trans issues could best be characterized as a series of blunders, failures and missteps. Raised on movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and coming into our lesbian identities in bars and at queer parties occupied by queer cis women and trans men, Laneia and I never decided to intentionally exclude trans women from Autostraddle… we’d just not thought about trans women at all, not even for one second. When we published our first essay by a new trans male writer and readers asked where the trans women were at, I remember thinking “but trans women don’t date women, they date men, right?” Um, wrong! (In fact, the best numbers we have on the topic indicate that two-thirds of trans women identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer.) Oh my friends, that was just the tip of the “shit I was wrong about” and “things I am so sorry about” iceberg.
So we set out to educate ourselves and be better. If someone in a leadership position like mine could be that ignorant, who knows how little everybody else knew. I read a lot of books and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, which is where I found Annika Penelope, our first trans woman staff writer.
When Annika decided to take a break from the internet, we used money from our 2012 fundraising campaign to publish a series of essays by trans women called Trans*scribe. We hoped at the very least we’d publish a bunch of interesting work and at the very most, add a bunch of new trans writers to our rolodex for future contributions. Around that time I read a really interesting post at The Lingerie Addict by the incredible Cora Harrington, who was being attacked online with transphobic slurs although she was not, in fact, transgender. I thought it’d be cool to re-publish her piece with a response from an actual trans woman of color, and asked Mey Rude, whose Tumblr I’d been lurking on for a few weeks, if she’d like to do it. At this point I didn’t make the connection that Mey was also the author of a Trans*scribe essay we were planning to publish, but when I did, it all came together. (The Call/Response piece with Cora and Mey turned out SO GOOD.)
At this point I cannot even imagine an Autostraddle without Mey in it. She’s become a dear friend and an incredible Autostraddle Team Member. In addition to writing about comics, witchery, television, cold-weather fashion and dinosaur facts, she’s taken on the role of Trans Editor and solicited work from so many of the best transgender writers working today, with a particular emphasis on trans women of color.
She’s told ghost stories with Janet Mock, interviewed Laverne Cox (twice!), consulted with the authors of Lumberjanes and Bitch Planet, interviewed Miss Major, schooled the world on how not to interview trans women, appeared on HLN, had her article mentioned by name on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show and been featured on Facebook Stories — and brought authors like Gabrielle Bellot, Raquel Willis and Drew Harris to Autostraddle.
I shelved the original piece I’d written for this week because Mey has curated such an exceptional series of articles and essays centering trans women’s voices that the last thing I wanted to do was re-center a cis voice. I JUST WANT TO TALK ABOUT MEY, YOU GUYS! But I’d also like to highlight some of the best stuff that’s been published by trans women over the years. Since 2012, we’ve published writing by 48 different trans women writers. Autostraddle is committed to trans inclusion, to elevating trans voices, and to setting a new standard for queer women’s communities to be explicitly inclusive of trans women, no matter how many TERFs harass us on Twitter. We know that we mess up sometimes, and that not everybody in the trans community is a fan of everything we do, and that we’re not perfect allies by any means. (Nor does anybody need or want a cookie.) But this we believe: trans women are women, black trans lives matter, trans women of color need our support, and that queer communities who don’t include trans women are doing it wrong.
This year has been full of many steps forward and many steps back for the trans community at large, but I do think Mey has had a hand in a lot of the steps forward that have happened. I’m proud to have her in our family, and grateful for every trans woman who’s published with Autostraddle.
Here’s what’s gone up for Trans Awareness Week so far:
- 15 Best Trans Woman Movies According to Trans Women, by Mey Rude, constructed with input from amazing humans including Jen Richards, Annie Mok, Zackary Drucker, Princess Harmony Rodriguez and Trace Lysette.
- True Life: I’m Genderqueer and I Watched MTV’s “True Life: I’m Genderqueer”, by Anna Bongiovanni
- The Complete History of Transgender Characters in American Comic Books, by Mey Rude
- Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously, by Gabrielle Bellot
- 10 Trans Women Pioneers They Definitely Didn’t Tell You About In History Class, by Mey Rude
- Kicking Off Trans Awareness Week, the Trans Stories of the Past Year, Recapped, by Mey Rude
1. I’m Just Your Typical Urban Hipster Femme Twentysomething Trans Lesbian, by Annika Penelope
The post that started it all!
I doubled down on my efforts in college. I made a vow to try to become the man that everyone expected me to be. It certainly seemed easier than the alternatives. I joined a frat and started lifting weights. But the more I butched up, the more miserable I felt inside. I was never comfortable in social situations. I couldn’t fully relax around others for fear of letting the girl below the façade show through.
2. A Muslim RuPaul At the Dawn Of Islam, by Maryam
It’s really hard to describe Tuwais without getting a little wide eyed. He comes off as a mixture of David Bowie and RuPaul.** He was a freed slave of Arwa, mother of Uthman, the Third Caliph. (It’s said he was born the day the Prophet (P) upon him died. Which was the origin of the phrase “unluckier than Tuwais.” Legends.) Sometime in his career, he took a nickname, something only female singers did, changing his name to Tuwais, or ‘little peacock.’
3. How to Write About Trans Women, by Gabrielle Bellot
After we all read Gabrielle’s essay on Guernica, Mey reached out to see if she’d write for us. When she said yes we all died because she is so good and we were so excited.
The photo on your cover or hanging above your article comes next. Go for broke here. Images of hairy legs in high heels or emerging from tutus are classics you can’t go wrong with, like Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz or light summery pastas with basil and garlic. The goal is to suggest that trans women must look like comical parodies of womanhood, like clueless men.
4. If Joan Of Arc Can Do It, Why Can’t I?, by Mey Rude
One of the first times Mey’s whole heart was just right there on the screen. Also I love Joan of Arc and I love Mey.
Ever since I went to a Halloween party at my friend’s church youth group in 6th grade, I’ve been almost inseparable from my Christian identity. But on November 4th, 2012, my heart was all the way down in my toes as I got ready to go to church for the first time as a transgender lesbian.
5. I Said Yes To The (Gay Wedding) Dress, by Mari Brighe
Despite all the planning, and all the talking, and all the money we had spent, it was THAT moment that suddenly made the wedding feel very real. This was the dress I was going to get married in, that I would be wearing when I affirmed my desire to spend the rest of my life with my amazing partner. But, it also touched something deeper, more complex, more fundamental to my transition and my womanhood.
6. Graduation to Womanhood, by Raquel Willis
Some people come out of the experience with a degree, others with incredible stories, and others simply with a better understanding of their body’s tolerance for alcohol. But some, like me, left with a newfound understanding and sense of purpose; I matriculated as a timid, confused boy and departed as a woman standing in her truth.
