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Melissa Harris-Perry: The troubling truth is that LGBTQ people in the US are nearly four times more likely to experience violence than their straight and cisgender counterparts and trans folk are particularly vulnerable.
2021 was the deadliest year for transgender and gender non-conforming people since the human rights campaign began keeping count in 2013. Data tracking on violent crimes against transgender people are almost certainly an undercount. There's no central reporting database and police often misidentify victims. Now a new investigation from Insider has assembled the most comprehensive database of transgender homicides to date.
Reporters found that over the last five years, at least 175 trans people were killed throughout the US. Of those cases, only 28 resulted in murder convictions. 59 remain unsolved, and this violence disproportionately affects Black trans women. Diamond Styles is an editorial consultant on this investigative project and is executive director of Black Trans Women Inc, a nonprofit that serves and is led by Black trans women. Diamond talked to me about the arduous process of collecting these data.
Diamond Styles: Oh gosh. It is a comb through of all the cases that have been bubbling up since 2017 when it comes to trans violence. We had to talk to families. We had to sue to get court case files. We had to spend hours on hold with police departments. It just was an ordeal to get this information, but I'm glad that somebody invested the time and labor to be able to do it because we need this information.
Melissa: Your point about police departments, I've had this conversation in a couple of different spaces, but I'm still always astonished by how little centralized data there are from American policing. It's actually hard to find all kinds of information from the police.
Diamond: Absolutely. Their negligence and indifference when it comes to us as a group, we see this in many other demographics, but particularly trans women. The silence and the people allowing them to actually be negligent, and indifference in our cases is very glaring in this database.
Melissa: Even in terms of making a determination. So often we see, even for example in news, in local news media you'll see or hear dead naming inaccurate use of pronouns. I'm wondering about how that also then makes it difficult to even determine that it was a trans person who was killed?
Diamond: Absolutely. That is something that we grapple with in many cases. We had cases where it was a gay man dressed up just for sexual kicks. We had cases where it was a person that was just getting to affirm their identity with their friends, but not necessarily out to their parents. We couldn't decide on whether it was, but they hadn't had any surgeries or anything like that. All these stereotypical markers that would say, "This is a trans person." We know that gender identity is a little bit more fluid than that. We definitely grapple with that. How we made the decision is based on evidence in how they presented on the internet, how they presented to their friends. When they were talking about themselves to other people. That's what we determined.
Melissa: I want you to walk us through some of these data. It's The Takeaway. What are the key takeaways that you think people need to know from these data?
Diamond: First and foremost, understand that this is a data that is a glimpse into the crooked room, as you will call in sister citizen. Our matrix of domination, our simultaneity of oppression. All the things that Black feminists have laid out in the past 100 years for us to understand, like it is a complicated set of fatal conditions that lead to us being more susceptible to harm, that also leads to us contorting ourselves to survive. When we look at the data, what we see is that literally it is dominated by dark skin Black trans women being murdered. If you look at the pictures, it is a glaring picture that those are the people that this burden lays on.
Melissa: Wait, pause. I don't want anybody to miss that because we moved from this broad category, trans folk, to trans women, to Black trans women, to brown and dark skin Black trans women. When you talk about a matrix of vulnerability, of hate as my colleague Ann Marie Hancock would say, disgust that we have about some bodies, some persons that description, that vulnerability that is breathtaking.
Diamond: It creates this system, this system of barrier that some people are using as buzz words in the movement. For us, it cuts us off from the basic needs of housing. It cuts us off from the basic needs of healthcare. Our ability to make a living wage, even our ability to love and be intimate was something that we all usually look for. It just makes us vulnerable.
Melissa: Who kills dark skin, Black trans women?
Diamond: This is also a complicated answer. The direct answer is Black men. But, as we know, that's a proximity thing. Whoever is harmed, usually criminally harm is usually harmed by people in their community. What I want to add is when we add the shame and isolation of men when it comes to being intimately involved with trans women that patriarchal rule sets up to the culture of rape and violence against all women, but especially Black women. This database shows the results of that, the intricacies of how a guy can get to a point and say, "I don't want this to come out because it is going to harm my reputation, so I'm going to kill her."
We've seen that so many times in this data, in these cases. How they can kill this person and then use the police and use the imbalance of the justice system to have a trans panic defense and win and get off. Even in the justice system, when the victim is a white trans person you have a higher rate of conviction than if it the victim is a Black trans person. All of these intricate things that just show you that the bigger culture, the unfairness in the bigger culture around patriarchy around racism reflects just even more intensely in our culture.
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Melissa: Let's take a quick break right here, but we'll be back with more of my conversation with Diamond Styles. You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we're continuing our conversation with Diamond Styles, executive director of Black Trans Women Inc, about insiders investigative project that assembled the most comprehensive database of transgender homicides to date.
Diamond: The vitriol in our current national culture of politics, it's clear that there is a war waging on trans people. To me, it feels like we're just being used as dog whistles to rally people's base. It's not even that effective because we are not getting a particularly high voter rate, but all we see is a particularly high set of bills being passed that are targeting mostly trans people. We're seeing these things happening on a public stage that reflects in the numbers of how many of us is getting killed. I think first we have to start there. We have to mind how we are talking about trans people on the national stage, but also on our intercommunity level.
We have to mind how we are showing up for trans people. We have to give them actual survival mechanisms for us to survive those barriers. That stops us from housing, that stops us from getting healthcare, that stops us from being loved freely. How are you showing up in your own system of power, where you do have power? No, you don't have to be some big politician. Where you hold power, create a space that is not transphobic, that is inclusive, that we can feel safe. That's even from within your home, your work, your church, your school or wherever. How are you making them feel safe and giving them actual, tangible means to survive?
Melissa: We've talked a lot about the data, about the systems, the structures, about what's possible. I wonder if, as we go, if there's a story, a name, a person that you want to lift up in this moment so that people don't become just numbers? The data is so critical, but also behind each data point, real person.
Diamond: I want to lift up Malaysia Booker, who was murdered in Dallas, who was such an integral part of the Texas trans community. She had a complicated relationship with her mother, but they loved each other. She had a complicated relationship with her father, but they loved each other. Her queerness exacerbated these things. Somebody took her life, some guy. A month before she was murdered, she was attacked by a group of cis men for a fender bender, a simple bump to the back of their car, and it turned into six guys beating her up so much so that six cis women had to drag her to safety, and this was a viral video. It showed the violence and she survived it and a month later she was murdered.
I think this is a perfect example of how our oppression is interconnected. If they'll do it to us, they'll do it to you. We are all collectively in this space where our rights are being attacked and we have to have agency over our lives. We have to have agency over our bodies. We have to be in this together because we can't be stuck in our silos. Malaysia Booker, she's the one who really, really brought it home for me. Everything around her scenario.
Melissa: Malaysia Booker, say her name. Diamond Styles is an editorial consultant on Insider's transgender Violence Investigation Project and is executive director of Black Trans Women Incorporated. Thank you for joining us, Diamond.
Diamond: Thank you for having me.
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