I will not be silent

Regardless of you take on Dallas Buyers Club and Jared Leto (I personally find his actions problematic) I am very troubled to see so much transgender erasure from the cisgender community right now. At the moment it is really revealing a problematic entitlement. When I and my transgender siblings are told what the transgender community’s opinion should be in this matter, and how I personally should or shouldn’t feel that is plain and simple privilege and a throwing of our community under the bus.

Despite having no connection to transgender experience or community many cisgender people seem to feel like they have a right to speak for our community and silence any disagreement with their points of view. This is WRONG!!! It is not up anyone, but the transgender community and it’s members to determine what is offensive or privileged and what isn’t to us. No one has a right to speak for us. You do not have the right to determine what I or my community feel if you are not a part of it, just as I do not have the right to speak for communities that I do not represent.

The sad part is that these feelings are not new, and have been present for some time now within cisgender communities, they are just being revealed with this incident. There is a major lack of acknowledgement or responsibility in the cisgender community for this form of privilege and often transphobic action which has existed for a long time. By worshiping Leto entirely without any sort of critical perspective, and being an apologist for a lack of transgender representation in the media you are being complicit within a power structure that continues to promote long standing inequities.