ENGLISH SPEECH ANNE HATHAWAY Authentic Equality English Subtitles
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 eEnchanted. 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.
It’s 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 will 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.