In 2018, the award-winning actress delivered a moving acceptance speech while receiving the National Ally for Equality award at the Human Rights Campaign national dinner in Washington, DC.
Thank you for this tremendous honor. You guys, you keep rewarding me for things I don’t think need rewarding. I am just living the values my parents gave me. I’m loving you the way you deserve. And yes, I am giving major side eye to anyone that thinks differently. That said, I acknowledge the need for allies because of the visibility we lend. That was just reinforced for me tonight, Sarah McBride gave me a note from a ten-year-old transgender girl named Ella. She named herself that after my movie, Ella Enchanted. And in this note, Ella thanked me for my courage as an ally.
Ella sweetie, I want to make something absolutely clear to you, it takes zero courage to love you. It does, however, take a lot of courage to get up and talk in front of a lot of people. So, I put your note right next to my heart to give me extra strength. It’s right here.
So, I’ve been thinking that an award is only as meaningful as the community that gives it. So, let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about this community. What I love most about this community is the way you own the alphabet, L G B T T Q Q I A A P, no letter left behind. No, for real, what I love about this community is the freedom. The freedom that comes with being yourself, all of yourself. I love the energy, the activism, the generosity, the light, the shade, the fun. I love the dignity that accompanies self-acceptance, and the way our collective humanity gets expanded when one wrongfully marginalized community says, we are human beings, there is enough room here for all of us, period.
This declaration that one’s worth is not affected by one’s sexual orientation or gender is a trailblazing concept that lifts humanity into its fullest expression of itself. This is the declaration that precipitates deep lasting change. This change once embraced will make us free.
I hope, I hope, I really hope you guys, but the path to freedom, to equality is currently being blocked by a big, heavy, almost invisible lie. The lie is not about whether we are equal, the lie is about whether our opportunities are. It’s important to acknowledge that whatever my actions have been, however hard I have worked. However, the world may have marginalized me and my experiences that my standing here, my ability to be visible to you comes from the world unfairly rewarding my particular type of visibility.
It is important to acknowledge that with the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth. That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cis-gender, and that all races orbit around whiteness.
This is myth is wrong, but this myth is too real for too many. It is ancient, so it is trusted. It is a habit, so it’s assumed to be the way things are. It’s inherited, so it’s thought immutable. It’s consequences are dangerous because it prioritizes a certain type of love, a certain kind of body, a certain kind of skin color and does not value in the same way anything it deems to be other to itself. It is a myth that is with us from birth, and it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of the few instead of being invested in the lives of the free.
I appreciate this community so much because it’s where I learned to reject this myth. I appreciate this community because together we are not just going to question this myth, we are going to destroy it. Authentic equality, authentic equality doesn’t prioritize sexual orientation. It doesn’t put anyone’s gender or race at the center. It doesn’t erase our identities either. What it does do is centralize love. And when love is fully centralized, every door opens for everybody.
Now I know I’m speaking in abstractions and that there is privilege embedded in my ability to do so. I know that there are very real obstacles that block the path to true equality. And I know that removing them is easier said than done, but I also know that myths are destroyed by the same thing that creates them, a community. A community that believes, a community that is conscious, a community that collapse back and says no more, a community backed by the HRC.
Can you imagine what would happen as each person follows the lead of this community and rejects the myth of their own unworthiness? And more importantly, the myth that they need others to be worth less in order for them to be worth more. The walls built in fear will crumble. They will disintegrate. The old world will shatter and the pieces that no longer serve the melt. A new world will emerge forged from this community, from their size, from your seismic imperative message that love is love.
This community is a community of alchemists. This community has transformed a world full of stark, black and white morality into one, a rainbow prismatic, lustrous freedom. This is a community of light keepers, visionaries of worth, of authenticity, and of true power. And this is a community who by asserting its own equality have in these troubled savage times protected what is best about all of us. This community has arrived because this community understands innately that equality is not a destination. It is a choice.
Love is love, and equality just is. You gotta roll up your sleeves and get to work every day until everyone gets it. You taught me that, you teach us all. So, let me say for everyone whose lives that you have made better, which is to say, for everyone, thank you. To this beloved community, to Ella, it’s an honor to be your ally. This award means so much to me because it comes from you. Now let’s tear this world apart and build a better one.
Thank you.
