Taylor Swift Calls Out Census Form For Transgender Erasure

Taylor Swift Calls Out Census Form For Transgender Erasure

Taylor Swift spoke at Pride Live’s third annual Stonewall Day, commemorating the anniversary of the 1969 uprising in response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Although this year’s celebration was a virtual one, Swift came on the livestream to speak to fans about the day’s significance.

“I wanted to say happy Pride Month, how the Stonewall Inn has been such a symbol of rebellion in the face of oppression and such a safe place for people,” she began. “I want to say thank you to everybody who works there, everyone who has worked there, everyone who’s made it the place that it is. I was lucky enough to get to go and perform at the Stonewall Inn last summer when my friend Jesse Tyler Ferguson invited me to come and crash his set. And everybody there was so lovely and wonderful.”

“We had a really good step forward recently with the Supreme Court ruling based on discrimination based on sex. But we still have so far to go in terms of equality and protections for LGBTQ people and people in the trans community,” she continued. “The Equality Act has still not been passed and that needs to happen.” And she specifically called out the United States census form for its erasure of transgender and nonbinary respondents:

I got my census the other day and there were two choices for gender, there was male and female. And that erasure was so upsetting to me, the erasure of transgender and nonbinary people. And when you don’t collect information on a group of people, that means that you have every excuse in the world not to support them. When you don’t collect data on a community, that’s a really, really brutal way of dismissing them. So obviously we all need to exercise our right to vote this year, we need to check out our absentee ballot policy in our states, and we need to make sure that we elect people who care about all communities.

Watch Swift’s appearance on Pride Live’s Stonewall Day livestream below beginning at 1:07:02.

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