It’s an unprecedented time in society. Trans women are appearing in the media as Hollywood actresses, writers, innovators and advocates. Increased positive representation of trans people is one of the greatest things that could have happened to trans women as a group. But, in this moment of celebration, we need to ensure that more visibility doesn’t lead to more vulnerability.



The lack of representation made such an impact on me, that for a long time I had no idea how to parse my feelings about gender, my body, my sexuality and how I could exist in the world. In my childhood, any trans or gender non-conforming person on television or in film was almost always treated as a villain or a dead body. As graphic as that may be, that was the only representation we had. The rest were in the vein of Buffalo Bill (a serial killer from the movie Silence of the Lambs) or unnamed corpses in Law & Order and shows like that.

In ads at the back of New York City’s free newspapers, I can remember seeing trans women who were immensely beautiful and splayed out like models. I remember when the Village Voice had actual backpage ads for transgender escorts. I know some may think it bad that I, as a young adult, had been exposed to images of transgender women who had to do sex work to survive. But that exposure helped me. I learned the words necessary to describe what I was feeling, to describe what I am and would become. It’s where I learned the words transgender and transsexual. Most importantly, I learned the harsh realities that came with being transgender. I learned the steep price one had to pay to be oneself in a society so deeply opposed to transgender people thriving.

Contrast that with today, when we have trans women gracing the covers of magazines like Time and Vanity Fair. Trans youth can finally see people who know how they feel and have gone through what they went through. It’s a truly miraculous happening and I couldn’t be more happier that I have witnessed it. I don’t think we’ll ever have another Silence of the Lambs moment, where transgender identity in film is diminished to a joke at best and a threat to ‘ordinary’ people at worst – at least not without a loud backlash. But progress does come with its own added challenges.

Until recently, the only way a trans woman could thrive in life was if she had either waited to transition until she was older or if she could pull off ‘deep stealth’. What is deep stealth? It’s like passing, except not only do you pass, you never speak a word of being transgender to anybody. Not a single word except to your lover or possibly your parents, if you still had a relationship with them. If you couldn’t do that, you had to subject yourself to the hypervisibility of transgender women with it’s unending scrutiny. Paradoxically, when a person or group is hypervisible they may also be invisible, in the sense that they are treated as irrelevant by society.

This hypervisibility puts marginalized groups at risk. In terms of transgender people, this often means transgender women of color. With the conversation around equality for trans people reaching its fever pitch, those who do not want us to become equal and have equal rights are becoming increasingly more violent towards us. This year alone, 18 trans women - many of them of color - have been killed, including Mya Hall who was shot near Baltimore after she took a wrong turn. This breaks last year’s record. It should be noted that a large majority of anti-LGBT hate crimes are directed at people of color.

Hypervisibility is what turns trans women’s lives into spectacle. When the media, and the society at large, ask invasive questions about surgical status or former names, those are just some of the ways that hypervisibility acts in our day to day lives as trans women. Famous trans women, such as Laverne Cox, have been ambushed with questions like that. Media personalities asking inappropriate questions – even after being told that they wouldn’t answer any of them – and then having the audacity to be upset when people refuse to answer them mirror what the average trans woman goes through on perhaps a day-to-day basis. Unlike a famous person, though, it’s not an interview we can walk away from. Sometimes these questions are loaded, impacting our personal lives or even ending in violence if we don’t answer them or don’t answer them correctly.

In the same vein, in conversations surrounding trans people, one of the most common things that comes up is the topic of passing. This topic is probably the most difficult one to deal with. People - even well-meaning ones - don’t understand that passing isn’t a cure all to the violence we face, nor is it possible for some trans women. Whether by circumstance or something else, there are trans women who don’t ‘pass’. And that’s okay. It shouldn’t determine whether we get to live. And either way, many of the trans women who were murdered thus far (not just this year, but these past few decades) passed. Many were beautiful. Some could have even been stealth if they chose to be. Nonetheless, they were still murdered for being trans.

There is no panacea for transphobia. Having famous trans women in the media is great, but it isn’t enough. We need to start reconsidering the value we place on gender in our lives, and in others’ lives. We need to start considering, as a society, that all people are worthy of respect and of life regardless of how we feel about gender, gender identity and gender expression.