That evening, Teish’s friend Alissa Davis invited her to a party across town. Alissa had said she was pregnant and didn’t want the child. She told Teish that she could have it, and Teish was hoping that this plan would work out; she’d already asked Roxanne to help her raise the baby. When Teish got the invitation, she and her brother, Mark, jumped in their father’s van and headed over. They didn’t know many people at the party. A young man named Dwight DeLee, who had attended school with Teish and Mark, approached the van, saying, “We don’t want faggots here.” DeLee shot Mark and Teish point-blank as they sat in the van. Mark took a bullet to his shoulder; Teish’s bullet went into her chest, then hit the aorta.
“We just skated off,” Mark explained to me. “Lateisha’s like, her chest hurt, chest hurt. She was like, ‘I love you,’ then saying to bring her back home, don’t take her to the hospital.” When the van drove up, Albert was on the porch, and Mark said, “Moses been shot.” Albert ran toward the street, calling 911 as he went. He pulled back Teish’s shirt, saw no exit wound, and knew it was bad. “She looked at me, smiled,” he said. “I knew she wasn’t going to make it.” Roxanne came running out. “The look she gave me was ‘I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m going,’” Roxanne said.
Dante got the call at work. We were talking almost a year after it happened, but Dante took his large head in his hands, and his shoulders bowed. “I seen her that day,” he said, “but I didn’t get to say good-bye. When they say it gets easier, that’s a lie.” Albert put an arm around him. Dante picked up his head. “She was an openhearted person,” he said. “She loved who she was. She was who she was.” Dante remains close to Albert and Roxanne. “That’s forever,” Dante said. “She would want to see me bettering myself. Working, going to school. She wouldn’t want to see me feeling the way I really feel. Someone can shoot me, stab me. I don’t care. I mean, I’d be up there with her in heaven. I’d be able to see her again.” Albert held out his rough hands as though there were something in them and said, “And I still have the money I was saving for her operation.”
DeLee’s murder trial was emotionally devastating for everyone. While the rough facts of the case were clear, first-person accounts varied, with witnesses contradicting each other, some recanting under what appeared to be pressure from peers. “There were witnesses who I thought were going to have heart attacks, they were under so much strain and stress,” said Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, who worked on the trial. Because DeLee’s intent to kill could not be proved, he was found guilty of manslaughter in the first degree rather than murder, but it was manslaughter as a hate crime and he received a twenty-five-year sentence, the maximum for manslaughter. It was the second conviction in the country and the first in New York State to treat the murder of a transgender person as a hate crime.
Months later, the local trans kids were still coming around to see Albert and Roxanne; during the day I spent in Syracuse, two dropped by in a few hours. Albert said, “I’m going to help other kids. Her life maybe was in vain; at least her death won’t go in vain.” In the corner of their modest living room stood a shrine with Teish’s ashes in an urn inscribed with her dates—July 4, 1986–November 14, 2008—and her favorite photo of herself, dressed in red taffeta for her sister’s wedding. Every day Roxanne lights two candles and leaves them to burn down. “She wanted to come home to die with us,” Albert said. “So she’s going to stay at home.” Roxanne said, “When I went to get the ashes, I asked, could I look at them? I wanted to see if they’d cremated her with her boots on. Because if so, there would have been some gold stuff in there. She’d have liked that.”
Shakona was pregnant when Teish was killed. She named the baby Lateisha.
• • •
Severely disabled children, autistic children, schizophrenic children, criminal children—many of these are at greater risk of death than a conventionally healthy child, but parents of trans kids are uniquely poised between two equally terrifying possibilities: if the child is not able to transition, he or she may commit suicide; if the child transitions, he or she may be killed for having done so. The murders of trans people often go unreported; even when a murder is reported, its status as a hate crime often remains unacknowledged. Since 1999, more than four hundred trans people have been murdered in the United States, and Transgender Day of Remembrance puts the rate of fatal hate crimes at more than one a month. Worldwide, a transgender person is murdered every three days.
Commentators have observed that the problem is ubiquitous. The German trans activist Carsten Balzer wrote that such murders “occur in countries with high general murder statistics, such as Brazil, Colombia or Iraq as well as in countries/states with low general murder statistics such as Australia, Germany, Portugal, New Zealand, Singapore, or Spain.” Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, wrote movingly about the murder of a transwoman in Portugal, Gisberta Salce Junior, who was gang-raped and then dumped in a well to die. Data from the first six months of 2009 indicate that about 7 percent of the trans victims murdered worldwide that year were minors. Professionals who support transition are also under attack. Norman Spack told me he had received death threats.
