Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a black trans woman leaves her house — maybe for a party, maybe for work. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. She’s wearing her favourite dress; she feels great.
She never comes back.
In 2015 there were over 20 murders in the American TWoC community (a list of all the trans dead in 2015 up to November can be found here); Laverne Cox called it a “state of emergency” and it is a record-breaking year for the number of trans people dead.
This is the other side of the transgender tipping point, the side of trans visibility often seen but rarely discussed: we are dying. We are being murdered.
When the point tips the wrong way, it’s our lives at stake. It’s not the cis people who alternately celebrate us when we’re cisnormative and revile us when we’re accurately trans. It’s not the cis lawmakers who set up laws stigmatising our genders and ourselves. It’s not the cis creators who depict us as mere objects of evil, subjected to the whims of devils.
It’s us. It’s the trans people who are just trying to live as they are. It’s the trans lawmakers who find themselves in a sea of cis, battling for our rights. It’s the trans creators who frantically try and depict how they feel, an antidote to the Ace Venturas of the world.
It is not a quarter into the year and already a TWoC is dead. Monica Loera, a latina trans woman, was murdered by a john.
And now she is gone.
There’s a legal defence for when you kill a trans woman — it’s called the “trans panic” defence. It happens when you discover a woman you are about to have sex with is transgender. This, according to the logic of the defendant, is so repulsive that the only option left is to kill the woman you were, one second ago, attracted to.
This defence was used after the murder of Gwen Araujo. Four men forcibly touched her genitals and discovered she had a penis. Upon this discovery, they became so incensed that they decided they had to subject her to hours of torture, ending in her murder.
The defence worked. Two of the four murderers were charged with second-degree murder; they can be released in 2018. The other two were charged with manslaughter; they are both already out.
The institutionalised murder of trans women is based on the dehumanisation of trans women. There are so many tropes we are seen as in popular culture, but not one of those is “human”. We are pure evil, sex objects, deceiving, and now we are becoming the saint. These depictions are so off-base that we might as well not exist in the eyes of cis people. When they do meet us, they see us as inhuman.
In real life, we are treated just as badly. It is illegal for trans people to enter the bathroom of their gender in South Dakota. Courts may terminate a transgender parent’s visitation rights as their being transgender may have a “sociopathic influence” upon the child. There is no right to gender-affirming surgery or hormones under many insurance policies. Trans people can be imprisoned for self-defence. Hate crime protection for gender identity doesn’t exist. The FDA identifies trans genitals as anomalous.
We are murdered because of this — we are murdered because we can’t fight back, both literally and metaphorically. We are murdered because of every cis person who doesn’t stand up and help us. We are murdered because of the cisheteropatriachal systems that work to keep us downtrodden.
Trans murder is written into the core of Western society. We will never be able to move past it until we can move past the conventions of kyriarchal culture and into something new. Sometimes, I think we’re moving towards a new set of values. Other times I’m sure we’re not. But I know we can.
