The Charges: She's Black---And Trans

So what is life like for a black trans woman?

The sad tale of Meagan Taylor might tell us more--and worse--than most people could have imagined.

She checked into a Des Moines, Iowa hotel room with a friend who is also transgendered. The staff were "acting really funny" around them, she said.  Then the police showed up at their hotel room.

Now she's sitting in a cell of the Polk County Jail Medical Unit while officials try to figure out what to do with her.  Her bond is set at $2000.  Were she a Polk County resident, she could pay a tenth of that.  But, being from out-of-state, she would need someone local to co-sign, and she doesn't know a soul in Iowa.  She doesn't even have a lawyer.  All of this means that Taylor could be in that cell for months.

So what, exactly, is Meagan charged with?  Well, the hotel clerk who called the cops described "two males dressed as females", with the implication that they were prostitutes.  The cops could find no evidence of that.   They did, however, find a bottle of spironolactone hydrochloride.  in an unmarked bottle in her purse.  I used to take that same drug with estrogen tablets before U had my surgery but, apparently, the cops didn't believe her when she told them it's part of her hormone therapy.   So, she was charged with having a prescription drug without a prescription.

And, to be fair, she did give a false name and Missouri ID.  It’s not clear as to how she got that ID, but it’s hard to understand why that should have led to a charge of “malicious prosecution”, an aggravated misdemeanor.
While arresting her, a police officer ran a check and found she had an outstanding probation violation in her home state of Illinois: When she was 17, she was charged with credit card fraud. She says she did her time for that but admits she still owes $500 in fines.

All right.  You might say that Meagan Taylor is no angel.  But who among us is?  And young trans people often do, out of desperation, the sorts of things (like credit card fraud and using fake IDs) other young people do out of stupidity or arrogance. 

I don’t think most people would want to keep any young person locked up for such offenses.  Incarcerating such people rarely does them any good and costs a lot of money.  So why do Polk County officials see fit to keep Meagan Taylor, a low-level nonviolent offender, behind bars?

Maybe He's A Cop In Ohio

Dominick used to talk about becoming a cop.   He was about as suited for that work as I am to be an accountant.  I always suspected that his wish had something to do with being bullied as a kid:  As a cop, he would've had a weapon and the authority to inflict on others what was inflicted on him.  

Maybe he realized that dream after all, though not in New York.  

In Lakewood, Ohio, a transgender woman was arrested for shoplifting. During her questioning, an officer played Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like A Lady."

Hmm...When I ended my relationship with Dominick, he called every day and played that song.  When I didn't pick up his call, he left the song on my voice mail.  In doing that, of course, he confirmed one of the reasons why I broke it off:  his immaturity.  And he revealed what I always suspected to be his real attitude about me, and trans people.

Everyone told me to ignore him.  I did, but he escalated his harassment for the next two years:  The dumb jokes and slurs turned into spreading false rumors about me and threatening that he would make my life so miserable that a refrigerator box would seem like the Waldorf-Astoria.

Well, if he's in Ohio or someplace else, I should count my blessings--but pity the next trans person who crosses his path.

Don't Talk To Me About "Bulding Bridges" With The Police

Now that thug, I mean NYPD Officer,Daniel Pantaleo got away with murder, I mean was acquitted by a grand jury, I don't want to hear anything more about improving the transgender (or lesbian or gay or any other) community's relations with police.  It's simply not possible. 

So you think I'm being extremist and incendiary.  Well a report from Al-Jezeera---Yes, Al-Jazeera--provides confirmation of something I've been saying for years:  The cops profile trans people.  I'm sure the NYPD has a file on me as I write this.  And I'm sure they put something in it that said I was complicit in the abuse I reported to them two years ago, or at the time I was stopped-and-frisked.


Andrea Ritchie, an attorney specializing in police misconduct says, "I think most people are familiar with racial profiling.  But I think people are less familiar with how gender is really central to policing in the United States."   It's based, she elaborates, on expectations of "how women are supposed to look, how men are supposed to look, how women are supposed to act and how men are supposed to look".  

When people don't conform to those expectations, the police "often read that as disorder and perceive that person as already disorderly, already suspicious and already prone to violence," she says.

In other words, cops expect us to be criminals.  And, as I discovered, they simply can't deal with it when they realize one of us isn't.  

What exacerbates the gender profiling is that poverty and homelessness are considered criminal acts, rather than states into which too many of trans people fall because of bigotry or because they ran away from home rather than endure more beatings and other abuse from classmates and family members and thus didn't get the education or skills necessary for the workplace.

