by: Paul R. Benson
At 1:00 PM on April 12th, 2019, Parkland College will be hosting a free public screening of the movie Free Cece in room C-118.
The movie is about Cece McDonald, a transgender woman of color who was brutally attacked for her race and for being trans. McDonald killed a man in self-defense and was arrested for murder. Despite identifying as a woman, McDonald was put into a men’s prison. Parkland Pride Advisor, Tanino Minneci, told the Prospectus, “On top of the problematic nature of Cece being tried and convicted for defending herself, then she was put in a male prison and had to suffer all the mental and physical abuse. Basically, her body or her gender wasn’t being respected by the criminal justice system. So, there were a lot of people who ended up fighting for the cause to free Cece.”
Laverne Cox, an American Actress and LGBT+ advocate staring as Sophia Burset in the Netflix series Orange is The New Black, caught wind of McDonald’s case. Cox worked with documentary filmmaker Jac Gares to tell the story of Cece McDonald and bring attention to the issues that transgender women of color have to go through on a daily basis. The documentary is told through an interview between Laverne Cox and Cece McDonald.
Minneci said that he found out about McDonald at last year’s Midwestern Bisexual Lesbian Gay Trans Asexual College Conference, (MBLGTACC,) where McDonald was a keynote speaker. From the conference, Tanino did research to figure out how to bring McDonald’s story to Parkland. “I thought that it could be a really important learning tool for us here at Parkland and just for anybody. But, I thought that it could spark some really interesting conversations at Parkland. So, I looked into the prospect of purchasing the rights and an institutional copy for the college and the library was kind enough to absorb that into their library buying budget.” Minneci said. The movie is one-hour and forty-minutes long. There will be an open discussion after the movie led by an LGBT+ speaker from the Champaign-Urbana community. There will also be an announcement for Parkland Pride’s drag show on May 10th.
“She even mentioned to me that there were a few times where she thought she wouldn’t be able to keep watching. That she might have to get up and leave or stop the movie for a bit.”
The discussion following the screening is bound to be interesting. “It’s a film that will spark a lot of conversation.” Minneci said. “It was really interesting, we screened it for a small group of pride people including myself, a few students, and Jessica [Jackson] was there as well. Jessica had a very strong reaction to it. She even mentioned to me that there were a few times where she thought she wouldn’t be able to keep watching. That she might have to get up and leave or stop the movie for a bit.”
Minneci reflected on his own experience with trans hate and injustice while in New York. “Before I moved back to Champaign and began working at Parkland, I spent 7 years working at an emergency shelter for LGBTQ+ youth in midtown Manhattan,” Minneci said. “At least half of the clientele that I worked with were trans youth and probably 80%-to-90% of those trans youths were trans youths of color. Almost all of them had interactions with the cops and almost all of them had at some point an incident or event that led them to be arrested or have to be advocated for in a criminal justice setting. So, I witnessed a lot of this first hand. I witnessed the trans youth that were staying at our shelter regularly get harassed, get threatened, and get beat up even. So, it’s out there, we may not see it in our daily lives, but for people who are trans and for people who are living in those environments, it is a very real problem.”