Culture

Watch Our Emmy-Winning Short Documentary About a Transgender Texas Girl


 

Last night, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Trans in America: Texas Strong, a film produced by the ACLU and released in partnership with them., won in the Outstanding Short Documentary category. The film follows Kai Shappley, a six-year-old transgender Texas girl, as she and her mother Kimberly fight for Kai’s right to live without discrimination at school and in her community. It’s a stunning portrait of the burden trans people face to simply be seen and exist in our country, made all the more urgent by the upcoming Supreme Court fight for transgender civil rights and the ongoing epidemic of violence faced by trans people of color.

“The very premise of anti-trans rhetoric is that we are not real and that we don’t deserve equal rights — or any rights for that matter,” wrote executive producer and ACLU attorney Chase Strangio when the film premiered last year on them. “Those who would deny us our rights and dignity go to great lengths to enforce the idea that our gender is determined at birth by chromosomes or genitals, and that any internal truth about our gender that we dare to claim, embrace, or embody is always a fraud perpetrated on the world. That is not so. Onscreen, we see a little girl ask to simply live in a society that is fighting to deny her that chance.”

The Trans in America film series also followed Eisha Love, a trans woman of color facing life after incarceration in a men’s jail, and Jennifer Chavez, a trans woman who lost her auto repair job after coming out. Stories like theirs’, alongside Kai’s, help to advance trans equality by bringing light to the real lives of and struggles faced by trans people in our society — and, with any hope, will educate the public about why civil rights protections for the transgender community are so important. Watch Trans in America: Texas Strong above.

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