Production Planning Outline: research, research, and more research!

 

The Final Decision is Here!

All about the topic I chose, and the work put in that made the choice

  I have finally chosen a topic I want to focus on! With enough research and some ideas for the filming process and story plot, I can now share my ideas. I have worked diligently on researching this topic, and will continue to do so, and I will share pictures of documenting process for planning throughout this post as I move along. As seen in my last posting, I was running through the different concepts I would consider by describing the topics I'm most passionate about, and have decided on the representation of  young Black transgender women.

A quick flip through of my outline 

Synopsis 

A young, Black transgender woman navigates life in a world filled with hatred, but finds family and a strong community in her loved ones, people who share her intersectional identities, and allies alike.

Research 

  Plenty of resources have aided me in my research of this particular demographic, I wanted to delve deeper into their history, current statistics, and the experiences of transgender youth, Black LGBTQ youth, and transgender women of color specifically through reading surveys and interacting with the communities.
   The resources I have used for the statistics shown have been highly reliable sources regarding these topics. I used the websites hrc.org (Human Rights Campaign), glaad.org (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and transequality.org (National Center for Transgender Equality) for the following statistics, as seen through these images recording my research process:

Statistics Pie Charts, a drawing within my outline
(Source: glaad.org)

• In 2019 alone, at least 26 transgender or gender non-conforming people were murdered
• 91% of them were Black women
• 81% were under the age of 30
• 68% lived in the South
• "In the seven years that the Human Rights Campaign has tracked anti-transgender violence, an average of 22 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been victims of fatal violence per year."
• In the reporting of these cases, the victims are often times misgendered in local police statements and media reports.
• HRC partnered with researchers at the University of Connecticut to conduct a survey of over 12,000 LGBTQ youth and capture their experiences, more than 1,600 Black LGBTQ youth responded.
• LGBTQ youth of color and transgender teenagers experience elevated stress and unique challenges
• Only 11% of youth of color surveyed believed their racial or ethnic group is regarded positively in the U.S.
• Over 50% of trans and non-binary youth say they can never use the school restrooms that align with their gender identity
• According to a U.S. 2015 survey for transgender people:
• Nearly half (46%) of respondents were verbally harassed for being transgender
• 47% were sexually assaulted at some point in their life. In communities of color, these numbers were higher: 53% reported being sexually assaulted in their life time.

Research of Representation in the Media

  To ignore these statistics in general is fatal for the lives of many. And in film, representation is extremely important. In my attempts to find potentially really good representation of characters within these communities, I found it to be extremely limited. Often times, when I searched for representational films, they featured mainly white, gay, cisgender men as a representative for the entire community (completely ignoring the diversity of the LGBTQ community) and the few that represented the T in LGBTQ were usually about white transgender characters, and played by cisgender actors.

Still from The Danish Girl (2015)

  The two closest examples I got to where The Danish Girl (2015) directed by Tom Hooper, which was a biographical romantic drama film loosely based off of the true story of Lili Elbe, an artist married to wife Gerda who was also an artist. Lili is historically the first transgender person to undergo medical transitional surgeries, and due to this in the last stages of the transitioning complications had caused her to pass away. Her story has been captured beautifully by this film in a way that it will always be one of my favorite films of all time, it history of this community runs. However, as mentioned before a bigger issue within this is that the actor who played Lili (Eddie Redmayne) is a cisgender man. Though his acting in this piece was brilliant, and he did plenty of research within the transgender community to make sure he was representing the story as true to the experience as possible, the idea of a cisgender man playing a transgender woman can spread the harmful idea that trans women aren't really women, which simply isn't true. That is why it's so important to cast transgender actors for transgender roles.

Orange is the New Black cast

  However, my next example does hold up to this standard, and it does so well.  In the Netflix original has truly immortalized Lili and reminds people of just how deep the Orange is the New Black, Laverne Cox, an actress who is also a Black transgender woman, plays Sophia Burset in this show, a prison inmate who is also a hairstylist and transgender woman in the show. The experiences Sophia faces in prison as somebody who belongs to these communities, especially the abuse she endures in later seasons of the show are appalling and even more appalling is the fact that these experiences are consistent in the lives of Black transgender women in prisons all over the nation. Often times, they are even put in a men's prison where they are subject to even more transphobic violence and a complete disregard for their identities by not being placed in a women's prison. Though Sophia is not the main character in this TV show, the representation of her character and the struggles she faces within it are incredibly realistic and raw.

      As you can see, representation is scarce. Don't get me wrong, there are more productions out there representing these intersectional communities, but simply having the characters there for representation brownie points hardly makes truly good representation, and that is what is missing most often when it comes to people with multiple minority identities being shown in the media. My goal for this project is to make sure I am interacting with these communities, the news, the history, everything I can to make sure I am giving an accurate presentation of these human beings who deserve a whole lot more than the world has offered them. I want to be accurate in the information presented about the marginalization of these women in particular, but I also want to make sure that it is a story of hope, that they do get a "happy ending" for a lack of better words. That these women in it find a strong bond of love in their peers, their family, communities, and allies, and know that they are loved and can in turn develop a strong love and confidence in who they are. I want it to be brought to awareness the hatred they face because of who they are and that it can be fatal, how we who do not face these kind of struggles have to be there for these women in our lives, but to additionally share the overwhelming power of love that the world also has to offer and that it is something they need and deserve.