Sometimes it all seems too familiar. There is a particularly gruesome attack on a transgender person, and the media splashes it all over their pages and screens. Or they do one of their "Bet You Didn't Know They Were Trannies" segments.
The problem is that reporters, producers and others who are supposed to inform the public forget about us the rest of the time. They will never, for instance, talk about Injustice At Every Turn: A Report of The National Transgender Discrimination Survey. If they did, they would express shock or possibly pity. But they would be surprised only in ways we can't be upon finding out that 78 percent of gender non-conforming people experience harassment in grades K-12 and half of us were harassed in our workplaces, while seven percent of us experienced outright violence there.
And for trans people of color, it's all worse. But when was the last time you saw a gender non-conforming person of color who wasn't named RuPaul on TV or in a movie?
I wonder whether anyone has done a study about how much media attention we actually get.
The problem is that reporters, producers and others who are supposed to inform the public forget about us the rest of the time. They will never, for instance, talk about Injustice At Every Turn: A Report of The National Transgender Discrimination Survey. If they did, they would express shock or possibly pity. But they would be surprised only in ways we can't be upon finding out that 78 percent of gender non-conforming people experience harassment in grades K-12 and half of us were harassed in our workplaces, while seven percent of us experienced outright violence there.
And for trans people of color, it's all worse. But when was the last time you saw a gender non-conforming person of color who wasn't named RuPaul on TV or in a movie?
I wonder whether anyone has done a study about how much media attention we actually get.
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