#trans issue time

This is a two-pronged approach. The first prong is to vote — try to get legislators who vote for anti-trans legislation out of office. Second, I think we need to pressure our current legislators to understand transgender identity and what the real-life consequences of anti-trans legislation are.

Your being and existence is not and never an inconvenience. Your being and existence are beautiful and necessary.

It is not your, nor anyone else’s responsibility, to keep someone comfortable at the expense of you or your comfort. No matter who you are, it can be really difficult to ask for what you need in personal, academic, or professional spaces. You have every right to inform people of how you need to be addressed to be and feel respected. Although it can be uncomfortable to speak up about it, you know who you are and it is on other people to respect you as the person you are.

That being said, you can also get creative if you don’t always want to have the conversation, like for example, wearing buttons that you make or buy with whichever pronoun feels right that day! Or if you have a close friend who’s an ally, they can model to other people how you would like to be addressed and correct people when they use the wrong pronouns. Just a few ideas! But the Tumblr community probably has many more, too!

Pride 2017 isn’t over yet — and our inbox is now open for Tumblr’s next Issue Time on transgender rights. Experts, advocates and journalists are here to answer your questions about the issues and struggles transgender people face and how we can work together to solve them.

According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 78% of transgender/gender non-conforming students in grades K-12 said they’ve beed harassed, while 35% reported physical assault and 12% reported sexual violence.

According to the same survey, transgender respondents experienced unemployment at double the rate of the general population, while 26% lost a job due to being transgender.

20% of respondents also reported that they were evicted or denied housing simply for being transgender.

19% of respondents said that someone denied them medical services because of their gender identity.

From 2010 to 2016, at least 111 transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans were murdered because of their gender identity, 72% of them were black trans women and gender-nonconforming femmes, who identify as neither male nor female but present as feminine.

Anti-transgender legislation continues to sprout up nationwide.

We’ll be accepting questions until Wednesday, June 28 at 11 AM and publishing the responses here on Thursday and Friday, June 29 and 30.

Ask away!

Let’s meet the panelists:

Tiq Milan has been an advocate in the LGBT community for over a decade. He is also a writer and journalist who carved a niche for himself as a media advocate and one of the leading voices for transgender equality. He is a regular on-air contributor to Huff Post Live and various MSNBC news outlets and has penned articles for BET.com,Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Source, Vibe and others on issues facing the LGBT movement. Tiq is the former editor-in-chief of IKONS magazine, an LGBT pop culture magazine, and has been a freelance pop culture journalist for several years, interviewing people from Jay-Z to Cicely Tyson. Recently married to Toronto based artist and educator Kim Katrin Milan, they together speak about creating love in queer communities of color and intersectional approaches to human rights activism in North America and abroad.

Alex Schmider received his Bachelors of Science degree in Psychology with a minor in Media & Communications from Tufts University in 2013. Prior to joining GLAAD’s team, he worked as the Communications Coordinator at the Los Angeles LGBT Center where he also participated in the Happy Hippie Foundation’s #InstaPride campaign and was featured in a Hallmark Mother’s Day ad, showing the love between a mom and her transgender son. Since joining GLAAD in 2016, Alex has worked with Tinder to launch its trans-inclusive app update, MTV on content for Transgender Awareness Week, and Teen Vogue on featured videos and articles. Schmider was selected as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for Media in 2017, and the same year also received the Visibility Award from L.A. Pride. In his spare time, Alex volunteers as a camp counselor for Camp Aranu'tiq—a camp for transgender and gender nonconforming youth, who inspire him to do what he can to accelerate acceptance for the transgender community.

Meredith Talusan is an award-winning journalist and author who has written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, VICE, Matter, Backchannel, The Nation, Mic, BuzzFeed News, and the American Prospect. She has received journalism awards from GLAAD and the Society for Professional Journalists, and is a contributor to Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America. She lives in New York City.

Mathew Rodriguez is an award-winning journalist and staff writer at Mic. He is a former editor at TheBody.com, an HIV/AIDS news website, and a contributing editor at Modern Loss. His work focuses on the intersectional lives of LGBTQ people. He also hosts a podcast, Slayerfest98, about his favorite television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Shelby Chestnut is the Director of Community Organizing and Public Advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project. For over a decade, Shelby has been organizing with LGBTQ people, people of color, and low income communities to address violence, promote access to resources, and affect local policy change that is for and by the people most impacted by oppression. Shelby holds a BA from Antioch College and an MS from the New School. Shelby is a member of the Assinibouine Nation in Montana. Shelby currently calls Brooklyn, New York home.

Hi Anonymous, you’re right. Gender is so baked into our legal system that it can seem near impossible to make progress on that front. Luckily, the movement to get genders beyond the socially-constructed ideas of “male” and “female” is gaining steam. Mary Emily O'Hara at NBC News has done some great reporting on legal victories in Oregon, another Oregon victory for a genderless person, seven non-binary people in California and intersex individual Sara Kelly Keenan. My best advice is to try to learn from the non-binary individuals at the center of these stories and, also, the legal teams that were able to make these thins happen. It may be a slow burn, but if these victories happened in several U.S. states so far, they’re replicable elsewhere.

I don’t think we can underestimate the influence or impact that media can have on culture, especially in this country. According to GLAAD research only 16% of Americans say they personally know someone who is transgender, and that means for 84% of Americans everything they know about trans people comes from the media which for decades has misrepresented who trans people are, miscast us, and portrayed us as either victims or villains.

What we know is that when someone personally knows someone who is LGB, they are more likely to support LGB peoples’ equality. The same is true for trans people. While it’s improbable that everyone would get to know a trans person in their daily lives—although it’d be great if they did, the media may be peoples’ one and only access point into getting to know who trans people are and what we’re really like.

While binary trans people are becoming more visible and well-known, non-binary people are still very underrepresented. Part of doing our part to ensure that representation reflects the real-lived experiences of non-binary people is both supporting good representations that are available, like Asia Kate Dillon’s portrayal in Showtime’s “Billions” while also holding accountable ones that aren’t or are non-existent by withdrawing our time, viewing, shares, or money. People need to get to know non-binary people and an extremely effective, expedient, and impactful way to do that is through media, which in turns transforms culture. (And if it doesn’t exist, create it!)

Currently, 19 states and Washington, D.C. have laws prohibiting a company from firing someone based on gender identity. This is a real worry, and if you live in a state where there are no gender identity protection laws, I’d suggest linking up with local legislators who might be your ally and seeing what can be done to implement laws that will allow trans people to earn a living.