www.huffingtonpost.com Queer Voices 04/17/2017 By James Michael Nichols
A Powerful New Series Is Exploring What It’s Like To Grow Up Trans
“It is important for people to meet trans people as people first.”
A powerful new series from Broadly is offering an intimate look at the lives and adolescences of three transgender young people, as well as the impact anti-trans policies and legal battles have had on them and their families.
“Youth, Interrupted” is hosted by Broadly writer and correspondent Diana Tourjee and features three trans youth: Trinity Neal, Vinnie Holt and Gavin Grimm. Earlier this year, Grimm became the public face of a high-profile battle for transgender rights ― a case that was set to be heard by the Supreme Court until Trump rescinded an Obama-era guidance protecting the rights of trans students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity and it was sent back to a lower court.
Tourjee told The Huffington Post that she hoped to shift cultural dialogue surrounding transgender rights away from “bathroom bills” to the lived impact of anti-trans discrimination on real people in America.
“The series attempts to capture real American stories, to show the human beings behind an overly politicized debate,” Tourjee told HuffPost. “Gavin Grimm told me that ‘discrimination stems from a lack of knowledge,’ and that it is important for people to ‘meet trans people as people first,’ in order to reduce discrimination. I agree with him. This generation is the first generation of trans youth who are coming of age during a time of liberation for transgender people. They are our leaders, and people should look to them for understanding, rather than rely on outdated preconceptions about what gender means or how the world is supposedly supposed to work.”