Prism Raises $350 for Black Trans Orgs
Google Meet – Fulbright Prism is pleased to announce a donation of $350.00 to three Black trans-serving organizations: the Okra Project, the Black Trans Travel Fund, and the Atlanta Homeless Black Trans Woman Fund. Funds were raised by the Prism community thanks to a Q&A on July 17 with Sam Feder, director of the Netflix documentary Disclosure, and Tiq Milan, a creative consultant and interviewee in the project.
Disclosure, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at transgender depictions in film and television. It reveals how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender. Leading trans thinkers and creatives, including Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski, Yance Ford, Mj Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton, and Chaz Bono, share their reactions and resistance to some of Hollywood’s most beloved moments. Disclosure provokes a startling revolution in how we see and understand trans people.
Citing documentaries specific to the experiences of Black and queer people in (and through) media as influences, Feder explained that they wanted to provide a similar lens for the trans community. “Fast forward to 2014 and trans visibility was increasing, mainstream society was talking about us more than ever,” Feder explained in a conversation moderated by Prism Chapter Development Coordinator Lilli Hime, a 2019 Fulbright ETA. “The [mainstream] media was insinuating that visibility was the goal, and that trans people were new. I wanted to provide more context and our history and grounding the fact that visibility is a means to an end.”
“Intersectional representation is important,” Milan added. “All the trans folks who worked on this knew it would be something moving, that no-one had seen before.” And Disclosure’s impact is still being measured, Milan noted, in the continual response from viewers and calls-to-action it champions. “One of the most important things for me [is] what came afterwards,” they said. “The afterglow of the film has been really really great.”
Disclosure is also notable for Feder’s work to hire trans staffers behind the scenes. That “no-brainer” decision, Feder said, is because “we are the experts in our own history.” Where it was not possible to fill a position with a trans person, the cisgender person hired instead was asked to mentor a trans person looking to build their expertise in the field. “I’m so proud that we stuck to out guns; it wasn’t easy,” they explained. “If a small indie project can do that, a studio production has no excuse. I hope we seen this happening.”
“So often marginalized people told that they’re being so sensitive, that their experiences aren’t real, Feder noted. [Disclosure] was a way of providing proof and saying “‘look, you can see what we’re experiencing.’”
Fulbright Prism remains committed the centering the lived experiences of trans Fulbrighters, and looks forward to future opportunities to raise their voices. Watch the Q&A here: