Ts Madison showed up on Tamron Hall’s eponymously named show to let the award-winning journalist and her audience know that behind the glitz and glam is a Black trans woman who still fears for her life.
On Monday, Ts Madison stopped by to chat with Hall on her daytime talk show. The actress, LGBTQ+ advocate, and social media personality has had a meteoric rise to stardom with her new judge status on RuPaul’s Drag Race, her feature on Beyoncé’s Renaissance, and her new show Ts Madison Ate That. But even fame doesn’t absolve her and many other Black trans people from discrimination and harassment.
RelatedIn everything Ts Madison does, she leaves no crumbs and now she’s ready to prove it again in her new show, ‘Ts Madison Ate That.’
Seated across from Ts Madison, Hall chatted about the experiences of trans people of color and dived into Ts Madison’s posts on X from July that were written in response to a transphobic rant from comedian Jess Hilarious, who is a Black cis woman. In the post that Ts Madison wrote, Hall read out, “I would hope that the Black community would actually sit down and have a willing openness to learn.
The rest of Ts Madison’s post continues with, “I really wish that we would look at it through the lens of what we had to go through with white supremacy and racism and say, ‘Oh my God, I am doing some of the same things to a marginalized group of people.’ Transphobia affects all women, cis women and trans women. And we have to put an end to it.”
Hall added some facts and figures to the conversation highlighting research from the Human Rights Campaign’s 2022 report An Epidemic of Violence. Hall read that “since 2013, over 85% of victims of violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people were people of color.”
The numbers don’t lie, but rather point to the growing concerns around the safety of trans and gender conforming people of color. Ts Madison used the research as a call-to-action for cisgender and heterosexual people to actually show up for the trans community and realize that “we are on the same side.” The Bros actress also added that even with her star status, she, like other trans people of color, are still concerned for their safety daily.
“I’m still afraid for my life. Even with me being a star and going out on Beyoncé’s album, my own show, I’m still afraid for my life because especially, with me being so vocal about it, you know trans issues and trans rights and the unification of Black people, I’m afraid sometimes that I could be hurt,” Ts Madison said. “My mother is always somewhere praying on her knees, crying, and saying ‘Oh maybe you shouldn’t say this or oh maybe you shouldn’t say that,’ I say, ‘Mommy, it’s put on my heart to say it because I need to because they’re listening to me.”
Ts Madison highlighted other Black trans women, like Laverne Cox, Angelica Ross, and Hope Giselle, leading the charge on calling out transphobia within the Black community. And while they each have their own way of doing so, Ts Madison does as well.
“I’m hood, Tamron and I need to let them people [sic] know,” Ts Madison said. “Listen, you may play with them like that, but you gon’ [sic] have a time on your hand trying to get rid of me.”
You can watch the full clip below of Ts Madison speaking with Tamron Hall below.
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