“I think Mey is going to be my best friend for life.” – Heather Hogan, pictured here with Mey Rude
7. Do Not Consume Psilocybin Mushrooms While Trans, by Meredith
Meredith’s cis wife, Genevra, has also written some really amazing stuff for Autostraddle.
It feels real when I wake up, but I still have a male body. It must be another dream. I shakily walk over to a bookshelf and pick a book at random — Orlando, funnily enough. The pages remain the same no matter how many times I look away and back again, almost like I’m awake. I must be dreaming though, if only because it would be too unfair for this to be my real body again.
8. “And I Do Mean All My Life”: A Trans Coming Out Letter, by Sarah Szabo
Over the last four years, my incredible parents have basically done the equivalent of bringing me the moon and stars down from the sky, through all the things they’ve done for me. They are amazing people, and I know I’m fortunate, but even they had troubles grasping what it truly meant for them and me, the first time I told them, “I’m a girl.” I knew they probably would. Also, I knew I’d have trouble saying the words.
9. I’m A Trans Woman And I’m Not Interested in Being One of the Good Ones, by Vivian
Here’s the thing: People fucking despise trans women. Often the nicest thing they can thing of to say to trans woman is “gosh, you are so little like a trans woman!” Being trans is something to avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare up under. But I’m done with it.
10. I Knew I Was A Girl at 8: Transitioning and Teenage Activism, by Eli Erlick
I remember explaining to Harmony, my best friend in third grade, that I was a girl:
“Harmony! We can have sleepovers now!”
“But you’re a boy!” she immediately retorted.
“Well, I’m a girl now.”
Harmony rolled her eyes and walked away, confused.
Annika with her cabin at A-Camp 1.0
11. Imagining a Better World For Trans Women Survivors of Domestic Violence, by Morgan Collado
The reach of intimate partner violence in my life still amazes me. Emotional violence in relationships leaves scars that are deep and knotted. It has taken years and lots of love, both self-love and love from others, in order to ease out the tension that ties up my body. But being a survivor has shown me how resilient I can be because I am still alive. I can take the shit that the world has thrown at me and turn it into a garden.
12. I’m Both an L and a T and I Don’t Want to Choose a Side, by Mey Rude
As a trans woman, I’m much more afraid of, and much more angry at, about a dozen demographics before cis lesbians, and as a lesbian I’m much more afraid of, and much more angry at, another dozen demographics before trans women. Actually, I’m pretty over this pitting women against women thing, especially when we have so much in common. I feel much more kinship with cis lesbians than I do with gay men or most trans men, or to be honest, with many white trans women. Oftentimes I feel a bigger divide between white trans women and trans women of color than I do between trans women and cis lesbians.
13. This Is Because I’m a Woman, by Morgan McCormick
It didn’t take long before I wasn’t leaving my home much anymore. Friends I’d opened up to about it often just say, “Welcome to womanhood” or sometimes, “Wow, really? I wish guys would pay that much attention to me.” I can see what they’re saying, because some guys are just trying to tell me I look nice and they’re not going to follow me home or hurt me. (One just bicycled around me a couple times and said, “Little girl, you are the most beautiful,” and pedaled away.)
14. Rebel Yell: This Voice Isn’t Gendered, It’s Punk, by Audrey Zee
Instability is a funny thing, being queer and trans: it can be a space of possibility, of new starts, and making norms look as dumb as they are in comparison. And good punk is nothing but instability, everything just about to fall apart. Instability is scary, though, when it’s my own gender identity being broken down, live, in front of other people.
Tim O’Brian, Laverne Cox & Mey Rude
15. Badass Blacksmiths: Women’s Work and Transgender Identity, by Willow Zietman
My passion for the craft became less of a blessing when I came out as transgender. People would look surprised and say, “But…you can’t be a girl. You’re a blacksmith!” My adherence to my passion as a gendered activity ended up negating the reality of my inner feelings. I may be trans, but people didn’t believe me because of my craft.
16. On The Silencing of Trans Women of Color: A Response to Trans Glamour vs. Trans Activism, by L’lerrét Jazelle Ailith
As a white woman, you may not understand this, but the simple act of getting up and being in the public eye and proclaiming your transness unapologetically is an act of revolution for every trans person of color, and in that right, they are doing the work.
17. Click on a Keyboard: Dungeons, Dragons, and Trans-Feminism, by Katherine Cross
Single player games provided me with visions of female power. Women with swords, spells, lightsabers, martial skills, elegance, high education, class, guts, skill, and who – above all – showed no shame in who they were. If these fictional characters could do it, so could I. But since I was still being forced to live as a boy, where could I possibly begin?
15 Best Trans Woman Movies According to Trans Women
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.
It seems like filmmakers are practically jumping at the chance to make movies about trans people right now. This year alone we’ve seen Tangerine, About Ray, Stonewall, Grandma and The Danish Girl, all featuring trans characters. However, this increase in trans characters hasn’t exactly resulted in an increase in positive representation. Most of the movies I mentioned featured cis actors playing the trans roles, and most aren’t really what you would call happy stories for the trans characters. This is how trans representation in movies has been for as long as I can remember.
Laverne Cox tattooing Lily Tomlin in a scene from Grandma.
So, when I say that this is the list of the 15 Best Trans Woman Movies, I should make it clear that most of the movies on this list aren’t necessarily that great in the area of trans representation, and I don’t think that any of them are perfect. They are, however, better than most, and they did mean a lot to many of the trans women who watched them. So, while most of these movies might not be great examples of trans representation on the silver screen, they are the 15 best movies featuring trans women according to trans women.
The trans women who I polled were women who have written for Autostraddle and other sites, including me, Devan Diaz, Lexi Adsit, Gabby Bellot, Raquel Willis, Savannah, Drew, Nicole and Sadie Edwards; writer and editor Jamie Berrout; author Ryka Aoki; trans activist Cherno Biko; Her Story co-creator and co-star Jen Richards; Transparent producer and one of the creators of “This is Me,” Zackary Drucker; writer and illustrator Annie Mok, Drunktown’s Finest and Her Story director Sydney Freeland, Black Girl Dangerous writer Princess Harmony Rodriguez, TSER Director and co-founder Eli Erlick and Transparent actress Trace Lysette.
Many of the trans women I talked to couldn’t name more than two or three movies they thought were good, some could only name one, a few couldn’t even name one. One of the women I asked, Devan Diaz said that she finds it hard to watch films with trans characters because they ring so false for her. It doesn’t feel like she’s seeing herself reflected in the movie.
Most films I’ve seen that have included trans characters/actors have been for the cis gaze. It’s always the same story of the person going from point a to point b, but we never see the life beyond transition. We never see cis characters and actors ask critical questions about gender the way that seems required of trans people in film. I think if we want to be more inclusive we all need to confront identity and who we are, and that means interrogating misogyny and transmisogyny in film.
