VICE News’ first season of Transnational is a six-part series, with an epilogue added, about global struggles for trans rights and stories of resilience — all told by a team of trans storytellers, who get real and personal in each episode. Our teams embeds with a ballroom community in Detroit that’s healing from the murder of one of its members at the hands of a local pastor. In the U.K., we investigate how the National Health Service, lauded and beloved in England, is leaving trans people in limbo for years, and how the delays for life-affirming care have had deadly consequences. In Mexico City, we follow a woman’s quest to honor her murdered friend’s legacy by opening the country’s first shelter for former trans sex workers — and track how residents there are, in the face of a global pandemic, turning the temporary housing into a home. We visit the only Quranic school in Indonesia that teaches trans people how Islam embraces gender diversity. In India, we explore how trans people fight for employment opportunities. And we dive into how Indigenous two-spirit activists in Canada are reclaiming their pre-colonization sacred status through the land defense movement, to the creative suites of India’s finance industry; and inside the religious madrasas of Indonesia. In the season epilogue, we return to the US with Eva, and get into the growing movement to honor fallen trans people — and its toll on their loved ones.
A pioneering work of journalism, ‘Transnational’ is an impressive series that embraced inclusion both in front and behind the camera to tell powerful stories about underrepresented communities.
