Join out trans rapper and Original Plumbing magazine cofounder Rocco "Katastrophe" Kayiatos as he hits the streets of Los Angeles to ask passersby about gender and debunk stereotypes, then sit down with BuzzFeed's Hillary Lauren Levine to learn more about gender from trans folks themselves in the eye-opening video below.
BuzzFeed's "WTF is Gender?" lets us follow Kayiatos as he asks questions most of his interviewees have never answered before -- starting with "What is your gender identity?" and "How do you know?" -- in paradigm-shaking exchanges akin to the viral 2008 man-on-the-street video where Travis Nuckolls and Chris Baker asked unsuspecting Coloradans, "When did you choose to be straight?"
Kayiatos is similarly able to move strangers from awkward to amused to illuminated about how gender is more than meets the eye -- and help them realize that trans people are everywhere.
Meanwhile Levine, a cisgender (nontrans) woman, shares that she conceived of the video to learn more after realizing she's always identified as a woman but "never questioned why." Filming interviews with Kayiatos, out trans model Arisce Wanzer, and others was an experience the journalist said "changed her life." See why below.
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