I think the whole stigma of 'black movies' is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like '12 Years A Slave,' to 'The Butler,' to 'The Best Man,' to 'Ride Along,' to even 'Think Like a Man' from last year - these movies are just good movies.
It's important to me that talking about my experience not undermine those who choose differently. There can be a stigma for people who don't take the path I did, as though not having surgery means you're not really transitioning. No one should feel as though it's everything or nothing.
Soaps are great. You learn to work very fast - some say superficially, but that's not really true. You do some very serious character work. I've never had any feelings about a stigma attached to it, and nowadays there seems to be less snobbery about what you do. More and more big names are doing TV and commercials and voiceovers.
Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV. The problem is that these laws are flouted. Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
There are many plant medicines that are available to us that have a lot of stigma around them that I hope, in the future, our medical community can look at, because I would absolutely go to those alternatives first before I went back to Western medicine.
The problem with the stigma around mental health is really about the stories that we tell ourselves as a society. What is normal? That's just a story that we tell ourselves.
There's a stigma to skating. People think of it as a kid's sport. People kept telling me I couldn't possibly make a living out of it. Then they said I couldn't keep it up in my 30s. And here I am in my 40s, and I'm still improving my skills.
For women raised in the '70s, high heels can still carry a stigma; they're associated with being stupid, with just wanting to please a man. Other women find them empowering.
The stigma that used to exist many years ago, that actors from film don't do television, seems to have disappeared. That camera doesn't know it's a TV camera... or even a streaming camera. It's just a camera.
The magnitude of discrimination and stigma faced by people with disability in Australia cannot be underestimated. People do not understand disability, and people fear what they don't understand.
The climate is much different for men. That stigma is only going to be broken when people come out and see that there is a positive response. That doesn't mean there will be no negative response, but if people can have the courage to be one of the first, which is very hard, those barriers can be broken down very quickly.
Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward.
If they can look past the fact that I happen to wear mascara on stage - which, by the way, is a ridiculous thing that people have a stigma about - then we promise a good rock show.
Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have a massive hat collection, which includes many, many fedoras I haven't worn because of the stigma. I buy them thinking, 'I'm going to make people accept fedoras!' But with the way I dress, if I wore a fedora, I'd be in the camp that gives them a bad name.
I don't have any stigma attached to my body. When I'm in my own private space, I have very little on.
I'm trying to work on my modelling career and remove myself from the whole FHM stigma. I want to be seen as a classic model.
Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.
The only reason I've shared my story is to take that tiny baby step of breaking down the stigma attached to depression.
