What Happened When I Created the Transgender Flag Photo Filter
POR QUE CRIEI O FILTRO DA BANDEIRA TRANS, E O QUE ACONTECEU DEPOIS
As many of you are well aware, there was a great victory for social justice on Friday, June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court of the United States declared any law banning gay marriage unconstitutional. Millions of gay, white, cisgender men were liberated from the violent oppression of the State, as Equality finally arrived in his beautiful, TD Bank sponsored rainbow carriage to spread happiness across the land. It was a day filled with much joy and laughter as the rainbow was declared the national bird of the United States of America and everyone was invited to join in on the fun and celebrate Pride ™.
All joking(?) aside, it really was an incredible sight to behold. I honestly never imagined that such an overwhelming public display of support for LGBT rights could even be possible 10 years ago. I was even blown away by the thousands of brands and corporations who adopted the rainbow colors into their logos, regardless of opportunistic intentions. And that was nothing compared to the all-powerful Facebook releasing a rainbow filter for your profile picture, which over 26 million Facebook users all over the world happily participated in. 26 million. Believe it or not, that matters.
As it turns out, people tend to learn from and emulate other people they relate to. Facebook users are no different, and they even have a nice, convenient “friends list” of some of those people right in front of them! Wow! It’s just simple human nature — in general, people are more likely to support something or someone if they see other people they relate to doing it as well. LGBT rights in particular have always been one of those extremely controversial issues, but when the rainbows took over that Friday, I noticed a beautiful thing. People I never would have expected to change their photos with the rainbow filter did. Some people came out as LGBT. And I’m sure countless others have learned a thing or two and changed their minds about some irrational beliefs they had once held the day before. It happens time and time again: anyone who is against civil rights for everyone ends up on the wrong side of history.
I created the transgender flag photo filter in response to this. It’s a very simple web app which takes an uploaded image and overlays a semi-transparent transgender flag over it. The effect is neat if you’re into that sort of thing, however I have found that the overall impact it has had over the last few weeks is much more interesting. I wrote some very brief, sloppy posts about it on Facebook and Tumblr not too long ago, but this seems like a more appropriate venue to answer a few of the questions I’ve received since the moment it went public. This should also shed some light as to why it was created and the incredible impact it has had since.
Question 1:
Why the trans flag? Can you do other flags? What about the bisexual flag? What about the pansexual flag? How about an autism filter?
Despite all of the love the “LGBT” community has received lately, many of these supporters are blissfully unaware of any actual LGBT issues besides marriage equality. The ugly truth is that we have a very, very long way to go still. Many people who claim LGBT allyship will throw a transgender person under the bus the first chance they get, and sadly this is exactly what much of the history of the LGBT movement is. For those who don’t know, it was started by transgender women of color, who have continually been squeezed out of the discussion to make room for straight assimilationist values like marriage equality and inclusion in the military since. There is even a major full-length feature film coming out about Stonewall which does not even prominently feature any transgender women of color characters. (If you are going to see it, please support MAJOR! and Happy Birthday, Marsha! too.) And while marriage equality sweeps the nation, transgender women of color are being slaughtered at higher rates than ever before. The transgender community has been screaming for basic human rights for decades, only to be silenced as quickly as possible.
If you truly want equality, intersectionality is crucial. The simple reality is that transgender people are by far the most marginalized group of the LGBT family and the most likely to be discriminated against, harassed, bullied, attacked, and killed. Things are definitely changing though, as evidenced by the phenomenal popularity of Caitlyn Jenner.
There was even a great segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about transgender rights in America (which everyone should probably watch), but it still somehow fell short of discussing the alarming rates of violence against transgender people, and transgender women of color especially. Personally, it actually came off to me like the worst things we face as transgender people are income inequality, being misgendered, annoying bathroom laws, and inclusion in the military. Don’t get me wrong — these are all very important, but the ones who are going to be affected by these laws and issues the most are also the ones who’s deaths are constantly being ignored or maliciously misrepresented. Somehow we all forgot about racism, even as black churches continued to go up in flames in the South.
We need to lift these voices up, so I created the filter to help in any tiny way that it could. Besides, there are already tools for all of those other flags. I would probably do one for the intersex community first, if anything.
Question 2:
What if I’m cisgender (not transgender)? Can allies use it too if they’re not trans? A trans person told me not to use it!
