disheartened that he was continuing this attack on the trans community. i think we love to say oh, comedians are just telling jokes. like that s what they do. but i think it ignores the fact that they have platforms and those platforms, the rhetoric that they espouse has real world consequences. for a lot of cis-gender straight people who don t know trans people in their everyday life, their first interaction with trans people is through the media. it s through what they watch, through what they read. so if the only things that they hear are these constant misconceptions about our experiences, demonizing words about who we are, saying that we re not women if we re trans women, saying that trans men are not men and on and on, then they re going to actually bring that into their everyday lives and that s why we see high rates of violence. 38 at least 38 trans gender
and non-conforming folks have been murdered this year. we will continue to see more pieces of legislation put forth that actually impact young trans people. and so i think that s also the other thing too, is that people get so fixated on the adjective of trans, right? the trans part of it. but we are human. and i think that chappelle did a sloppy job of speaking to our humanity. yeah. there is a part in there where he talks about his friend, right? and he said his friend said, you know, i m not asking you to understand, i m just asking you to listen and i m telling you that i m having this experience and that i m a human being. so did you is there any part that is redemptive in there or is there anything you would like to, if you had a discussion with chap chappelle, would you what would you say to him? well, i think what is unfortunate is that he has not really grappled with the fact that as a black cis-gender
straight man he could have easily used his platform to talk about the tensions that exist within our own community as black folks, right? i think that there s a way that he and other black cis-gender straight comedians kind of gloss over the fact that black lgbtq plus folks exist. so it s easy for him to paint the lgbtq plus community as purely just the white community. there are all these ideas that queerness and transness and all these different things are white inventions. and that s just not true. black lgbtq plus folks have always existed. and i really wish he didn t spend so much time only focusing on the fact that there are white people within our community because it lets him get off the hook. he doesn t have to hold himself accountable for the transphobia and homophobia that exists within our own community. well, look, some of the terms that you re talking about like cis and all of that, people may not be familiar with. and it s our job to educate people, right?