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.
Austin police are investigating whether an assault on a transgender woman and a male bystander at Barton Springs, a popular Austin swimming spot, was a hate crime. The incident occurred on July 26, when three men began flirting with the woman’s friends and then allegedly harassed her after she approached them.
"They said something along the lines of 'I don't support that lifestyle,' while pointing at me, which upset all three of us," said the transgender woman, whose name is being withheld for safety and privacy reasons, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
Social conservatives are claiming vindication for their views after Robin Westman, the 23-year-old behind the August 27 mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, was identified as transgender by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in an X post.
Armed with a rifle, shotgun, and pistol, Westman fired dozens of rounds into the church during a morning Mass attended by students from the affiliated Annunciation Catholic School, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said, as reported by The Associated Press.
A new report published by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law finds that an estimated 2.8 million Americans aged 13 or older identify as transgender.
According to NBC News, that figure represents about 1% of the U.S. population within that age group. The breakdown is nearly even: 34.2% identify as transgender men, 32.7% as transgender women, and 33.1% as nonbinary.
One statistic drew particular attention on social media: younger Americans are far more likely to identify as transgender than older generations. About 3.3% of those ages 13-17 identify as transgender, compared to just 0.3% of those 65 and older.
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