I don’t care what they told you, use it! Despite revising the website a few times, this still comes up and I want to make this absolutely clear:. This is not just about pride, it is about showing support and changing public opinion. That is why it is absolutely crucial for cis allies to share it and participate as well as the transgender community. In fact, visibility can be extremely dangerous for transgender people and Facebook loves to target transgender people under their “real” name policy, so i am not definitely not asking any transgender people to out themselves. If transgender people were the only ones who used it, what would be the point? It’d be like a big sign saying “Here! Report me!” to all of the transphobic users on Facebook.
Simply put, if you are one of the 26 million Facebook users who used the rainbow filter on your profile to support LGBT rights, you should already be supporting the “T”. If you don’t support transgender people, I ask that you get rid of your rainbow profile picture and educate yourself about the history of the LGBT movement. (And it isn’t our job to do that either — please do some research, it’s not that hard.) Then maybe switch to the transgender flag filter instead, because sometimes it spreads and things like this happen…
When I first created the app, I naively did not expect it to reach much further than some circles of friends who were Photoshopping their own transgender flags onto profile pictures for each other. Even though it was just an ugly blank page with nothing but 2 buttons at the time, it still spread quicker than I imagined and was immediately shared by some well known transgender celebrities and activists including Geena Rocero, CeCe McDonald, and Jennicet Gutierrez.
Of course, this just fueled its popularity even more, and apparently the world took notice. The app received a nice chunk of traffic over the next few days while spreading to Australia, the Phillipines, and over 120 countries all over the planet, although I had yet to realize the impact it was having in Brazil at the time.
Shortly after the app went public, a group of activists in Brazil noticed and began to plan a day of protest centered around it. Brazil actually has the highest rate of transphobic violence in the world and the idea was to put an end to it with the help of social media. In fact, 8 transgender people were murdered over the past month alone in Brazil, including a woman named Laura Vermont who was chased down, stabbed, and brutally beaten to death by 2 police officers (and yes, there’s video.) I noticed traffic coming from a news article there with a transgender flag filtered photo of Laura within the first few days after. There was talk of the people of Brazil using the filter as a form of protest against the violence, but I didn’t quite get it the first time, relying on less-than-stellar Google Translations because I simply didn’t understand Portuguese. More and more traffic started originating from it throughout the week though, so I came back to it later and tried to deceipher these posts and tweets I saw coming from some of the people I assumed to be organizers. I felt like some sort of super cool detective as I slowly fit the pieces together around 4:00 a.m. EST and realized that this was a much larger, organized action. They were actually urging people to hold off using the filter until that Friday, which just so happened to start for most people in a few, short hours.
I found myself stumbling upon the public Facebook event they had just created and I was able to quickly bring myself up to speed. Luckily, it was still very early in the morning and I was also even able to onnect with the organizers of the movement, only to discover some of them speak English! I couldn’t believe this was happening. We started talking right away, and I made plans to adapt the filter to help facilitate their movement and carry their message. I switched out the main photo on the page to Laura Vermont to show solidarity with the people of Brazil and added their hashtags #OlhaABandeiraTrans and #ThisIsTheTransFlag to the sharing buttons. Within minutes, it exploded — reaching 500 active users at once and 5 page views per second for hours that day, and continued to gain momentum throughout the weekend. I couldn’t believe what I was watching as thousands upon thousands of Brazilians added the transgender colors to their profile pictures, many of whom switched from the rainbow filter. One after another, famous celebrities and politicians joined the campaign and united with activisits to call for an end to transphobia once and for all, and it was absolutely beautiful. To date, the app has had 100,000 unique users in 144 countries across the globe, and is still growing in popularity.
It’s such a simple act, yet these are the types of things which create awareness and meaningful change in society. People learn from other people who they respect and look up to. I know this whole thing is still relatively small in internet terms, but if the saying that “1 person can change the world” is true, then 100,000 people have to be doing something right…. right?
This global campaign to end transphobia is taking place the entire month of July, so there’s still plenty of time to join the world in showing your support for transgender rights. Of course, there are other more tangible, concrete ways to show your support, however this is a very simple act that could potentially change the world. Plus you can participate even if you don’t use Facebook as well!
Support transgender people. Support black transgender women and other transgender women of color. Support transgender kids. Support disabled transgender people. Support non-binary transgender people. Support transgender people who don’t “pass.” Stop the hate, wage love, and support transgender people. Please.
Love,
Jessica
P.S.: Here are some helpful links and organizations you can support if you want to go further:
Transgender Flag Photo Filter
Transgender Oral History Project
Transgender Legal Defense Fund
Trans Lifeline
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
TransTech Social Enterprises