Sometimes simply being in the path of the cops means that you will get harassed, arrested, beaten or worse.  As Dean Spade, an attorney and one of the founders of the Sylvia Rivera Law Projects put it, being trans means "you're more likely to be poor and on the street, which puts you in the path of police."

A black man I know was explaining to me that he learned, at an early age, that if he's pulled over, he should turn on the light inside the car and put his hands on the steering wheel--and make sure his license is on the dashboard.  "The light is so they can see that no one is in the back seat," he explained "and that my hands are on the dashboard.  And the license is where they can see it, so they don't get anxious about me reaching into the glove compartment."

He insists that such actions are necessary to ensure that worse things don't happen.  But law-abiding young black men have been doing such things for a long time, and it seems that the police only continue and amplify their harassment.  And he, whether he realizes it or not, has internalized the notion that he is a criminal until he proves himself otherwise.

I don't want to see things come to that for trans people.  If I am not doing anything criminal or even merely offensive,I should be left alone.  And if I am being victimized, I should be helped. My expereinces with the police have shown me that they seem to think otherwise and that, if anything, they are turning the fact that I do, mostly, what most people do every day and the fact that I went to them for help as reasons why I am a potential criminal.  I cannot count such people as allies, as people with whom I--or any LGBT person--should cooperate.

Eric Garner's Killer Not Indicted; Why I Am Upset But Not Surprised

As you've probably heard by now, a grand jury in Staten Island decided not indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

Almost anyone who's seen the video of the incident can't understand how the jury came to such a conclusion.  If you know anything about Staten Island, it's the most suburban of New York City's boroughs. Among the island's 472,621 residents (out of 8.406 million in all of New York City) are many NYPD officers. Even if none were uniformed men or women, there was probably more sympathy for the police in that jury than there would be in a group of jurors in, say, the Bronx.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the middle-class and affluent white residents, whether or not they are members of the NYPD, come into little or no contact with the island's black and Hispanic residents, almost all of whom live in a couple of neighborhoods between the Bayonne Bridge and the former Naval Station in Stapleton.  Standards of political correctness seem to fall precipitously as one disembarks from the Ferry in St. George or descends from the arc of the Bayonne, Verrazano or Goethals Bridge. 


To put it bluntly, white residents do not see non-whites as human being; they see people of color as a plague that, if unchecked, will spread across their island.  The people of color, penned up in the projects, see police officers as members of an occupying army employed, commanded--and, to a large degree, staffed by whites, and therefore do not trust them.

Given my own experience with the police, I can understand that distrust very, very well.  Having been harassed and bullied by cops on the street and in a precinct house (the latter when I went to report the abuse I was experiencing from Dominick), I know that the men (and, sadly, women) in uniform will not do anything to ensure my safety, let alone my rights.  I know that none would hesitate to use force against me, whether or not I violated any laws, never mind whether I'm threat to anyone's safety.  

In brief, I cannot see the police as part of a system that defends or ensures justice--at least not for me.  They are little more than the bodyguards of the wealthy and powerful, the bouncers hired to push me out of sight whether or not I was intruding or in anyone's way.  In such a system, I and other trans people are always in danger, whether or not we "pass".  Being in danger destroys your ability to trust, especially those who are entrusted with force that can be turned against you for no reason.

Department of Justice To Train Police To Work With Transgender People

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I had to go to my local precinct--the 114th in Astoria, Queens, New York--three times before they would even take a complaint from me regarding the harassment and bullying I experienced from Dominick.

Simply being brushed off, as I was the first time, was bad enough. But the second time nearly pushed me over the edge: two out-of-uniform officers harassed me on their way out of the gym, after a workout.  They made air-smooches, asked me (in a mocking yet menacing way) whether I wanted to "take a ride" with them and, finally, threatened me if I didn't respond to them.  The desk sergeant sat only a few feet away and watched it unfold but claimed to see nothing.  Then, as I was unlocking my bike from a parking meter on the next block from the station, two officers barged in front of me.

"You're not supposed to park there!," one of them bellowed. "This spot's only for officers."

"I'm sorry, I didn't see a sign..."

"Just shut up and go, " the other one yelled. "And if you know what's good for you, you won't come back."

As it was dark and everything happened so quickly, I didn't see the officers badges--or, indeed, whether they were not wearing them or had covered the numbers on them.  The cops who harassed me on their way out of the precinct gym didn't have their badges.

