Aneesh Sheth spoke at the Spectrum Eleventh Annual Interschool Conference Speaker Series on May 7. Photo Courtesy of The Mary Sue
On Thursday, May 7, Jessica Jones star and transgender activist Aneesh Sheth tuned in to Choate’s Spectrum Club, an identity group for LGBTQ+ students, via the virtual platform Zoom to give a presentation about her life and her work for the transgender community.
Ms. Sheth’s talk was part of the larger Spectrum Eleventh Annual Interschool Conference Speaker Series, which is a series of workshops on issues and stories of the LGBTQ+ community presented by prominent LGBTQ+ or allied speakers. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, speakers were not able to present in person to Spectrum as planned. However, faculty advisor Ms. Mb Duckett Ireland and the Spectrum Club were still able to book two speakers to appear to the Spectrum Club and Choate community via Zoom. The second speaker, Dr. John Pachankis, Director of Yale’s LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative, is scheduled to give a talk to Spectrum on May 18 at 9:00 p.m EDT.
Ms. Sheth’s presentation focused on her life as a transgender woman of color attempting to build a career as an actress and activist. Ms. Sheth said, “A lot of my activism work is based around visibility and the intersectionality of my identity. I realized that my existence, solely as the person that I am, in these spaces, is activism itself.”
Ms. Sheth explained that she has struggled with the lack of transgender representation on TV, finding instead that directors would fill roles for transgender characters with cisgender actors. Ms. Sheth said being on Jessica Jones gave her “a lot more visibility in my career than I had before, specifically not just as a trans actress but as a trans-South Asian actress, because how often do we turn on our televisions and see someone with those intersectionalities?”
Maily Hagan ’21, Co-president of Spectrum, said, “This lecture was important to LGBTQ+ youth to show that success as a queer person of color is possible — though it requires self-advocacy. Representation taught Aneesh to accept herself, and now she is an LGBTQ+ advocate.”
After the roughly twenty-minute presentation, Ms. Sheth answered about forty minutes’ worth of questions from students who were eager to learn more about her work as a transgender activist and her experience as a transgender woman in the film industry.
When asked about when she first realized that she was transgender, Ms. Sheth shared her experience of coming to the realization at the age of 26 after speaking to a representative of the Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on preventing suicide among LGBTQ+ youth.
The second person scheduled to speak for Spectrum, Dr. Pachankis, is a researcher at Yale on mental health issues affecting members of the LGBTQ+ community. His studies, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), examine the efficacy of interventions delivered via technology, community members, and diverse settings in reducing anxiety, depression, and suicide among LGBTQ+ people.
Spectrum Co-president Nico Campbell ’21 said, “One thing that we stand to gain is really any sort of community right now, because I know for a lot of kids who go to Choate, their life at school can be so different from their life at home.”
Campbell and other members of Spectrum encourage all Choate students to join the event to hear about Dr. Pachankis’s research.
