This Pride Season: Black Trans Women are (Still) Dying
By Kai Breaux, Organizer, Planned Parenthood of New York City
Muhlaysia Booker, 23 (left) and Tamika Washington, 40 (right)
The Pride that we celebrate today originated from the infamous Stonewall Riots. The Stonewall Inn, still in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was home to groups of queer and transgender folks normally prohibited from any other establishment. Bars that served queer and gender non-conforming customers faced denial of liquor licenses, so police regularly raided bars that welcomed these communities.
On June 28, 1969, the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, asking customers for ID and arresting them if they could not provide adequate identification. For trans and gender non-conforming bar goers whose sex on their IDs seemed incompatible with their gendered presentation, police automatically condemned them for identity theft or sodomy. Officers then forced these folks to strip and reveal their sex assigned at birth, only to arrest them if their genitals seemed to contradict their gender presentation.
Police systematically disregarded the fact that gender and genitals do not go hand in hand, and many people continue to disregard this fact.
The graphic below, the Gender Unicorn, can help us better understand the spectrum of masculinities and femininities in the western world.
via Trans Student Educational Resources
The exploitative physical, sexual and psychological assault of people who aren’t heterosexual cisgender men or cisgender women is rooted in the gender-sex binary. The gender-sex binary is the social construct that people born with penises must embrace hyper-masculinity and adopt the category ‘man’, while people born with vulvas must embrace hyper-femininity and adopt the category ‘woman.’ It is safe to say that the vast majority of people born in the West are marked with a binary gender identity before they are even born.
The gender-sex binary is oppressive to queer, trans and gender non-conforming people, and those who are not white are pushed even further to the margin.
From the beginning of colonialism, to the Stonewall Riots, to present day — transgender people and Black people face denial of their right to be recognized as fully human within this system.
When the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, queer folks stood their ground. In response to this violent exploitation of power rooted in the fear of non-normativity, they threw coins and broken bottles at officers and a riot quickly ensued. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transfeminine drag queen, and Sylvia Rivera, a transfeminine Latina, have gone down in history as playing a primary role in these riots and in New York City’s gay liberation movement. In Rivera’s honor, Dean Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization that primarily provides legal services to marginalized LGBTQI+ folks of color.
If these women, and many more, were key in LGBTQI+ liberation, why do Pride campaigns and events today center privileged, white, gay cisgender men?
Why is the life expectancy of Black and brown trans women in the U.S. just 35 years old?
Why were five Black transgender women brutally murdered in the few short months of 2019?
On May 18th, a Black transgender woman named Muhlaysia Booker was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas at only 23 years old. According to her Facebook page, Muhalysia worked as an entertainer and was a student at Louisiana State University. In April of 2019, Muhlaysia was violently beaten on video by a cisgender Black man while others egged on the assault. This video went viral on social media. She attended a rally the week after her assault to highlight the trend of violence women like her consistently face.
Michelle “Tamika” Washington, 40, another Black transgender woman, was killed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the day after Muhlaysia’s murder. According to her Facebook page, Tamika was a student who studied nursing at the Community College of Philadelphia.
The reality is that Black and brown trans people, especially transgender women, face the highest rates of murder in the United States today. The world watched while Muhlaysia’s life was threatened, and we failed to protect her. Due to misgendering in police reports and unreported murders, there are likely several others who were lynched this year at the hands of hatred and bigotry. And yet, they are rarely given the proper light during the month of June.
This Pride season, I ask you to honor those who led the queer liberation movement and uplift those without access to care and safety. Have conversations with your families and friends, humanize those at the margin, and donate directly to those asking for help. Help Black trans women survive. Pay for their transportation, donate to their education, and offer items that contribute to the means of survival. Much of this can be done by donating to and sharing their online fundraisers, directly buying art or clothes, and connecting them with childcare, health care and job opportunities.
As you celebrate Pride this month, revisit the reasons Pride began, honor those we have lost, and make a pledge to uplift the most marginalized.
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