Sunday, April 15, 2012

Melissa Harris-Perry Trans Issues Show: SOSO

You TransGriot readers know how much I love Melissa Harris-Perry and her weekend MSNBC show, and was surprised and pleased to discover when I tuned into today's edition of the show that a Transgender in America segment was coming on and was even happier to hear that she was making a commitment to become a better cis ally to trans people.

But that faded when the panelists were announced because Ms. Harris-Perry and the Nerdland staff fell into the same old same old same old trap in terms of who was invited to talk about those issues.   Once again we had the trans 1% situation of an all white trans panel and a white cis female guest Allison Kilkenny talking about trans issues





Arrgh.   At least Mel Wymore, the transman they had on the panel (who is BTW running for New York's City council ) wasn't Chaz Bono.   But as my Black, Latino and Asian transbrothers will probably say, they got erased just like Black, Latina and Asian trans women did in this panel along with our voices and perspectives on the issues affecting this community.

Same old same old bull feces.   We transpeople of color take the brunt of the anti-trans violence and discrimination but rarely get the chance to expound on the issues in this community as we see them  

Once again it's the white transpeeps getting the face time as the talking heads of the community, and that bull feces is getting old..  Once again a vanillacentric narrative was presented to Ms, Mr. and Mrs America that transpeople are middle class whites.  

If you really want to be an ally to our trans community Prof. Harris-Perry, please use your show to broaden the conversation of trans issues (and GLBT ones for that matter) to include trans persons of color.



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