Another woman, Jamie Berrout, said that it’s hard for her to watch these movies because it’s too difficult for her to not empathize with the trans women on screen, who are usually being mistreated, either by the other characters, the narrative itself or the filmmakers.
Whenever I see trans women characters there’s an immediate connection where I try to identify with them and match up my experiences to what they’re going through in their fictional lives. When a trans woman character is treated badly by her part in the film or by the plot or by being portrayed by a cis person then that means I’ll be suffering along with her. And I’m not using that “when” lightly — watching a movie that features trans women is almost always a painful, invalidating, anxiety-causing experience. The question isn’t, “Will this movie hurt me?” it’s, “Which of these possible ways of hurting me will this movie employ?” and “Is there something about this movie that makes it worth being insulted and humiliated for a couple of hours?”
Still, there are some movies that some trans women do like, and do relate to. These movies aren’t assured to work for all trans women, but if you’re looking for a movie that at least some trans women think represent them well, these are your best bets.
The films Wild Zero, Beautiful Boxer, Trash, The Legend of the Swordsman (Swordsman II) and Laurence Anyways also received votes but didn’t make the list.
15. The Matrix
Not only is The Matrix one of the most revolutionary action and science fiction films of the past 30 years, but it’s also probably the most famous movie written and directed by a trans woman, and as Ryka Aoki told me, “We should not focus only on the beautiful ones in front of the camera, but also the brilliant trans women behind the camera, as well.” Although she wasn’t out at the time, Lana Wachowski co-wrote and co-directed this film about a group of hackers/freedom fighters who start a revolution against the robots who are enslaving earth. As Annie Mok pointed out, the film was also full of trans symbolism.
Among the first words in The Matrix are “CALL TRANS OPT,” flashed in green on Neo’s MS-DOS-style screen. This movie was written by a 90’s trans woman anime nerd (with white girl dreads, unfortunately…) — as my friend Maggie Eighteen pointed out, the Wachowski siblings took heavily from the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie. Several essays explore transness in the film. When I watched it on VHS with my housemates recently, I would have taken a drink every time something obviously trans happened, but I’m sober so at each instance I just yelled out “TRANS!” and held up my fist.
14. Drunktown’s Finest
Carmen Moore as Felixia.
Another movie written and directed by a trans woman, this time a trans woman of color named Sydney Freeland, Drunktown’s Finest also co-stars a trans woman of color playing a trans woman of color. This film is about three interconnected young Navajo people, including a sex worker and aspiring model Felixia played by newcomer Carmen Moore. Freeland and Moore bring an authenticity to a trans woman’s story that’s rare in film, and even more rare for a Native American trans woman.
13. A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story
The only “Based on a True Story” on our list, A Girl Like Me tells the story of Gwen Araujo, a young trans Latina, who was beaten and murdered by a group of men who attacked her after they found out she was trans when she was just 17 years old. The film, which originally aired on Lifetime, stars J.D. Pardo as Gwen and won the 2007 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Movie for Television. Drew said that she latched onto the film because “it was one of the first movies I ever watched that was inclusive of someone with not only trans experience but also who was a person of color.” For Sadie, the film marked a turning point in how she viewed trans experiences.
I was probably in the 9th grade, it was a time when I had finally been able to give a name and a face to what was going on with me and seeing films like this were a big influence on that. I spent more than one night I’m sure, sitting and weeping to this movie. It was my one of my first exposures to the brutality and denial that so many trans women, most significantly trans women of color, face in just being themselves. It’s haunting and kind of beautiful, for Lifetime standards, but like most tragic real life trans narratives it’s sometimes pretty hard to watch.
12. The Crying Game
The Crying Game is probably one of the more famous movies with a trans character, but not really for a good reason. This movie’s about an IRA fighter, Fergus, (played by Stephen Rea) who kidnaps a Black British soldier, Jody, (played by Forest Whitaker) and, after bonding with the captive and hearing stories about his girlfriend Dil (played by Jaye Davidson), later meets and falls for her. This movie is, for the most part, a pretty touching love story between Fergus and Dil, even after he finds out she’s trans. The famous scene, however, is when Fergus first sees that Dil is trans, the same time the audience does, causing the viewer to gasp and Fergus to vomit.”The Crying Game was one of those movies I avoided for a very long time. Not really because of the film itself, but the mythos surrounding it. Its been referenced time and again in pop culture because of just how ‘shocking’ the reveal is,” Sadie said, “Once I got around to seeing the film itself, though, I saw a lot of the tenderness and the complexities of the plot. Where others saw the disgust, I saw the love story, the part that said that a trans woman could find love, even with all her parts.”
11. Todo sobre mi madre
Directed and written by the legendary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, Todo sobre mi madre, also known as All About My Mother, features a trans sex worker named Agrado played by a trans woman, Antonia San Juan, who’s the main character’s old friend. It’s also one of the most-awarded movies featuring a trans woman, taking home the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as dozens of other international awards. For Savannah, “the relatable, charismatic trans woman character Agrado and her relationships with the other women in the film balanced well with transfeminine Lola, who was essentially the film’s ever-absent (but still humanized) antagonist.”
10. Better than Chocolate
This was ranked #91 on our list of the 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time, and one of the lesbians in it is Judy, a trans woman played by Peter Outerbridge. It’s not necessarily that this movie is quality that makes it beloved, though, as Annie Mok told me.
Better Than Chocolate is a bad movie, but it’s gleefully bad and weirdly addictive — Autostraddle cartoonist Archie Bongiovanni once busted open a broken laptop with a hammer to get at their DVD copy. I recommend it without irony partly because of the legit sweet subplot starring a trans lady character, the nightclub singer Judy. Judy is a gay nightclub singer, and at one point the protagonists of the movie beat up a girl who harasses her in a bathroom. This movie has multiple montages and ends, as Archie pointed out, with a literal explosion. It’s cute, but only watch it with a friend or two so you can laugh about how, overall, it makes no sense.
9. The Queen
The Queen is a documentary chronicling the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant of 1967, which was a drag queen pageant hosted by Flawless Sabrina, and won by Rachel Harlow, who would go on to transition after the contest, and featuring, among others, Andy Warhol as a judge. Zackary Drucker says that The Queen isn’t only a good movie, it’s an important historical artifact.
It’s so important that we know where we’re coming from. The Queen is a rare look at pre-Stonewall queer communities, and reveals a time before gender identity distinctions were cemented — all cross-dressing was a felony whether you were a gay man in drag, a trans woman, somewhere in between, black or white, young or old. Watching this group come together over one of Flawless Sabrina’s pageants (“The Nationals”) in 1967 and talk about the draft in Vietnam, family, and living underground, is a tremendous inspiration for today’s trans movement.
