Trans Awareness and the Culture War, and Inclusivity

Trans Awareness and the Culture War, and Inclusivity

I can still remember seeing Laverne Cox on the cover of a copy of Time magazine laying on my dining room table.  She was the first trans person I can remember seeing represented on such a huge stage even remotely close to on her own terms—not as a joke or a victim or a freak.

Time called it the “transgender tipping point,” and for me, it was one of the most memorable images from a pivotal period of my own life, when I realized first that I could come out and then that I had to.

If I could talk with Cox feels it could be like a fairytale. But I’m not the first person to feel that way if I got a chance to talk to a woman whose success has become symbolic of the increasing space for trans people in public life in the United States. The quotes you will see in this blog are all taken from countless interviews I have read or seen with her on TV. With that in mind, let’s begin shall we …

“What has been so beautiful about being a public speaker who is openly trans is having the experience of meeting trans folks and hearing them tell me how my visibility has inspired them,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We shouldn't underestimate [visibility] just in terms of reaching trans and non-binary people who need to know that they're not alone and that who they are is valid.”

But she is also aware of the paradox of representation, the fact that being visible means being more legible as a target. In Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, the 2020 Netflix documentary that features Cox extensively, the tension between being seen and being targeted is central to the film’s in-depth investigation of trans representation in media and how it’s tied to attacks on trans people. The film provides a media-literate anthology of trans tropes, famous (and infamous) examples of them, and draws powerful connections between these depictions and the politics of the day.

The risk of being targeted happens on a “political level” in anti-trans laws and policies, but the risks can also be personal, as stories of trans victims of interpersonal violence and intimate partner violence are chilling reminders of how dangerous it can be to be trans.

“I want to create a world where it's safe to be openly trans, where you can be who you are and own who you are, and not have opportunities stripped away from you, not have your life stripped away from you,” Cox says.

It’s easy to pick up on Cox’s intuitive understanding of the intersections of trans experiences, broader gendered discrimination, and the racism that runs through our institutional forces. Even as we see modern-day legal attacks against trans people in state capitols or at the Supreme Court, these legislated and litigated forms of transphobia echo the history of criminalization against gender variance like the anti-crossdressing laws that proliferated in the 1850s. These laws became a major vector for the kind of police harassment that sparked the Stonewall Riots. It would take nearly a century until, in the 1960s and ‘70s, successful legal challenges to these bans emerged.

Against this historical backdrop, Disclosure offers the audience a chance to see a side of Cox that might be easy to miss if you’re only familiar with her acting work or talk show interviews: Laverne Cox, a public intellectual.

Delivering astute media analysis alongside a cast of expert interviewees, she’s one voice in a powerful chorus exploring the nuanced connections between the social, political, and economic realities of trans experiences. In our interview, she drew a direct line between the history of anti-crossdressing laws and more modern incarnations of trans criminalization.

“These anti-crossdressing laws were a way to humiliate trans people publicly,” she explains. “They would be publicly humiliated and then criminalized and get this criminal record.”

“Now, they've been attempting to criminalize trans people going to the bathroom, right?” she says. “This current administration — that's on their way out, thank goodness — that memo that came from the White House, right?”

State measures like the glut of so-called “bathroom bills” in the 2010s are still in play with efforts to outlaw trans kids from playing sports or make it illegal to offer affirming medical care to trans youth. Meanwhile, federal measures—like Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services move to define gender trans-exclusively and the administration taking that fight to the Supreme Court—may not directly criminalize people, but to Cox, “They're trying to legislate trans people out of existence.”

“I think, at this historical moment, it's about policing gender,” Cox told Teen Vogue. “I think when you see Harry Styles on the cover of Vogue in a dress, it doesn't feel like a big deal. But there were certain people, like conservative pundits were saying that we're trying to emasculate men and it's an attack on masculinity.”

The use of trans and non-binary people in the so-called “culture war” is an insidious attack on the existence of those communities and an attempt to reinforce traditional cultural norms.

“I think what we're seeing now is that the ship has sailed around cisnormativity and around heteronormativity,” she continues. “These attempts to criminalize trans people, it's this attempt to get back some kind of sense of what they—conservatives, I believe, or traditionalists—would believe is normalcy and restore some order around gender, where it just never existed.”

I think she believes that there’s a lack of meaningful policy proposals in politics right now on both sides of the aisle, but that Republicans—especially the outgoing president—have mastered running on the kinds of cultural anxieties that can be invoked by mentioning trans people.

But she’s not interested in participating in that kind of cultural battle.

“I am interested in the deep and beautiful humanity of trans and non-binary people and highlighting that,” she continues. “For me, that's not a war. That is a calling for me.”

In other words, she’s not willing to argue about the existence of trans people, or their right to exist. Instead, she’ll just keep existing.

