Taylor Swift Calls Out The ‘Erasure’ Of Transgender And Non-Binary People On The US Census

Taylor Swift has been an outspoken ally of the LGBTQ community. The singer was recently one of many musicians who applauded the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace. In order to celebrate Pride Month and commemorate the Stonewall uprisings, Swift was invited to speak as part of the star-studded livestream Stonewall Day. Using her platform, Swift spoke out against overlooked injustices that LGBTQ people face.

After celebrating the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, Swift said we still have “so far to go” in terms of protections for LGBTQ people. Swift pointed out a specific example — the US census. The singer said that upon filling out her own census, she noticed there were only two options for gender:

“We had a really good step forward recently with the Supreme Court ruling, based on discrimination, based on sex. 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. I got my census the other day and there were two choices, male and female. And that erasure was so upsetting me, the erasure of transgender and nonbinary 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 we elect people who care about all communities.”

Watch Swift’s Stonewall Day speech above.