For decades, Hollywood allowed trans people on-screen only as toxic punchlines (“Ace Ventura”) or as tragic figures played by cisgender men (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “The Danish Girl”). Now, trans people are getting to tell their own stories like never before
went on national television to tell Barbara Walters the same thing she’d been telling her parents, siblings and anyone else who would listen: She was, despite her birth certificate’s insistence otherwise, a girl.
Cox understands the argument that representation has its limits. “It doesn’t necessarily change the material conditions of working-class trans people,” she acknowledges. “But what representation does do that’s beautiful, for young people and people of all ages, is that they can just see themselves. They can just have a sense of existing, and a sense of possibility.”
Still, Jennings has been fighting similar measures for most of her life, and isn’t entirely surprised by their recent resurgence. “There’s been a lot of progress, but I think with the abundance of love and acceptance, there’s also that contrast of hatred and cruelty,” she says. “People are more outspoken. People feel empowered to share their loving, and empowered to share their hatred.”July 2015, as 14-year-old Jennings was about to enter high school, her family launched “I Am Jazz.
For 19-year-old “Saved by the Bell” star Josie Totah, seeing a trans girl her age put everything in perspective in ways she couldn’t quite articulate herself. “I distinctly remember feeling so connected to someone that felt so far away and yet very, very close to me,” says Totah. She’d later watch “I Am Jazz” with her mother and best friend as she embarked on her own transition, calling it “a touch point and a resource.
For a trans woman like Cox, who was 34 when the “20/20” interview aired, Jennings and her family represented both a hopeful future and an impossible past. “I remember just being so jealous,” Cox says. “I went back in my own life to think about what my childhood was like, and how difficult it was, and how it might have been different if I had supportive parents or even just some sort of critical framework to be able to say that I was trans and accepted and could live authentically.
The Jennings successfully sued the United States Soccer Federation to adopt a trans-inclusive policy. And yet 2021 has seen an unprecedented wave of anti-trans bills across the country, many aimed at keeping trans girls out of girls’ sports. Even Jenner, the most famous trans Olympian in the world, recently made headlines for not siding with the trans community on the issue. But according to Dr.
In Cox’s estimation, the bills represent an existential threat to trans people, period. “These battles are not necessarily new, but the way in which conservative lawmakers are painting trans youth is so dehumanizing,” she says. “Passing all these laws to stigmatize children is basically trying to stigmatize the entire trans community.”
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