The Queen features legends like Crystal LaBeija and has a really interesting behind the scenes look into trans history.
8. Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson
This documentary, which you can watch on Youtube is mainly made up of interviews with the legendary trans activist and Stonewall instigator Marsha P. Johnson, herself. Cherno Biko says it’s “life changing,” and “the most comprehensive archive we have of Marsha. I love that it’s free and on YouTube and more accessible to the girls. Too often we only focus on Sylvia and only think of Marsha as an afterthought. By centering Marsha, this film cemented her place in history as one of the mothers of this movement.” She added that her favorite part “is when they talked about her being called Saint Marsha and how vendors in the flower district cared for her because they considered her holy. This film inspired me to invest and act in Happy Birthday Marsha.” Lexi Adist added that this “documentation of Marsha P. Johnson, in which very little has been written or documented about, is extraordinary! Her struggles and life are a story worth witnessing. I’m just sad it hasn’t received as much fanfare or visibility as other films. Marsha is an icon and grandmother to our modern community and she deserves to be recognized for her labor.”
7. Women in Revolt
A film by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, this is the rare example of an older film actually starring trans women. Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. Drucker says that Women in Revolt “is a hoot. Also improvised (like Woodlawn’s earlier film with Morrissey, Trash), [Woodlawn, Curtis and Darling] interpret the fledgling 2nd wave women’s liberation movement with campy flair, organizing their comrades under the moniker ‘P.I.G.’ or ‘Politically Involved Girls,’ becoming lesbians, embezzling money from socialites, among other antics.” She adds that “I love that in both films the transgender actresses were playing cis characters — so ahead of its time.”
6. Wild Side
Wild Side, a 2004 French/Belgian/British film about a trans sex worker named Stéphanie, stars Stéphanie Michelini and won several awards when it came out. Nicole says that what she loves most about the film is that “it manages to be about a trans woman’s life, without sensationalizing it. It touches on so many struggles, feelings, and themes that I relate to, and have lived, without making them Stéphanie’s entire life. Being trans isn’t all of who I am, it’s only part of who I am, and this film portrays that better than many other trans related shows/movies that I have seen.” Also, she adds, “about 7 seconds of this film feature Evangelion, so that’s also a win.” Drucker agrees, saying that “Wild Side is sexy, unpredictable, and features a menáge-a-trois relationship in which a trans woman is the object of desire — weak knees thinking about this one.”
5. Princesa
The first film in our top five is this 2001 Italian film about, again, a trans sex worker. In this film, Ingrid de Souza, a Brazilian trans woman, plays Fernanda, a 19-year-old Brazilian trans woman who travels to Milan in order to work as a sex worker and get enough money for her surgery. Like Women in Revolt, this is a rare film to actually star a trans woman. According to Trace Lysette, “the key word for me is authenticity, Princesa is a look into the life of a trans girl who journeys away from home, like so many of us do, and takes matters into her own hands to finance her gender transition while struggling to find a sense of community, family, and love all while dealing with the pressures of a world that leaves little space for us to thrive. It’s the rawest, truest narrative around the trans female experience I’ve seen.” Savannah adds that “one thing I think it does successfully is that it manages to neither condemn nor exotify her life on the streets.”
4. Ma Vie En Rose
Zackary Drucker says she “was 14 years-old when Ma Vie en Rose came to my local independent movie theater in Syracuse, NY. It was the first time I saw my adolescence, my experience of being young and trans, reflected on the big screen. I have a picture of myself in front of the movie poster that was taken the night that I saw it.” Many others felt similarly about this Belgian film about a a young trans girl played by Georges Du Fresne who is trying to live as the girl she is while her school, family and communty try to stop her. Ma Vie en Rose won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
3. Tangerine
Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in TANGERINE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
This poll stops being a contest when we get to the top three movies as voted by trans women. These three films were so far ahead of the others that if they got half as many points, they would still be the top three.
While the trauma of this film is understandably too much for some trans women, others found it to be one of the most emotionally authentic portrayals of trans women on screen. I loved this film and said “This movie is, above all else, sweltering and electric. Most of the movie’s slow-burning heat comes from Mya Taylor’s amazingly deep and deliberate — and often uproariously comedic — performance as Alexandra, one of the film’s two transgender main characters. The film’s crackling and bubbling energy comes from Alexandra’s best friend and partner-in-crime Sin-Dee, played with energetic hilarity by fellow newcomer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez.” These two women go on a journey across Hollywood trying to find the woman who Sin-Dee’s boyfriend cheated on her with and getting to Alexandra’s musical performance at a local restaurant. For Lexi Adsit, it was “exciting to see sex-working trans women of color characters get screen time. There are so many girls who have not had their stories told and Tangerine not only does a good job of telling it, but does so in a way that emotionally connects a mainstream audience to the characters’ struggles without losing it’s authenticity.”
2. Gun Hill Road
When Gun Hill Road came out, many in the trans community started buzzing about the film. Not only was it a movie about a trans woman of color, but she was actually played by a trans woman of color! That twoc, Harmony Santana, took full advantage of the role she was given, delivering a powerhouse performance and earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination, making her the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an acting award in the US. Biko says that Santana “was the first young trans girl I saw in a feature film. I shared many experiences of her character in the film and her family dynamic mirrored my own.” Raquel Willis also loves Gun Hill Road, adding that she thinks “it was an eye-opener, intersectionality-wise, to focus on a Latina trans woman and, of course, the interesting dynamics she had in her relationship.” Drew adds that “the movie tackles a lot of topics surrounding the trans community that cisgender heteronormative people might consider taboo; transphobia, transmisogyny, sex work, ‘pumping” (black market surgery)’ and more.”
1. Paris is Burning
Number one is this legendary documentary that focuses on New York’s Ballroom scene and the people, including many trans women of color, who built a community there. Lysette says that with this film and The Queen, she “can’t help but be overwhelmed with appreciation for the women who stood before me. Rachel Harlow, Octavia St. Laurent, Crystal Labeija, Venus Xtravaganza, the list goes on. I see the strength in them and it gives me the strength to exist unapologetically, to make things better for the next generation of girls.” Biko points out that despite the fact that the film is over two decades old and the fact that it’s director Jennie Livingston profited off the backs of the QTPOC featured in the film (only $55,000 was distributed among 13 of the people featured), “it remains one of our greatest treasures. It’s a roadmap for the children and made me want to escape Ohio for NYC. PEPPER (LaBeija). OCTAVIA. DORIAN (Corey). I could go on.” Drew adds that Paris is Burning “is just simply EVERYTHING! Dorian Corey’s sassy commentary adds a legendary effect to the already groundbreaking documentary.”