“Really, what this is about is using trans people and using race and using gender as a way to divide and conquer people,” Cox offered. “We have politicians who have run on nothing, who are not promising to do anything for poor and working people. But then they start shouting about trans people in bathrooms and shouting about trans children playing sports and then Black people existing—all of these ridiculous things that should not be up for debate—as a way to incite people and put fear into people. They're running on fear and encouraging people to choose fear instead of love.”

Cox does believe legislation can help trans people. She credits President-elect Joe Biden for supporting the Equality Act, which he’s said he would enact within his first 100 days (though it’s unclear how if the GOP still controls the Senate). But Cox also recognizes that guaranteeing rights isn’t the same as materially supporting people, that inclusion is not the same as survival.

“I think those kinds of protections across the board for the LGBTQ+ community are really important,” she says. “But, like, how do we get people jobs? How do we get people affordable housing, right?”

Another drawback of visibility is it often operates within the status quo, creating space for trans people within existing systems. Cox worries this may render working-class trans people invisible in our culture.

“A lot of visible trans people we see are very privileged trans people,” she says. “We don't see the poor and working-class trans folks who are in the hood.”

“It's not just about policies for trans people and trans-inclusive policies. It's about poor and working people and people of color,” she says of policy needs. “It’s about the years of structural racism, systemic racism that decimated certain communities, decimated schools in certain communities and in certain neighborhoods, where there's not a sense of hope and possibility.”

Cox outlines a political vision that accounts for both the economic and the social realities of our world: Policies that lift up the multiracial working class while being explicit about trans inclusions and protections.

“Having policies for working-class people of all races and gender identities and then coupled with protections for trans folks, then maybe we can begin to do something,” she postulates. “And then, I think, also, we all know that just having policies in place does not change the hearts and minds of people who might perpetuate violence against us, who want to discriminate against us.”

The question of hearts and minds isn’t just relevant to trans people, Cox says.

“How do we see the beautiful humanity, not just of trans people, but of poor working people? Working-class people are so deeply dehumanized in America and they're often blamed for their situations and told they're lazy,” she says. “I say all this as someone who loves America. I think when you love someone, you can be lovingly critical of them.”

“What our country does is they will elevate someone like Laverne Cox, they'll say, 'Oh, Laverne Cox is from a working class background. She was poor, she's Black, she's trans. She can do it. If you work hard, you can do it, too,’” she says. “And what that system does not acknowledge is that there's so many privileges I had that allowed me to be able to do this, and the biggest privilege of all was probably going to an art school for high school.”

There, she learned important lessons like “how to make white people comfortable,” (a skill she wishes she didn’t need) and the importance of hard work. Most working class people, she says, are intimately familiar with that significance.

“Who is lazy working 40, 50, 60 hours a week and making $7 minimum wage in some states, right?” she asks. “We can't even get a national $15 minimum wage, and $15 really isn't even enough.”

These inequities manifest in the trans community, where unemployment and poverty are more common than in society at large, with trans people reporting frequent discrimination. While the 2020 Supreme Court ruling on LGBTQ workplace discrimination was a landmark, it’s not a panacea that will prevent all future discrimination.

“This Trans Awareness Week, I want folks to understand that yes, trans people are beautiful, amazing, and we need to highlight their humanity, absolutely, and give people spaces to transition and be accepted as who they are,” she says. “But the folks who are really most struggling in our community are poor and working trans folks. It's not enough to just do our diversity initiatives. It's just not enough for them because there's no money. There's no healthcare, there's no housing. No job.”

With Trans Day of Remembrance looming, Cox says it’s obvious people need to stop killing trans people. Fatal violence against trans people is one of the community’s most urgent issues. Cox says she’s spent years considering the structural factors that put trans people in more vulnerable situations when it comes to violence. In particular, she remembers a formative conversation she had years ago with the NYC Anti-Violence Project, an organization dedicated to wholistically ending violence against LGBTQ people.

“I said, ‘How can we stop the violence against trans people?’ And they said, ‘It's an intersectional issue,’” she tells Teen Vogue. “If you have to turn to a street economy to survive, you're more likely to experience violence. If you are homeless and you don't have a place to live, you're more likely to experience violence.”

Despite the contemporary struggles, Cox says she encourages other trans people to remember the associations between gender variance and divinity throughout history, that trans survival is a matter of pride and a source of beauty in the world.

“Our job is to survive,” she says. “Just by living, just by being in the truth of who we are and our annointedness, there's so many lessons that we can teach folks if folks are open for those lessons.”

“All the stigma that trans people experience, the ways in which we're stigmatized—we internalize that, too,” she explains. “And it's just, it's been so, so very, very important that we understand that we're beautiful and we're amazing, that trans is beautiful and that we could—we need to walk with our heads up high and with a sense of deserving and worthiness to be here.”