Freed Activist CeCe McDonald and Actress Laverne Cox spoke out last year that ""Black Trans Bodies Are Under Attack"
After serving 19 months in prison, the African-American transgender activist CeCe McDonald is free. She was arrested after using deadly force to protect herself from a group of people who attacked her on the streets of Minneapolis. Her case helped turn a national spotlight on the violence and discrimination faced by transgender women of colo
According to U.S statistics, the murder rate for gay and trangender people in the U.S was at an all-time high. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs documented 30 hate-related murders of LGBT people in 2011; 40 percent of the victims were transgender women of color.
Feminist writer Veronica Flores wrote on Feministing that certaiin "bodies are dangerous,.and that even though the world wants to kill you, so many of us are out here fighting for your life.
Your bodies are how the revolution begins."
Laverne Cox recently decided to pose nude after much consideration on Allure magazine, a woman's beauty magazine.
Cox, a transgender actor and activist, admitted she wasn’t so sure about disrobing for the camera.
“Going through life, you try to cover and hide, but it doesn’t really work,” she said to Allure. “I said no initially, thought about it, and said no again.”
Not suprisingly, Laverne Cox, a black trqansgender woman actress, has received criticisms from certain feminists for posing nude on Allure magazine.
On her blog, Meghan Murphy wrote an April 22 post titled “Laverne Cox’s objectified body ‘empowers’ no one.”
She wrote, " if we alter our bodies through surgery and hormones? It seems clear that ‘radical self-acceptance’ is not at all what Cox is experiencing or conveying to her audience.”
She went on to say that bodies like Cox are sculpted in order to look like some cartoonish version of “woman,” as defined by the porn
Here are actual fact about trans women. (from everyday feminism)
Trans women are often pathologized and sexualized, portrayed as someone manipulatively hiding their transgender identity to trick a man into engaging with them sexually or romantically.
They play countless television roles as sex workers.
They are shown as unattractive; they are the butt of jokes, their desire to be feminine mocked, their motives for transitioning questioned.
Our media portrays trans women in archetypes – as the weak victim of a crime, or as the evil villain; as the mentally unstable character, or as the manipulative one.
And while it is difficult to find complex and honest portrayals of trans women characters on television, it is even more rare to find an authentic and respectful portrayal of a trans wom of Color (though we have see a few recently, like the great Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black).an
According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans people experience disproportionately high rates of poverty and homelessness caused by discrimination in jobs and housing, but they also experience greater incarceration rates, largely due to gender profiling by the police.
Gender is policed, quite literally by police officers who target, arrest, and often harass trans women for looking “different” and therefore, “disorderly.” Trans women of Color, in particular, tend to be perceived by police through racialized and gender stereotypes framing them as highly sexual and as criminal.
Trans women are consistently targeted and arrested for being involved in sex work, even if they have no association with this work.
In New York, where having a condom on you can be used as evidence of involvement in sex work, trans women are being profiled, searched, and arrested for being a trans woman at the wrong place at the wrong time.
There’s also direct violence at the hands of police: A 2012 study by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that transgender people across the U.S. experience three times more police violence than cisgender people.
And nearly half of trans people who reported hate crimes to the police experienced mistreatment from them while asking for help.
Trans women experience abuse after being arrested as well, when they are most often forced to reside in men’s prison facilities, experiencing extremely high rates of sexual and physical violence – a study by the Department of Justice found that 1 in 3 are sexual assaulted in prison. In response, many prisons place trans women in solitary confinement for extended periods of time “for their own protection.” (Meanwhile, solitary confinement is considered a form of torture.)
When it comes to the media:
Trans women are given an extremely two-dimensional portrayal in the news, where they are most often reported on in association of a hate crime. In these reports, their gender is consistently portrayed as confusing and illegitimate, appearing in countless headlines like this one: “Man Dressed as Woman Found Dead.
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