Adsit also pointed out Livingston’s continued profiting off of the film and exploitation of the queer Black and Brown people within, but also praised the film.
I want to recognize the empowerment that, as a transgender woman of color, I experience watching Paris is Burning. This film not only seduced me as a viewer, but empowered me and gave me powerful women to look up to. Dorian Corey, for instance, throughout the movie drops some of the most amazing life knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to get from your own grandmother. Venus Xtravaganza, is unapologetic in her pursuit of a beautiful life. Octavia St. Laurent, is a powerful young black woman who has the skills and ability to chase her dreams regardless of her gender history. These are stories that are epics, in their own right.
Few films showcase the brilliance of trans women of color the way that Paris is Burning does. So many trans women have found themselves in the legends in this film, finally realizing that they’re not alone and that they have a history too.
The Complete History of Transgender Characters in American Comic Books
by rory midhani
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.
I’ve been reading comics ever since I was in elementary school, when I would go to the public library and run upstairs to the comic section and check out whatever graphic novels they had, even if I had read them a dozen times before. But it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I saw my first trans character in a comic book. Like many people, my first experience with a trans comic character was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I remember when I was in high school opening up Volume 2, titled The Doll’s House, and reading issue #14, Collectors. This issue focuses on a serial killer’s convention and predictably features some extremely disturbing content. The thing that stuck in my mind, though, is one panel where we see a killer standing over a dead trans woman with narration that says “There’s something about preoperative transsexuals that makes The Connoisseur uncomfortable. Something brittle and bright in the back of their eyes. He loves them. But he always feels they’re laughing at him. He’s only ever found eight that he’s been able to talk to.” This was my first time seeing someone like me in a comic book. It made me terrified for my future.
From Sandman #14.
One of the big selling points of comic books is that they give us heroes to look up to and want to be like. They show us possibilities. They show us dreams and wishes. Not being able to see yourself in those dreams, wishes and possibilities can really have an effect on you, especially if you’re a younger reader. When readers are told that none of the heroes look like them, it can seem like it’s impossible to be a hero. That’s why representation is important. It allows us to see a brighter future for ourselves and to set out for that future. For trans readers, that representation has been almost nonexistent until recent years.
The Era of Not-Quite-Trans Characters (1940-?)
Unfortunately, transgender people are a group that was so marginalized in comics that the only characters trans people could see ourselves in were shapeshifters, aliens and victims of magic spells or science fiction body swaps. While trans characters were scant for most of the history of comic books, these kinds of characters were actually pretty popular, going as far back as DC Comics’ Golden Age. So while these characters are not quite trans, they still served an important function in giving trans readers some semblance of representation in their comics.
The Ultra-Humanite in Action Comics #20 with art by Joe Shuster.
One of the earliest examples of a not-quite-trans recurring character took place in Action Comics #20 from 1940. The Superman villain, Ultra-Humanite (a super genius similar to Lex Luther), has seemingly been killed. However, we learn that he had kidnapped a famous actress, Dolores Winters, and placed “his mighty brain in her young vital body.” As soon as Action Comics #22 this version of the Ultra-Humanite was gone and later instead of putting his mind in the body of a woman, the character would transfer his consciousness into the body of an albino ape. However, during the events of Infinite Crisis, a universe-wide crossover event in the late 2000’s, and in the 2006-2007 Lightning Saga crossover event, the Ultra-Humanite’s time as Dolores (now spelled Deloris) Winters is revisited.
Sir Tristan in Camelot 3000 with art by Brian Bolland.
The next notable examples appear in the 1980s when DC Comics published Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland’s sci-fi/fantasy series Camelot 3000. In this story King Arthur and his knights of The Round Table are reincarnated in the year 3000 in order to fight off Morgan le Fay and an alien invasion. One of the knights, Sir Tristan, is reincarnated as a woman. Tristan spends much of the comic trying to figure out a way to be turned back into a man, but in the end accepts this new body and role, even ending up with Isolde, Tristan’s lover throughout time. Stories like this showed the lack of awareness of real life trans people that comics had. Sir Tristan could have been portrayed as a trans man, and in the 80s there were ways for trans men to transition, so one would think that a thousand years in the future, those techniques would be much better. Marvel, for their part, in Alpha Flight #45 from 1987, had their own mind-transfer story. The Canadian superhero Sasquatch, who was basically a man who could turn into a giant white beast, was “killed” and his soul was transferred into the body of another Canadian superhero, a woman named Snowbird. So for a time Sasquatch had a “female” body when in human form and the male, Sasquatch form.
This trend really reached its peak in the 1990s. We saw characters like Malibu Comics’ Mantra, who had her own solo title, an immortal male superhero soul who was reincarnated into the body of a woman; Top Cow’s Joshua Cane, a character from the series Rising Stars who was possibly trans and had as one of their powers the ability to turn into a super-powered woman and DC’s Comet, who appeared in Supergirl comics and, in 1997, was revealed to be a shapeshifter who alternated between being the bisexual human woman Andrea Martinez and the male centaur Comet all reflected this trend of comics playing around with gender, but not actually having trans characters.
From Legion of Super-Heroes #31.
One of the characters who comes closest to actually being trans is Shvaughn Erin, a member of the interplanetary Science Police in the DC comic Legion of Super-Heroes. Erin was actually introduced as a female character in 1978, but in 1992, in Legion of Super-Heroes #31, it was revealed that Shvaughn was actually Sean, and that he was born male, but had been taking a futuristic drug called Profem in order to transition into a female form apparently because he was in love with the male superhero Element Lad, who he presumed was straight, but actually turned out to be attracted to Sean just as much as Shvaughn. Again, the lack of knowledge about trans characters shows here, as the Legion writers not only had to use a science fiction drug, Profem, that would cause its user to revert back to their original form once they stopped taking it, but they also seemed to think that trans women are just gay men who want to date straight men.
This “era” actually stretches all the way to recent comics of the 2000s. In 2000, Marvel had two characters who fit into this category. In their Ultimate Universe, the character of Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, is actually a female clone of Peter Parker who retains some of his memories and has some struggles with her gender as a result, and in their X-Men comics, Courier, a shapeshifting friend of Gambit, became trapped in a female form by the evil Mr. Sinister. Over at DC in the year 2006, the character Erik Storn was given superpowers which manifested in him becoming a female superhero named Amazing Woman. In 2008, the longtime Thor villain, Loki, had taken over a female body (that of Lady Sif) and was portrayed as a woman until Thor #602 in 2009. Loki could possibly go on this list again, as when a younger version of the character got his own title, Loki: Agent of Asgard, in 2013, Al Ewing, the series’ writer said that “Loki is bi and I’ll be touching on that. He’ll shift between genders occasionally as well.” So, Loki could possibly count as transgender, as much as a shapeshifting trickster god can be.
