​Transgender Day of Visibility

Transgender Day of Visibility is an annual event, occurring on March 31st, that aims to raise awareness of the discrimination, violence, and harassment that transgender individuals experience. It also serves as a day for people who identify as trans to claim and give power to their identity. It is day for them to speak up and out about who they are and what they’ve faced.

Transgender Day of Visibility is important because the number of people who personally know a transgender person is only 16 percent of the population. That means 84 percent of people are learning about what being trans is from television or movies. They are getting a skewed, stereotypical, or dangerously predatory lenses put on what it means to be trans and this can lead to some distorted thinking about the issue. Common misconceptions that are promoted are that being transgender is done for some advantage, or that is a mental illness, or a choice someone makes - when in truth it is none of these things.

For perspective, 20 percent of Americans have reported seeing a ghost in their life and 10 percent have reported spotting a UFO. This means ghosts are slightly more common than transgender individuals and aliens are slightly less. According to GLAAD, over 90 percent of people know someone who is personally part of the Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexuality community. This can explain why we’ve seen so much advancement for LGB rights in the last decade, while transgender rights are still mostly stalled.

While this is the common narrative and something I’ve spoken about before, I’ve realized over the years that transgender visibility on the whole hasn’t gone up dramatically. What has gone up dramatically is the visibility of transgender women. Across all media, the people we see representing the trans community are almost always trans women. It has been nearly 20 years since we had a trans man as the protagonist in the movie “Boys Don’t Cry.” I wonder how many people could name another movie featuring a trans male character?

Along similar lines, I wonder how many people could name a movie or television show featuring an intersex character? I don’t mean as a person who shows up for one episode of “House,” I mean a person who is a main character. We have a good number of movies featuring trans women at this point but since “Boys Don’t Cry” came out we’ve seen maybe a half dozen major films about trans men. We have Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Janet Mock blazing headlines every year, but I suspect it’s hard for most people to name a single trans male icon.

What ends up happening is that it erroneously starts to look like the only way to be trans is to be a trans woman. Nothing underlines this more than the young trans man in Texas who has been restricted from moving to the men’s wrestling team at his school and has been pitted against only female opponents instead. He actually just won state for the second year in a row. Since so many people are blind to the existence of any trans identity other than being a trans women, I’ve seen plenty of comments posted online that assume this young man was assigned male at birth instead and wants to be wrestling on the girl’s team. It’s a curious thing to see people who are staunchly anti-trans start fighting for this student’s right to compete with other males, putting them unwittingly on the side of pro-trans inclusion for this one single issue.

And guess what? You’re reading the words of a trans woman right now. Boo! You know… because of the ghost comparison earlier.

I’m given a voice at the High Plains Reader that few trans people have had the benefit of, but I’m still just another trans woman being given a voice. Realizing this and my privilege, I’ve created a series called “Trans Visibility: My Experience As.” While the exact title will change per person, over the next month I’ve invited people from different identities than my own to share a bit about their life, perspective, or anything else they wanted to share.

I highly recommended coming back to Trans Corner in the following weeks to see some stories and perspectives that don’t get the airtime they deserve!

[Editor’s note: Faye Seidler is a North Dakota Safe Zone Project Spokeswoman]