Claire Green (left) is featured in “Young, Trans and Looking for Love” — Image via Barcroft TV/BBC 3
Claire Green is moving from Virginia’s gorgeous Blue Ridge mountains to Richmond, the state capital, because she wants to “make a future for myself…move on from the past.”
Green is a transgender YouTuber who has posted a number of videos about her transitional experience. This week, she’s making a much bigger public splash in a new Barcroft/BBC documentary, Young, Trans and Looking for Love. A teaser shows Claire with her friend Zoe, donning a bikini at the beach and meeting a couple of guys. The young men are initially interested, but then treat the women with “silence” after their transgender status is revealed.
“In a lot of ways,” Green says, “I don’t like telling a guy, because, once I tell him, it’s like, all respect goes out the window. Straight guys just can’t get over you having the male…parts.” Metro UK quotes Green as saying she’s “never had an actual relationship.”
Green has legally changed her name and had hormone and laser hair treatments. However, she is now bothered by unpleasant encounters with people in her home community. “Someone yelled across the [gas station] parking lot, ‘Yo, like that’s a dude….’ And it’s just situations like that, that I run into, because people know me,” she added.
High school acquaintances, for example, have a difficult time addressing Claire as the woman she is now, rather than the male classmate they grew up with. “[I] run into so many people who are like — automatically, if I haven’t seen them for a while — ‘Hi, Dylan…’ or ‘he, him….’ And I will have to put them in their place.”
Claire recognizes that others may experience difficulty in changing their language, but she is hurt by their mistakes. It makes her feel as though all the work she has undertaken to transition has been undone by other people’s feelings of awkwardness or laziness.
“I understand that we knew each other for so long. And you knew me as this way before, for so long,” she says. “But I feel like, out of respect — because trans people go through so much — that that is the one thing you should do for a trans person: Call them by the right pronouns. Call them by the name they chose.”
Young, Trans and Looking for Love begins airing on BBC3 at 9pm, Monday, November 23, 2015. The program will also features Arin Andrews and Katie Rain Hill, two transgender teenagers, who previously shared their story of love on 20/20.
Ahead of Transgender Day of Remembrance on Thursday, November 20, Advocates for Trans Equality, a national organization, released a report honoring the 58 known transgender people who have died in the United States over the past year.
First held in 1999, Transgender Day of Remembrance was initially intended to mourn those transgender people lost to violence. The first organizers memorialized Rita Hester, killed in November 1998 in Boston, and Chanelle Pickett, murdered in November 1995 in Watertown, Mass.
Since that first memorial service, cities and regions throughout the world have adopted November 20 as a day to commemorate transgender and nonbinary individuals who have died -- whether due to murder, suicide, or natural causes.
In late November, the University of Oklahoma placed Mel Curth on administrative leave after the transgender graduate teaching assistant gave a student a zero on an essay about gender roles.
The essay cited the Bible to defend traditional gender roles and described transgender people as "demonic." Curth and the course's instructor, Megan Waldron, said the paper failed to meet basic academic standards due to a lack of empirical evidence. Both noted that the paper cited no scholarly sources and failed to offer an evidence-based critique of the assigned article, which argued that children who do not conform to rigid gender stereotypes are more likely to face bullying and negative mental health outcomes.
A Florida man has been arrested and charged with the murder of Girlalala, a 21-year-old transgender TikTok influencer, after allegedly shooting her during what appears to have been a dispute between the couple.
Broward County Sheriff's Office deputies say 25-year-old Shanoyd Whyte Jr. shot Girlalala shortly before 7 p.m. on Friday, November 14, while the two were sitting in a car on the side of the road in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.
According to Miami-based WPLG, video from a nearby Tesla shows a man believed to be Whyte getting out of the driver's side of a sedan as Girlalala tries to exit the passenger side. He appears to grab her by the hair and force her back inside before pacing outside the car with a cellphone in hand.
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