Taylor Swift says US census erases transgender and non-binary people

Taylor Swift has spoken out about the US census, saying it erases transgender and non-binary people.

• Read more: “We should be together”: how the LGBTQ+ community is trying to mark Pride 2020

The census collects data on every person living within the United States and its five territories, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.

During a speech for Pride Live’s celebration of Stonewall Day, Swift called out the makers of the census for only offering two gender options. “I got my census the other day and there were two choices for gender, there was male and female,” she explained. “And that erasure was so upsetting to me, the erasure of transgender and non-binary people.

“And when you don’t collect information on a group of people, that means that you have every excuse in the world not to support them. When you don’t collect data on a community, that’s a really, really brutal way of dismissing them. So obviously we all need to exercise our right to vote this year, we need to check out our absentee ballot policy in our states, and we need to make sure that we elect people who care about all communities.”

Earlier in her speech, Swift had highlighted some progress for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as emphasising the work still to be done. “We had a really good step forward recently with the Supreme Court ruling based on discrimination based on sex,” she said. “But we still have so far to go in terms of equality and protections for LGBTQ people and people in the trans community. The Equality Act has still not been passed and that needs to happen.”

Watch Swift’s speech in full above, from approximately 1:07:04.

Swift has been outspoken on a number of issues lately, including the need to dismantle statues to racist figures, the Black Lives Matter movement and more. Earlier this month, she announced she would be giving her employees Juneteenth off “from now on” and pledged to “never let privilege lie dormant”.

Meanwhile, the pop star recently shared a video of her performing ‘Cornelia Street’ at her ‘City Of Lover’ concert, which took place in Paris in September 2019. The entire gig was previously released as a concert film on Hulu and Disney+.

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