Outward

Miley Cyrus Gives a Platform to Trans and Gender-Expansive Stories With #InstaPride

Miley Cyrus and the #InstaPride crew.

Courtesy of the Happy Hippie Foundation.

In recent months, singer Miley Cyrus has raised her profile as a social justice activist, launching the Happy Hippie Foundation—a nonprofit focused on homeless LGBTQ youth inspired in part by Leelah Alcorn’s death in 2014—and speaking out about her own sexual fluidity and disgust at repressive religious doctrine in an unapologetic interview in Paper magazine. #InstaPride, a collaboration between Happy Hippie and Instagram that launched on Monday, represents a further push into activism. The project has Cyrus photographing about a dozen people who identify as trans or elsewhere on the gender-variant spectrum; the photos are being published along with substantial interviews regarding the subjects’ personal journeys.

Explaining the project to Time, Cyrus expressed her frustration at the discrimination trans and gender-expansive people face: “Anyone should be able to express how they feel, without question, and be able to live. … And use the f—ing public restrooms.” She added that her burgeoning commitment to advocacy comes from a sense of injustice around her own privilege: “I can stand on a stage with my tits out,” Cyrus said. “It’s so unfair that I’m allowed to be like this and there are two men that can’t get married in f—ing Nashville right now.”

The first two entries to the series feature Tyler, an agender (no gender) person who describes themselves as “a karaoke superhero” and who advises that “there is no right or wrong way to be transgender,” and Leo, a transgender man who’s looking to get into filmmaking and who hopes of the trans future that “the focus shifts away from personal questions regarding medical history, and onto questions about hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, hobbies and activities—stuff that cisgender people get asked.”

The #InstaPride project will run on Instagram and on the Happy Hippies website for the next two weeks.