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The exclusion of trans voices
There is a truism amongst trans advocates that their voices remain diminished compared to gender critics. To get any message to a broader audience requires both a platform and people willing to share that message. Platforms, especially those with broad audiences, have significant gatekeepers, and trans people have long struggled for any form of equity due to both being a small minority and being perceived as deviant to normal society. All of this is well known and long studies. What is less clear is that those trans people who have been platformed have usually been those who carry no political power, often only having the cultural power of the arts to carry them through. This platforming has defanged trans narratives, embodying in those who are platformed as normative framing that is safe for wider audiences.
This is a critique not of those who are platformed, but why they are platformed and what purpose does it suit those who are platforming them. Many trans people have appeared in the media, myself included, yet the handful of trans people who readily spring to mind have come from the arts. Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings through reality TV, Laverne Cox and Elliot Paige through acting, Laura Jane Grace through music, and so on. Each has a soft power because of their trans identities, with a prior history to guide the audience on a narrative arc from their prior self to their new trans one…
