Trans Lives Matter

The other day, MTV news ran a story, written by Katie Speller entitled, 6 Transgender Women Have Been Murdered in 2015 And No One Is Talking About It".

The title says it all.  I wrote about two of them--Penny Proud and Taja DeJesus--in this blog. They were the two I heard about.  If I do say so myself, I follow the news of crimes against transgender people a bit more closely than the average person.  So, even though I'd only heard of two out of the six victims, that's still two more than 99.9 percent of other people knew about.

I will follow the lead of MTV news and post the photos of each of the victims.  Remember:  They are all someone's sister, daughter, granddaughter, niece, friend and possibly girlfriend.

Here is Ty Underwood, who was shot to death in North Tyler, Texas on 26 January:


 

Five days later, on the 31st, Yazmin Vash Payne was fatally stabbed in Los Angeles:


 

The following day, the month of February began with Taja DeJesus being stabbed to death in a San Francisco stairwell:


 
 

On the 10th of this month, Penny Proud was shot to death in New Orleans:

 
 

Five days later--the day after Valentine's Day--Kristina Gomez Reinwald was found dead in her Miami home.  Originally her death was ruled a suicide, but it is now being investigated as a homicide:

 

Then, on the 17th, Lamia Beard was shot to death in Norfolk, VA.  As happens too often, the local media misidentified her gender.

 

Lamia's death made me think of the slogan "Black Lives Matter".  It's so good and righteous that we should appropriate it:  Trans Lives Matter.

Murdered Trans Women Of Color Remembered On Valentine's Day

Depending on which sources you trust, a transgender person is anywhere from 10 to 116 times as likely to be murdered as a typical person in the US.

I don't know how likely the 116 figure is.  But I would bet that 10 times is a low number, given that crimes against transgender people are disproportionately unreported.

As if those numbers aren't bad enough, a trans woman of color is (again, depending on who you believe) anywhere from twice to twelve times as likely to be murdered as any other trans person.

One reason for the risks trans women of color face is that, in addition to bearing the double stigma of falling outside accepted gender norms and being of the "wrong" race, they disproportionately live in high-crime areas such as impoverished urban neighborhoods and parts of the South where there is easy access to guns.

Parts of cities like St. Louis and New Orleans happen to fit into both categories.  So it's unsurprising (though still tragic) that Penny Proud, a black transgender woman, was found shot to death early Tuesday morning in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.

Thus, it's heartening to see that yesterday, Valentine's Day, a group of people gathered in the Central West End of St. Louis to honor transgender women of color and denounce the violence against them.

Even with greater public acceptance of transgender people, the violence against us continues and, for trans women of color, seems to be escalating.  In 2014, thirteen transgenders were murdered in the US.  In the first six weeks of 2015, five transgender women of color have already been killed in this country.

Some might argue that the numbers are higher because more crimes are being reported, or because more of the victims are identified as transgender and not solely by their assigned-at-birth gender, as has been the tradition.  Even if that is the case, though, we are being disproportionately attacked and killed, and it's even worse for trans women of color.