That came about seven years after I'd been stopped and frisked by two men who might or might not have been cops (They were in an unmarked van.) as I was riding my bike home from work on a hot day.

I don't know whether the stop-and-frisk incident had to do with my being trans:  They claimed I was in the projects (which I wasn't, but "so what" if I were) and demanded to know what I was doing there. But I have little doubt that what happened during my second visit to the 114th had to do with my identity if for no other  reason that I mentioned that fact about myself in all of my visits, as Dominick was using it to impute all of the old sterotypes to, in order to spread false rumors about, me.

As you can imagine, I've had no love (not that I had much before), and lost whatever respect I had for, the police until recently.  The only reason why I am now willing to even entertain the idea of revising my opinion of them is that I've met a detective in my church who is nothing like I expected any officer to be.  I think she really means it when she expresses her sorrow over my experience.

We need more like her.  Even for those who, like her, became cops because they wanted "to help people" or "be a positive force in the community", understanding of people whose gender or sexual identities might be different from their own are developed.  (The same is true of most people, I believe.)  

That is why I am glad to see that the Department of Justice has just launched a program to train local police departments to better respond to transgender people.  It is, if nothing else, a good first step:  a recognition of a need. 

Deputy Attorney General James Cole understands that one result of mistreatment is that too many of us simply don't report harassments, assaults or other violations against us.  As a matter of fact, even after that third visit to the 114th, when an officer finally took a statement from me, I vowed to never again report any crime, against myself or anyone else, to the police.  Maybe, just maybe, I'll reconsider.

What Happened To Nizah Morris?

Back in the days of the Civil Rights movement, it was not uncommon--especially in places like Alabama and Georgia--for police officers to offer "courtesy" rides to African-Americans who "appeared" to be "inebriated" or who "seemed" to be in "distress."

That would sound benevolent had some of said African-Americans not mysteriously died while in custody, or simply disappeared.  

Apparently, similar things still happen, and not only to African-Americans, and not only in the Deep South.

Three days before Christmas in 2002, transgender woman Nizah Morris died in a Philadelphia hospital from a subdural hematoma, the result of traumatic blows to her head.

Morris had been out drinking when a concerned bar patron called an ambulance for her.  She turned down the opportunity to go to the emergency room and instead accepted a courtesy ride from Philadelphia police officer Elizabeth Skala.     

Morris never made it home.  Skala claims that Morris asked her to drop her off at a corner two minutes away from the bar where she'd been drinking--but 45 minutes from her apartment.  A minute after Skala left her at the corner of Chancellor and South Juniper Streets, a motorist (according to his testimony) found Morris, naked from the waist up and bleeding from her head, lying on the street. 

Now, here's where things get interesting. 

 Another witness reports having seen her body on the street fifteen minutes later and a police officer pulling a jacket over her face as her body was loaded into the ambulance.  The ambulance attendants said they loaded her body at the same time--3:30 a.m.--the first witness (the motorist) claims to have found it.  The officer on the scene says the ambulance didn't depart until 3:45.

If these accounts are even remotely accurate, why was there such a delay in embarking for the hospital?  And why did the officer pull the jacket over Morris's face as if she were already dead?  Finally, why wasn't the police report released until 2011--nearly a decade after Ms. Morris' death?  And why did it take a freedom-of-information request from Philadelphia Gay News to make that document see the light of day?

Are you surprised to learn that her family thinks the police murdered her?  

I agree with them.  Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like.  But I've found that people who so label other people have not--or don't want to admit that they have--been subjected to abuses of power.  I know:  I was once such a person.  

Whether I'm proved right or wrong, I hope that the true story of Nizah Morris's death is disclosed, and that her family finds the peace she didn't have in those last moments of her life.

(Thanks, again, to Kelli Busey of Planetransgender.)

 

The Current State Of Transgender Health Care

The folks at Fenway Health have given us a useful infographic that provides disturbing--though, sadly, not surprising--information about the state of transgender health care.

One of the most startling facts it presents is that a transgender person is more than four times as likely as anyone else to be HIV-infected, while a black trans person is more than six times as likely.

One of the facts that most resonated with me is this : 62 percent of trans people have experienced depression.  And, among the 41 percent who have attempted suicide are several trans people I know, including two who took their lives over their gender identity issues.

Finally, I am among the 25 percent who have been harassed by the police and 29 percent who have received disrespectful treatment in health care settings.

And I'm one of the lucky ones.