Angelica Ross Instagram – “We have a culture full of people who cannot see themselves clearly. And because they can’t see themselves clearly, they don’t really even see other people’s lives clearly and just scrolling on Instagram with ill-conceived perceptions. How important is it for us to, as you say, see each other?” – @angelicaross “When I think about this, I think that the answer lies ultimately in community. And so when you ask the importance of seeing each other, and the reason why I named the book, We See Each Other, I wanted to be clear about who I was talking to, which is other black trans folks. Everybody else, you can peek in, you can glean the wisdom from this, but this is about us. And I think when we hyper-focus on our communities and the folks that are around us, I think it makes this work of cultural change easier. But when you begin to focus on your immediate community, and you begin to see the folks in your immediate community, I think that’s how we begin to have some cultural change. So if you, in your local community, are doing what you can to show up for the trans folks, for the black folks, for the queer folks, et cetera, in your local community, the folks who are down the street from you right now, and I’m doing the same here, and they’re doing the same over there, that’s how the shift begins to happen. There’s that GLAAD statistic that folks always say of like, I think the number is 70 some odd percent of people say they’ve never met a trans person. And what I like to say is they believe they’ve never met a trans person, and the reason they believe they’ve never met a trans person is because they have not created a safe enough environment around them for the trans people who already exist in their local communities to tell them their truth. And so how can we think on an individual standpoint about making the space around us safe for the trans folks, for the marginalized folks who are already there?” – @rayzhon