Masquerade in Blood Syndicate #1 with art by Trevor Von Eeden.
A couple of these characters actually might be better suited in other categories, but I’m going to mention them here first. In 1993, Milestone Comics introduced the character Masquerade, a shapeshifter who was a male superhero, but was assigned female at birth. Finally, this conversation wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Xavin, a shapeshifting Skrull from Marvel’s comic about the teenage children of supervillains, Runaways. While Xavin initially shows up as an ostensibly male character, they change to a female form saying “for us changing our gender is no different than changing our hair color” in issue #8 of the series. While this attitude toward gender and ability to shapeshift make Xavin not really representative of the human transgender experience, the character did explore changing gender in a way that was pretty revolutionary for a comic book character.
Next: Actual trans women characters!
Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
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’ll 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.
Learning to love yourself is a lot like learning to breathe.
I have been learning, again, how to live, to love, to breathe.
When you begin to transition, sometimes the world seems like a new place, terra incognita, the patches labelled ‘here there be dragons’ on an old map. I know this was the case for me. In some ways, it still is. I’ve been fully out for almost a year, and I’ve both learnt new confidence and failed to unlearn some of my old fears from my earliest days of presenting as a woman. I still, sometimes, hear my heart beating in my head when I step out the door in a dress, wondering if today is the day that wearing that dress will cause a man to call out to me in front his friends, then, realising I’m not the cis woman he wants me to be, turn his call into curses and kicks or worse. I still hesitate, sometimes, before picking up the phone, even when I know I must make or take a call, worried that the voice I have worked on for so long will vanish and that I’ll be reduced to a ‘sir’ by a stranger. I still use the restroom quicker than I should on some days, avoiding eye contact with the women in it, hoping I don’t give off such an overwhelming aura of nervous energy that I’ll cause the very thing I want to avoid: everyone turning to me.
Getting over these fears, and choosing to live with fear rather than live in fear, is an act of self-love. Learning to control your heartbeat so you don’t hyperventilate, learning to breathe normally in a crowd: these are lessons of love. These are ways of embracing ourselves.
I’m still learning.
The first day I taught a class of undergraduates presenting as female made me think, later on, of learning to scuba-dive in the Caribbean Sea. The two were many islands apart, me teaching in my new home in Florida after having learnt to dive in the Commonwealth of Dominica, the verdant island I grew up in between Martinique and Guadeloupe, but they felt quite close, all the same. Both set my heart going like the erratic wingbeats of a bat.
I’ve loved the ocean for as long as I can remember. As a child, I spent hours looking up information about the denizens of the deep sea, the realm that fascinated me the most. I was particularly intrigued by the enigmatic giant squid, and I remember with embarrassment the day I sent an email to one of the world’s most eminent squid scientists, Dr. Steve O’Shea, proposing what I thought was an obvious solution for capturing the then-as-yet-unseen behemoth on film. Why not, I wrote, just attach a camera to the back of a sperm whale, since they eat the giant squids? O’Shea, a gentleman, wrote back soon after, politely telling me that my idea was rather unlikely to succeed.
I loved the sea so much that it came to terrify me as I learnt more about the creatures that lived in it. I knew well it was unlikely I would encounter any of the creatures I’d read about just by going snorkeling on a family trip to the beach, but my imagination always ran wild. I was unable to wade more than a few steps most of the time, my mind filled with images of rushing tentacles, barracudas, and the barbed tails of stingrays. Beyond that, I was never a strong swimmer. My mother’s tales of old friends being dragged out to their deaths by currents in certain fatal patches of water — which she would repeat whenever we drove past the beach or estuary where someone had lost their life — would echo through my head. I would panic as I took a few steps into the water, the sand swirling around my feet in clouds, and begin to hear my heart hammer. I at once knew too much and nothing at all. If we were at Champagne Beach, where the beach was more rocks than sand, the ground lizards and the occasional iguana might leer at me as I retreated from the water, as if considering whether or not to run from such a comical specimen.
But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.
So, contrary to all the walls my fears had erected between the sea and me, I decided to learn how to scuba dive.
Learning to breathe with your scuba gear is a kind of act of faith. It seems contrary to all expectations if you’ve never done it before, especially if you’ve experienced the sudden lack of air from poking your head too far beneath the surface while snorkeling. Yet somehow it works. You just breathe, as normally as you can. And the world is your air: your breaths become loud and constant. As you learn to descend, though, the sea reminds you it is there. You feel its weight, your having come from the surface, when you descend a few feet and there is a pain in your head. You learn to pinch your nose and blow out to equalise so that you can slowly descend further into this blue world.
Illustration by Yao Xiao
And then there is the terror, which you must face, of simulating having your dive mask knocked off, where you must suddenly either close your eyes or come face to face again with where you are and either way put it back on. You learn to control your breathing so you don’t kick back up too fast to the surface when your gear stops giving you air, as once happened to me about 50 feet below the surface — for returning too fast can be your death sentence. And then, of course, you must learn how to control your fear when the old nightmares appear: when you encounter the creatures where you are diving. I learnt not to fear the enormous stingrays, the blue morays with their mouths hanging open that swayed in the current, the rare spotted eagle ray that once found its way into the area I first learnt to dive in. I even learnt, on my first and only night dive, to gradually not fear being surrounded by the darkness, only our flashlights, the pale moonglow, and the bursts of phosphorescence softening the black.
So much of this reminds me of walking outside presenting as a woman for the first time. Of having men call out to me, of having security guards in museums proposition me when no one else was around and my heart suddenly wanting to burst from my chest for the very person who I thought would protect me might become my enemy if I say the wrong word, and if I speak in a voice that does not ‘pass,’ what will happen next? I remember the many, many nights I stayed in instead of going out, even for something as routine for groceries, for I was terrified of being clocked as a trans woman, of being laughed at, stared at, followed.
I remember when all of my optimism about shifting my voice into the kind of voice I had always wanted came to an end, when I was humiliated over the phone. I’d had to call Tallahassee Memorial Hospital to pay a bill I couldn’t pay online for some reason, a bill that was under my new legal name and gender. I tried to raise my voice the way I’d tried before, thinking it sounded all right in my head. ‘How can I help you, sir,’ I heard seconds into the call. It became worse. My account number wasn’t coming up, so the man I was speaking with transferred me. The woman who answered brought up my information, but wouldn’t believe I was Gabrielle Bellot. I couldn’t be her because of my voice, she reasoned.
