Being Black, being transgender, and being a woman puts one on three different paths to danger in our society, and society as a whole has a long road to travel for change. But Maude asks, locally, who’s responsible for the mistreatment of Black trans women?
by Mauve Maude
March 17, 2021
It is dangerous to be Black in America, and it is dangerous to be a woman in America, and this doesn’t bode well for Black women. This is not a secret. Malcolm X famously said, in 1962: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” And people continue to say this now, because Black women make up a disproportionate representation of America’s poor, America’s single mothers, America’s maternal mortalities, and America’s unsolved disappearances–America’s disregarded–despite the fact that Black women are also the most educated and arguably the most civically minded population in the country. It seems no matter how much we do right, the cards are stacked against us–our wrongs, unforgiven.
But there’s one thing most Black women have going for them, that other Black women do not. The crime of being a Black woman is even more harshly punished, when one wasn’t born female.
Fifty-three (known) transgender people were killed in the United States between October 2019 and October 2020, accounting for almost fifteen percent of the worldwide marker for the same period. Most of these Americans were Black women.
Why does this happen? According to Harvard Law, it happens because it’s widely allowed to happen. Anti-transgender legislation, whether in the form of targeted hostility or passive disregard, brings issues from the top down, with state governments and the federal government, one way or another, sanctioning anti-trans sentiment. Trans people find themselves unprotected from employment discrimination, housing discrimination (or just plain lack of access, because of unemployment), and medical discrimination, which can potentially remove their access to all of it. These three issues alone make a healthy life virtually impossible, much less when they’re combined. Naturally, when a person becomes jobless and homeless, and can’t see a doctor, that person, no matter who they are, will be in perpetual danger of crime, illness, disease, and suicide risk.
This is all before we even discuss the hostility of anti-trans individuals, with whom transgender people may come into contact on any given day, including civilians and law enforcement. But that hostility is basically backed up by law. Our governments are there to regulate the society we want to live in, to provide the support for who we want to be as a people. If they’re not protecting trans people, society isn’t either.
Fifty-three (known) transgender people were killed in the United States between October 2019 and October 2020, accounting for almost fifteen percent of the worldwide marker for the same period. Most of these Americans were Black women.
The only way society can make that change is from the bottom up. Before we can hold our governments accountable, we must hold ourselves accountable. And “ourselves” starts at the most local possible level.
Black trans women first have to be protected in their own communities.
And clearly, that isn’t happening, at least not frequently enough. To be clear, there are Black LGBTQ+ organizations working hard on this issue, focused on awareness and support for the Black trans women so disproportionately suffering anti-trans violence. But they have their work cut out for them.
As segregated as American society still is, between Black and White and rich and poor, it stands to reason that Black trans women aren’t finding themselves homeless, jobless, engaging in crime to survive, or dying in affluent White neighborhoods, or even poor ones, at least not the majority of the time. Black trans women are enduring this treacherous landscape where they live–usually in low-income Black communities. In this Time article about the murders of Black transgender women in Dallas, Texas, David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, says, “We . . . don’t move to ‘gayborhoods.’ We live in communities with other Black people, where we’re fighting for basic access to resources.” Unfortunately, the forces that work hard to keep Black people down–poverty, education inequality, racial bias in law enforcement–are working on Black trans women and everyone around them. And a lot of those forces–just as they’ve tried to turn Black people in general against each other–turn cisgender, heterosexual people against transgender and non-hetero people. Even amongst the most discriminated racial and social group in America, there’s room for more discrimination to be handed down, in the forms of misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.
“We don’t move to ‘gayborhoods.’ We live in communities with other Black people, where we’re fighting for basic access to resources.”
David J. Johns, Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition
In Dallas, in 2019, two Black transgender women, Chynal Lindsey and Muhlaysia Booker, both in their twenties, were killed within a couple weeks of each other. Ms. Lindsey’s traumatized body was found in Dallas’s White Rock Lake. Ms. Booker was shot to death. About a month before Muhlaysia Booker was killed, she was assaulted by a large group of people outside an apartment complex in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in South Dallas. The assault was captured on both surveillance and cell phone video, the latter of which was posted to the Internet, where it went viral. One suspect was charged in Booker’s assault. At his trial later that year, the defense argued that Muhlaysia–who they referred to as a man, using her birth name–provoked her own assault by the six-foot-seven suspect and others, by “twirling around” smack-talking after a fender bender in the parking lot. In actuality, Muhlaysia was threatened with a weapon by the other driver as the crowd gathered, and one man offered another two hundred dollars to beat her up. In his initial interview, in which the suspect confessed to beating Muhlaysia, he stated that he didn’t beat her as hard as he would “a real man.” Edward Thomas was convicted in the assault. In June of that year, after the deaths of Muhlaysia Booker and Chynal Lindsey, Kendrell Lyles was arrested and investigated in possible connection to both murders, in addition to three others. One of those was of Brittany White, a Black transgender woman killed the previous fall. Lyles was also investigated in the stabbing of a fourth transgender woman. He was later charged in Muhlaysia Booker’s death and the deaths of two other women.
The so-called motives of Thomas and Lyles are, of course, unclear. Proving any hate crime is about as difficult as convicting a police officer in any on-the-job killing. Intent has to be crystal clear. Two of the three women Lyles is charged with murdering were cisgender, and at least one was shot during a drug deal. His connection to the crimes against the three other transgender women was unclear. In the case of Thomas, who was the only assailant charged of many, he was not heard to have uttered any of the homophobic slurs captured in the video of Booker’s assault. Context, however, if acknowledged, is clear as day. Last year Sgt. Jon Mattingly claimed in his TV interview with Michael Strahan that Breonna Taylor’s killing wasn’t racially motivated. But he and the other officers knew they were investigating a Black suspect, serving a search warrant on a Black woman’s home, in a community where Breonna Taylor had Black neighbors. The next morning, detectives kept Breonna Taylor’s mother bouncing between the scene and the hospital for hours with no information, while they knew her daughter lay dead in her apartment. It’s hard to believe all of these officers would have behaved in the manner they did in a White neighborhood. In the same way, when a woman is assaulted by multiple people, for “smack-talking” after being threatened with a weapon over a fender bender, and her assailants hurl homophobic slurs at her in the process of assaulting her (because the completely separate realms of homosexuality, gender identity, and often child molestation are all wrapped in the same package in the minds of some), it’s just as hard to believe her transgender identity had nothing to do with their motivation.
It’s also hard to believe that the unsolved deaths of Black transgender women are being investigated in the way that they should be, when so many police departments, journalists, and even attorneys and family members insist on deadnaming and misgendering in their statements and reports.
Black trans women first have to be protected in their own communities.
But there is hope. In the above-referenced video taken just weeks before her death, Muhlaysia Booker speaks to the public surrounded by supporters male and female, transgender and cisgender, from her community. If you compare that video to the one of her assault, it appears just as many made the effort to show up and support her speech, as those who spontaneously joined in mob mentality to assault her. After her death, Dallas supporters formed the non-profit Muhlaysia Booker Foundation to carry on the mission of trangender awareness and support, in and around the Black community. Steered by an all-Black board, they strive to provide housing, advocacy, counseling, and employment resources, among other services, to transgender women.
Transphobia does, of course, also extend to transgender men, who are often left out of the picture outsiders have of the trans community. It seems that transgender women are just seen as more of a threat to patriarchal society, where women have historically been treated as property, to which men are entitled.
Which begs the question: if a Black transgender woman loses value in a man’s mind because of what is or isn’t between her legs, how does that man really feel about Black women?
My sisters and I, no matter which package we came in, still have a long way to go.