Transgender woman from Virginia, Claire Green, is “Looking for Love” in new BBC documentary
Claire Green is moving from Virginia’s gorgeous Blue Ridge mountains to Richmond, the state capital, because she wants to “make a future for myself…move on from the past.”
Green is a transgender YouTuber who has posted a number of videos about her transitional experience. This week, she’s making a much bigger public splash in a new Barcroft/BBC documentary, Young, Trans and Looking for Love. A teaser shows Claire with her friend Zoe, donning a bikini at the beach and meeting a couple of guys. The young men are initially interested, but then treat the women with “silence” after their transgender status is revealed.
“In a lot of ways,” Green says, “I don’t like telling a guy, because, once I tell him, it’s like, all respect goes out the window. Straight guys just can’t get over you having the male…parts.” Metro UK quotes Green as saying she’s “never had an actual relationship.”
Green has legally changed her name and had hormone and laser hair treatments. However, she is now bothered by unpleasant encounters with people in her home community. “Someone yelled across the [gas station] parking lot, ‘Yo, like that’s a dude….’ And it’s just situations like that, that I run into, because people know me,” she added.
High school acquaintances, for example, have a difficult time addressing Claire as the woman she is now, rather than the male classmate they grew up with. “[I] run into so many people who are like — automatically, if I haven’t seen them for a while — ‘Hi, Dylan…’ or ‘he, him….’ And I will have to put them in their place.”
Claire recognizes that others may experience difficulty in changing their language, but she is hurt by their mistakes. It makes her feel as though all the work she has undertaken to transition has been undone by other people’s feelings of awkwardness or laziness.
“I understand that we knew each other for so long. And you knew me as this way before, for so long,” she says. “But I feel like, out of respect — because trans people go through so much — that that is the one thing you should do for a trans person: Call them by the right pronouns. Call them by the name they chose.”
Young, Trans and Looking for Love begins airing on BBC3 at 9pm, Monday, November 23, 2015. The program will also features Arin Andrews and Katie Rain Hill, two transgender teenagers, who previously shared their story of love on 20/20.
You can follow Claire Green’s personal videos on YouTube.
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