To prove I wasn’t a criminal, she asked me to verify my gender. I’m accustomed to verifying my first car, my best friend in secondary school, and my mother’s maiden name, but I had never been asked to verify my gender. I imagined, suddenly, that she had asked me to strip over the phone. I told her my history with transition over the phone. She sounded relieved.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said.
My eyes began to sting, and the world felt heavy. My gender said ‘F’ on my file, but her pronouns wouldn’t shift. I didn’t even imagine, at the time, that the woman was transphobic; I imagined that my voice was simply so non-F, somehow, that her own instinct couldn’t align it with the ‘F,’ couldn’t fit the contours of the right word. I didn’t love myself enough to even correct the woman.
It was a humiliation that echoed what would happen soon after on a trip to New York, where a receptionist at the Neue Galerie, a museum I had longed to visit for years, gendered me female on sight, then shifted without a blink to ‘sir’ as I blurted out that I couldn’t find my student ID for a discount. It was such a quick, cold switch that I left the museum after fighting with myself for half an hour, because I had come to hate myself so thoroughly. I had come to not see the paintings in the top floor properly through my stupid tears. I felt imprisoned by my fear of my old voice. Clearly, I was not ready to descend into the world, not to these depths.
Now things have begun to change. I enter the world with more confidence. I know the privilege to pass that I have; all the same, I’m prepared for the looks and questions I do get. I have worked on my voice for months because I wanted to, not because there is anything wrong with keeping your old voice, but because I didn’t want that voice, didn’t feel safe with it, didn’t feel right with it, didn’t feel happy with it, felt embarrassed teaching with it, hid because of it. I learnt to change the timbre of my voice through breathing differently — quite literally — and hundreds of recordings and hours of research. It may not be perfect, but it’s hard to express how happy I feel when I can pick up the phone, call a stranger, and — most of the time — expect to hear ‘ma’am.’
It was a labour of love to reach this far — and the labour, I realised, signified the love. To be lazy in such things was to be love-denying, to see myself standing at my own door and to shut it instead of letting myself in.
I remember descending over the largest stingray I’ve ever seen on. It was resting on the silty bottom near the wreck of a small liner we were exploring. The stingray looked like a muddy magic carpet with eyes. I remembered my terror of stepping on one before I learnt to dive. I was still, floating, the sound of my breaths a reliable muffled rhythm, the bubbles floating up to the surface like currents of little jellyfish.
I remember smiling like a fool. I had learnt how to love a world I once feared.
Now, I must do it again. I must learn to be brave wearing a new wetsuit, getting a new diver’s card with the right name and gender on it. Diving for the first time since coming out scares me. I wonder at the dangers of diving in a group of strangers, where someone learns you are trans and decides they do not like it. I think of how I still avoid going to the beach because I have never worn a woman’s swimsuit in front of anyone but my reflection. In my worst moments, my past dives begin to seem like dreams.
But I’ll do it.
“Create dangerously,” the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat advised in Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work, “for people who read dangerously,” for people who, she says, soon after, “may risk his or her life to read” your words. To that I would add: love dangerously, so you don’t regret the breaths you could’ve enjoyed.
I cannot return safely to the place I learnt to dive as a queer trans woman, but I love the lessons it taught me, which I only understood better later, when I began to become myself.
10 Trans Women Pioneers They Definitely Didn’t Tell You About In History Class
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.
It seems like when people talk about early trans pioneers from history we only ever hear two names — Lili Elbe and Christine Jorgensen. Things are getting better and now we also talk about TWOC leaders like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. While it’s true that Elbe and Jorgensen are important historical figures, and while it’s true that Rivera and Johnson are legends who we owe worlds to, it’s also important to talk about other trans women who might be less well-known, but have had their own big impact on trans history.
It’s usually pretty suspect to prescribe modern identities to people from the past, but no matter which way the deceased people on this list would identify if they were alive today, they remain important figures in the history of American (and some international) trans and gender non-conforming people and the way people challenge society’s rules for gender. This list is only the tip of the iceberg; there are dozens and dozens of other trans pioneers without whom we wouldn’t be here today.
As a general warning, some of the pages I’m going to link to contain misgendering and/or outdated terminology.
1. Mary Jones
A really transmisogynistic lithograph printed in New York newspapers during Jones’ trial.
Our first figure comes all the way back from 1836. Mary Jones was a Black sex worker in New York City whose story is one of the earliest that we have of a trans woman in the United States of America. In the summer of 1836, Jones was arrested after a male client slept with her. You see, she wasn’t just a sex worker, she was also a pickpocket, and had stolen $99 (which would be at least $2,600 in today’s money, you go girl) from a white mason worker named Robert Haslem. When she was arrested, the police searched her and discovered that she wasn’t a cis woman. Jones’ trial quickly became the talk of the town, as she appeared in court dressed as a woman in elegant clothing (natch) and explained to the court, “I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way — and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.” She also apparently was able to trick men into thinking they were having sex with a cis woman because she “had been fitted with a piece of cow pierced and opened like a woman’s womb, held up by a girdle.” So either men in the 1830s were exceptionally clueless about women’s bodies or they would take any excuse they could find to explain why they were having sex with a trans woman. Or probably both. The court was, unsurprisingly, very horrible towards her, laughing, pointing and even snatching off her wig at one point. She was finally sentenced to five years in state prison for Grand Larceny.
2. Frances Thompson
A depiction of the Memphis Riots.
Thompson, a former slave, is quite possibly the first trans woman to testify before a congressional committee in the United States. In 1866 she testified before a committee investigating a riot that had occurred in Memphis, Tennessee. For three days in May of 1866, white men rioted throughout a community of emancipated slaves in Memphis. At least 48 African Americans were murdered, with close to 80 more injured, and five women testified to being raped. She testified that seven white rioters had broken into the house that she shared with another former slave, Lucy Smith. After the men demanded that they find “some women to sleep with,” they raped Thompson and Smith. Ten years later, Thompson was arrested for “being a man dressed in women’s clothing.” Her arrest for “transvestism” was used by newspapers in Memphis to smear her name discredit her story that she was raped.
3. Lucy Hicks Anderson
Born in 1886, Lucy Hicks Anderson is one of the earliest fighters for marriage equality in the United States. She grew up in Kentucky, where she started presenting as a girl and going by the name Lucy at an early age. She later moved to Texas, then to New Mexico, where she married Clarence Hicks, then to California where she lived in Oxnard and operated a brothel. After divorcing Hicks in 1929, she married Reuben Anderson, a soldier, in 1944. Her signing of this marriage licence led to a perjury charge against her, as on it she swore that there were “no legal objections” to the marriage. She told reporters, “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” Still, she was found guilty of perjury and later fraud because she received allotment checks as the wife of a US Army soldier.
