Dominique Jackson opens up about experiencing agoraphobia due to anti-trans attacks

Actress Dominique Jackson says she has struggled with agoraphobia due to anti-trans hate and trauma resulting from physical assault.

The Pose star is being honored with a national leadership award at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s annual gala in Miami this weekend. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the award, Jackson said that she never set out to be a leader for the trans community.

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The “Pose” star says Murphy left her “on read” and suggested he may have cost her a Marvel role.

“I just wanted to live. I wanted to survive. I wanted to be comfortable,” she said. “Because of borderline agoraphobia, trauma, and other things like that, I wanted to be able to get to a space where I could be a part of the world and yet, be able to find peace and space that I can be a little reclusive in.”

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Asked about her experience of agoraphobia, Jackson said that “It’s something that happens a lot in the sense of right before I go out now, I get a little panicky or nervous. But I have overcome it.”

“I spent eight years of my life dealing with not wanting to go outside, having major anxiety in spaces even though I had to work in said spaces,” she continued. “I had to eat and I have to live, so I’ve found the courage. I will always get there even if it means that once I’m home, I’m a mess on the floor crying hysterically.”

“I push myself through every possible challenge I face,” she added. “You think there are obstacles, but there are only challenges. Being afraid to go outside was one of them.”

Jackson also described never knowing what kind of reception she and her co-stars would receive from the public as they became more well-known following the success of Pose, which aired on FX from 2018 to 2021.

“There were so many people who were joyful for us,” she said. “There’s this thing that happens in that where one or two comments come in amid all that joy and those comments were very negative or contained death threats. That was part of it but I could not sit at home and be fearful of showing up to something that was important or something that I fought for all of my life. I didn’t fight to be a visible person. I fought for us to be able to get the jobs that we believed we could do.”

She also described being assaulted in 2014, two years before appearing in the Oxygen reality series Strut. “I was strangled within moments of my life,” she said. “I carried a lot of fear with me after that.”

To this day, Jackson said, she travels with security, including her fiancé who acts as her bodyguard. “Because of the climate out there, as a trans woman, I do not travel by myself,” she explained. “I’m a free spirit and I meet people, speak to them, laugh with them, but I don’t want that to be the end of my life. So, I have to be extra careful.”

According to a 2021 report from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than cisgender men and women. So far, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has tracked at least 19 trans and gender nonconforming people in the U.S. who died by violent means in 2023. Black trans women are particularly vulnerable. According to a 2022 HRC report, 63% of known victims of fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people since 2013 were transgender women of color.