1.
Image via ANOHNI
After Academy Awards organizers cut Best Original Song nominee ANOHNI’s performance due to “time constraints” last week, the singer posted a touching open letter to Facebook about deciding not to attend the award show. Initial gratitude to be the first transgender performer ever nominated for an Oscar turned to disappointment in the Academy’s decision to nix her performance in favor of more commercially viable artists (including Lady Gaga and The Weeknd).
Encouraged by friends and family to attend the awards because it would be good for her career, the songwriter couldn’t bring herself to board the flight to Los Angeles. She admitted the feeling of rejection struck closely to the trials she’s faced her whole career as a transperson and chose to skip the ceremony.
“I imagined how it would feel for me to sit amongst all those Hollywood stars, some of the brave ones approaching me with sad faces and condolences,” ANOHNI writes. “There I was, feeling a sting of shame that reminded me of America’s earliest affirmations of my inadequacy as a transperson. I turned around at the airport and went back home.”
“As if to rub salt into the wound, the next morning the Oscars added that I was transgendered to the trivia page of their website.”
Although ANOHNI makes it clear she knows her performance wasn’t cut solely because she’s a transperson and was likely a business decision based on ratings and popularity, the decision points to a larger issue of oppression in America.
“If you trace the trail of breadcrumbs, the deeper truth of it is impossible to ignore. Like global warming, it is not one isolated event, but a series of events that occur over years to create a system that has sought to undermine me, at first as a feminine child, and later as an androgynous transwoman. It is a system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit.”
Read ANOHNI’s full letter here.
