Following the premiere of Caitlyn Jenner’s docuseries I am Cait, the reality star took to her blog to discuss suicide rates in the transgender community. As she declared in episode one’s opening moments: “I don’t want people dying over this, I don’t want people being murdered over this stuff.”
Sure, I am Cait is commercial, but it’s imbued with real sincerity. There’s some obligatory product promotion as Kylie Jenner gifts Caitlyn a set of hair extensions from her own line. The episode balances these glossy Kardashian-Jenner moments with vignettes from another family’s life, as Caitlyn visits Katherine Prescott. Katherine’s son, trans teen Kyler Prescott, committed suicide this year. As Caitlyn put it on her blog, “it’s not because trans people are somehow inherently unstable — it’s because we live in a world that makes it very, very difficult to be trans” she then hands the floor over to Kyler’s mother, whose words you can read here.
Though Caitlyn’s blog post focuses on suicide, there’s other trans realities that contextualise I am Cait’s premiere. The week before the E! show debuted, two transgender women were murdered in America. Their names were India Clarke and K.C. Haggard: respectively the 10th and 11th victims of such hate crimes in the US this year.