TEDx Talks: Nina Arsenault

Show: TEDx Talks
Title: The transgender conversation has just begun
Release Year: 2015

On December 8, 2015, at a TEDx event, artist and activist Nina Arsenault took to the stage not to explain what it means to be transgender, but to ask: Why wasn’t she angry? And more importantly, why did that question matter so much? Delivered with emotional clarity, biting humor, and searing honesty, Arsenault’s talk was less a lecture than a call to witness. It spanned continents, cultures, and decades of personal and political reckoning. From performing naked 60 feet above the ground at the Pope’s Palace in Avignon, France, to confronting the mundane cruelty of everyday ignorance in Canadian bars, Arsenault charted the internal journey of a trans woman who had once resisted anger, and eventually learned why she couldn’t anymore.

 

The speech begins not with theory, but with a moment, a performance. “It’s a summer night in 2014,” Arsenault tells the audience. She’s standing high above a crowd at the Palace of the Popes, starring in a daring new theatrical production. She’s naked, sexually exposed, performing a provocative piece about the Whore of Babylon. Below her, her fierce and electrifying girlfriend Rosie Bie, “the fiercest performer I have ever seen in my life”, is dancing with a power that stuns Nina into awe. Rosie, a Māori performer from New Zealand, reveals her secret later that evening over drinks: before she goes on stage, she thinks about her ancestors. The ones who had their language taken, their land stolen, their power denied. That’s where the fury comes from. That’s what fuels her presence. And then Rosie turns the question outward: “Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you angry about the things that have been done to trans women?”

 

Arsenault, at first, has answers. Logical ones. She’s had a good life, she insists. She’s starred in groundbreaking performances around the world. She’s been part of a cultural wave that finally brought trans women into mainstream visibility. She even names the cultural turning point: Caitlyn Jenner on Vanity Fair, Laverne Cox on Time, and a trans woman on Obama’s staff. These are not small shifts. So why, then, feel rage? She gives more reasons. Focusing on the negative makes it impossible to hold space for the positive. If she told people how she really felt, they might not listen. They might cut her off. Worse yet, she might “start using [her] man voice”, a moment she shares not with shame, but pride. That’s my voice, she says defiantly. Don’t you dare make fun of it. And still, Rosie’s question lingers. It pierces. It festers.

 

Returning to Canada, Arsenault notices something surreal: the world seems... different. Warmer. More welcoming. Trans people are “in Vogue”, both literally and figuratively. But even as the social climate changes, a deeper question bubbles to the surface. Why did it take so long for people to see us as human? For decades, trans women were reduced to spectacle. Talk shows like Phil Donahue or Geraldo Rivera paraded them out like curiosities. The only questions ever asked: What surgeries did you have? What does your family think? What’s between your legs? Even as cultural tides turned, those fundamental invasions never stopped. Arsenault recounts a man in a bar who asked if she’d had “the final surgery.” When he apologized, horrified he’d offended her, she didn’t feel insulted. She felt bored. “I started transitioning in 1998,” she says. “Every time I meet someone, I have to have that same conversation. It’s boring.”

 

Despite the progress, Arsenault confesses something startling: she was angry, very angry, for nine months. It hit her that many of the “rights” and recognitions she was finally being granted weren’t born from trans communities themselves. They were given, often with conditions, often filtered through cisgender, non-trans power structures. Just like women were once “given” the right to vote by men, trans women were being selectively allowed dignity by others. The bureaucracy was catching up, but what about the lived experience? What about the right to walk down the street without humiliation? That wasn’t something a law could guarantee. And for many trans women, especially those who aren’t “passable”, a term Arsenault rightfully critiques, those humiliations are daily, routine, and corrosive. So corrosive, in fact, that many trans women stop going outside during the day. Arsenault names the violence of public humiliation. It’s not just cruel. It isolates. It makes people disappear. It erases lives. 

 

Arsenault touches a raw nerve: privilege. “Wouldn’t it be great if people just treated you like a normal woman?” someone once asked her. Her response: “No. Actually, no. I want to go back to being treated like a non-transgender male. That was awesome.” It’s a biting truth. Before her transition, Arsenault was treated with respect. People listened. Her ideas were seen as visionary, intelligent. After? Her same insights were dismissed as “kooky.” Friends and colleagues vanished. The world shifted. And it wasn’t just prejudice, it was a loss of status, of power, of safety. She compares the public mocking of trans women to the historic weight of anti-Black racism. Like the n-word for Black communities, she argues, transphobic slurs cut deep. They carry centuries of dehumanization, violence, and marginalization. And they push trans people into hiding.

 

By the end of the talk, Arsenault offers no easy answers. What she gives is something harder to look at, but far more necessary: A mirror. She reminds the audience that now, finally, trans people are visible. Some of the mystery, the exoticism, has faded. “We’ve been seen,” she says. “And now, we can begin to speak of trans politics for the first time.” This visibility comes at a cost. A cost borne by those who never passed. Who bore the slurs. Who stayed indoors. Who were forgotten or disappeared. For them, and for herself, Arsenault demands not only recognition, but a reckoning. She ends her talk in the spotlight, standing in full daylight, both literally and symbolically. She’s no longer performing the Whore of Babylon from a palace window. She’s speaking her truth, clearly and without apology. 

 

Nina Arsenault’s 2015 TEDx Talk remains a landmark moment, not only in trans discourse but in public storytelling. It’s a manifesto cloaked in memoir, a performance turned political theology, a cry for visibility that refuses to trade honesty for politeness. In asking “Why aren’t you angry?”, Arsenault answers with the story of a lifetime spent walking the thin line between acceptance and annihilation. And in the end, she’s no longer afraid to say it: She is angry. And the world should be, too.

 

via: youtube

Image credits: TEDx Talks