4. Coccinelle (Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy)
Coccinelle (the French word for ladybug) was the professional name of Dufresnoy, a French actress, entertainer, singer and activist, and one of the first people to undergo a widely publicized successful gender confirmation surgery in Europe. Born in Paris in 1931, Dufresnoy began taking hormones in 1952 and made her debut as a showgirl the next year. She quickly became popular and soon joined other famous trans showgirls April Ashley, Marie-Pierre Pruvot and Amanda Lear as a regular at the Le Carrousel de Paris nightclub. She became so popular that she was featured in several films, had an Italian singer, Ghigo Agosti, dedicate a song to her, and starred in her own revue, “Cherchez la Femme.” After she underwent her operation, France changed its laws to allow for changes to be made on birth certificates following gender confirmation surgery. Her first marriage was also established trans people’s right to marry in France. She also founded the trans support group Devenir Femme and helped establish the Center for Aid, Research and Information for Trnassexuality and Gender Identity.
5. Louise Lawrence
Louise Lawrence with cigarette. Courtesy of Kinsey Institute, Indiana University
Lawrence began living full-time as a woman in the 1940s in San Francisco. There she worked as an artist and the manager for an apartment building for women, where she lived with her partner, a woman named Gay. In the following decade she created a widespread correspondence network with other transgender people throughout the US and Europe that laid the groundwork for Virginia Prince’s eventual Transvestia magazine subscription list. Lawrence worked with both Alfred Kinsey and Dr. Harry Benjamin on their work with trans people. Her work to connect trans people across the world was extremely important in the creation of trans organizations and communication in a time when those things didn’t really exist.
6. Carlett Brown
Carlett Brown on the cover of Jet Magazine.
Shortly after Christine Jorgensen got her much publicized gender confirmation at the end of 1952, another woman, Carlett Brown sought to undergo a similar procedure. Brown was an African American Navy vet who was working as a female impersonator and “shake dancer” in nightclubs. While in the Navy, she had discovered that she was intersex, and while the doctors suggested that she have surgery to become more “typically male,” she instead decided that she wanted to undergo the same operation Jorgensen did. She ran into a problem when she discovered that the nations who offered the surgeries she was seeking didn’t allow foreign nationals to undergo the surgery. Her plan was to travel to Europe and renounce her US citizenship, saying “I just want to become a woman as quickly as possible, that’s all. I’ll become a citizen of any country that will allow me the treatment that I need and be operated on.” However, before she could leave the country she was first arrested because of an anti-crossdressing law and then later not allowed to leave because she was ordered to pay $1,200 in back taxes. Her story was chronicled in Jet Magazine, which also featured Sir Lady Java, and after she was ordered to pay the back taxes, her story went cold.
7. Sir Lady Java
Sir Lady Java protesting at Redd Foxx’s club in Jet Magazine.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Java later moved to Los Angeles where she became a sensation due to her 38-24-38 curves, singing, impersonations and dancing. Rumor has it that she dated Redd Foxx and Sammy Davis, Jr. She publicly challenged the city’s “Rule No. 9,” the law that banned crossdressing, when she worked at legendary comedian Red Foxx’s club in LA. LAPD threatened to shut down Foxx’s club, and so Java’s act was cancelled. In 1967, however, she worked together with the ACLU to argue that the law was unconstitutional and that it was preventing her from earning an income. The legal challenge was thrown out, however, due to a technicality, but was covered by Black and gay publications, drawing important attention to the discriminatory law. Sir Lady Java is still alive today.
8. Crystal LaBeija
Crystal LaBeija in The Queen
The founder of the House of LaBeija, perhaps the first house in the New York Ball scene, The Legendary Crystal LeBeija is famously featured in the 1968 documentary The Queen and even makes an appearance in the opening credits of the Amazon Prime show Transparent. This documentary shows the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant where LaBeija called out the host, Flawless Sabrina, saying that the ball was racist and fixed, after a white Queen, Rachel Harlow, was declared the winner. She founded the House of LaBeija in 1970 or 1972 when another drag queen, Lottie, asked her to promote a ball with her. LaBeija agreed when “Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija, with Crystal’s title as ‘mother.'” It may have been something of a PR stunt, but it started a revolution.
9. Angie Xtravaganza
Angie Xtravaganza in Paris is Burning.
The longtime Mother of the Legendary House of Xtravaganza, the first primarily Latina House in New York’s Ballroom Scene. She was featured in the documentary Paris is Burning, where she was awarded a Mother of the Year trophy, talked about her House and her children. When she founded the House of Xtravaganza she was the youngest of the legendary mothers, a group containing herself, Pepper LaBeija (who took over after Crystal), Avis Pendavis, Dorian Corey and Paris Dupree. She died in New York at the age of 27 from AIDS complications and liver disease. She remained a mother up until the very end, and towards the end of her life she liked to say, “I have no regrets. No drag queen has carried herself the way I have. I’m not a beauty, but I’ve got class.”
10. Dorian Corey
Dorian Corey in Paris is Burning.
Dorian is the guiding voice of Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, laying down the law about shade, fame, beauty, houses and life in general, all while casually putting her face on. Outside of Paris, she was the mother of the House of Corey and was a Legendary participant in the balls of New York where she was famous for her extravagant costumes and won over 50 grand prizes throughout her life. She gives the poignant final lines of Paris, saying, “I always had hopes of being a big star. But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you’ve left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues, and just enjoy it. If you shoot a arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.”
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.
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.
November
30th – Amazon Prime’s Emmy winning show about a transgender woman, Transparent, hired Our Lady J as its first trans staff writer.
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.
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.
Willow Zietman
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.
Lamia Beard and Ty Underwood.
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.
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.
Penny Proud via The Advocate
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.
March
via Planetransgender
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.
Jazz and her family via aceshowbiz.com
![aceshowbiz.com](http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/wennpic/jazz-jennings-24th-annual-glaad-media-awards-04.jpg"){kind=link}
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.
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.
Laverne Cox in her appearance on The Mindy Project via Variety
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.
May
via Huffington Post
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.
Mercedes Williamson
30th – Mercedes Williamson, from Rocky Creek, Alabama, became the second trans woman murdered this month and at least the 10th this year.
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!
Brouhaha trainer Luna Merbruja left and project director Lexi Adsit right in downtown Oakland.
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.
July
6th – Maddie showed you how to talk to your parents about being better trans allies if you’re cis.
Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in TANGERINE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
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.
India Clarke via facebook
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.
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.
From Lumberjanes #17.
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.
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!
Jen Richards in Her Story.
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.
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.
Keisha Jenkins
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.
Zella Ziona
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.
Reina Gossett and Grace Dunham fight over who looks more like Caitlyn
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.
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!
Janet and Aaron.
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.