Black Trans Women on Why They're Essential to Pride Month and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Black Trans Women on Why They're Essential to Pride Month and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Video Transcript
- I want to hear you. Black trans lives matter!
ELLE HEARNS: Movements have consistently left people out or attempted to erase their contributions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ASANNI YORK: Pride started as a riot It was a riot because black trans people were really protesting the way that police officers were brutalizing their communities. It was a black trans person and a brown trans person who really stood up to lead this fight who started this movement.
ELLE HEARNS: Marsha is not necessarily lifted up as being the brain behind the movement. There's no way to disassociate the Stonewall Rebellion with acts and sacrifices of black people during that time.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART: We are the foundation. We have been here forever. We deserve recognition for where we've been and what we started and what we've created.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ELLE HEARNS: There is nothing more beautiful than the freedom of black trans people.
- Black trans lives matter! Black trans lives matter!
ELLE HEARNS: We represent something that is missing from everyone else. There's a slight antagonism that we experience not just because of bigotry but because people have never known such a freedom.
- When black trans lives are under attack, what do we do?
- Stand up. Fight back.
ELLE HEARNS: It's quite easier to deny us access to ourselves as opposed to figuring out all of the things that one must unlearn in order to have their own piece of freedom.
- What do we do?
- Stand up! Fight back!
- Trans lives matter!
[APPLAUSE]
Trans lives matter! Black trans lives matter!
ELLE HEARNS: Black trans women are being murdered. Until the conditions of black communities improve, black trans women will always be the first to be targeted.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART: I am a trans person, and therefore I did not create transphobia. Just as we cannot ask black people to undo racism, we can't ask trans people to undo transphobia.
ELLE HEARNS: It's so important to highlight black trans lives because it is a reflection of who we all are.
ASANNI YORK: Any type of representation in the media, if it even happens at all, it's usually normally about their death.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART: People don't understand what it is to look on TV for the majority of what they see to be reflected back in some version of themselves.
ASANNI YORK: And it doesn't really talk about the joy that black trans women and black trans men have.
ELLE HEARNS: We're also people who are excited to be alive, who are excited to love, and who are excited to contribute to the world and to society.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If you are someone from the LGBTQIA community, please make yourself proud, but also love your future children now so that, you know, they don't ever have to miss out on that love later.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART: I as a black woman with multiple experiences, I feel no need anymore to spend my time trying to prove to people that I matter. I exist, and I matter because of that.
ELLE HEARNS: This is bigger than us, and we have a great opportunity to really seize the moment for ourselves and also our future. And when we tell you there is no other place for me to be but at the center, that's the only thing that's going to get us closer to our liberation. If that does not happen during this time of resistance during the pandemic, we will be here in 50 more years. We'll be right back here.