Looking just in the United States in the year 2011, and considering only attacks that were specifically reported as transphobic, the catalog of completed murders is alarming. Krissy Bates was stabbed to death at forty-five in Minneapolis on January 10. Tyra Trent was strangled at twenty-five in Baltimore on February 19. Marcal Camero Tye was shot and then dragged until dead at twenty-five in Forrest City, Arkansas, on March 8. Miss Nate Nate (or Née) Eugene Davis was shot at forty-four in Houston on June 13. Lashai Mclean was shot at twenty-three in Washington, DC, on July 20. Camila Guzman was stabbed repeatedly in the back and neck at thirty-eight in New York City on August 1. Gaurav Gopalan had a subarachnoid hemorrhage due to blunt-impact head trauma at thirty-five in Washington, DC, on September 10. Shelley Hilliard was decapitated, dismembered, and then burned at nineteen in Detroit on November 10. Her mother had to identify her by examining her charred torso at the medical examiner’s office.
• • •
Anne O’Hara grew up in a small town in Mississippi. Both her parents were addicts, and Anne stole food to feed her sister and brother. “We were dirty,” she recalled. “People didn’t talk to us.” The first person on either side of her family to finish high school, Anne graduated as class salutatorian, then attended Mississippi State University in Starkville. She lived in her car for a year, working at Subway and washing in their bathroom; it took her eight years to get through college, but she made it. She earned a certificate in special education. Anne moved back home, found a job at a school just across the border in Tennessee, and married Clay, a man she’d know all her life who worked in a local plastics factory. When she showed me pictures of their house, she said, “It doesn’t look like a lot, but my daddy built it with his own hands, and he built it just for me.” Anne set out to change how special education was delivered in rural Tennessee. By the end of a decade, she had succeeded in mainstreaming all of her students from second to fourth grade for science and social studies; some were being invited to parties by nondisabled students.
Anne and Clay, unable to conceive, signed up to adopt. On the day Anne’s father died, three boys unknown to Anne were taken into state custody several hundred miles away. Marshall Camacho, Glenn Stevens, and Kerry Adahy had lived with their mother until she was arrested for child abuse. The police had found the children—then age three, four, and five—drugged with their mother’s antipsychotics, which she used to sedate them rather than herself; she kept them tied to a pole and fed them nothing but cereal. The state placed the boys with a foster family and enrolled Marshall in the school where Anne taught. “I had Marshall in my classroom for six weeks before he showed his first sign of promise,” Anne said. “He told me the name of a letter and its sound, so we threw a popcorn-and-Coke party.” A week after the po
pcorn, Marshall named three letters, then came out with his first coherent sentence: “Where’s my party?” Anne assumed that while some of his problems were biological, others were the result of abuse, and she was determined to sort them out. She argued against medication until every behavior management strategy had been tried. “He went from having a fifty-five IQ and being extremely violent and not talking, to a first-grade boy who could read and write with an average IQ,” she said. “But he still had horrible moods. So he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD and is now medicated for both.”
Marshall had been in Anne’s class only a few weeks when the social worker in charge of his case told her that the three brothers were to be separated, because Marshall, half Mexican, and Kerry, half Cherokee, looked dark and wouldn’t interest white families. Anne said, “What would I need to do to keep them together?” The next day, Friday, she found out she’d need to move to Tennessee, because the foster-care system would not allow the kids to move out of state. The social worker expected Anne to balk; instead, Monday afternoon, Anne and Clay found a new house. They moved in two weeks later, were given the kids, and started adoption proceedings. “A two-year-old will grab everything and rip it in half or drop it or roll it,” Anne said. “Nothing is safe. Marshall was doing that at six, but he was angry. So it was just a matter of letting him lick and touch and drop and tear until he got all of that out of his system. It took a year. Glenn had a fascination with putting things in different holes of his body.” Kerry had a feminine manner, which was the least of Anne’s worries. “Food issues, discipline issues, hygiene issues. I just thought this was one of those. But the other stuff cleared up and this never did. So I just thought, ‘Kerry’s going to be gay,’ which was fine with me. Kerry said, ‘I have a girl voice, girl feet, girl hands. Mommy, doesn’t my smile look as pretty as a girl’s?’”
The boys hid things under their beds and mattresses. If Anne was missing fried chicken or macaroni and cheese, she would go into their room and retrieve it, but objects she would just leave alone. She noticed that Kerry was often hiding girl things, lifted from the houses of his cousins. “You can’t attack a child who’s taken something like that,” Anne said. “I’d say, ‘Oh, Alicia lost her such and such, and she would love to have it back.’ A few days later, it would be back at Alicia’s house. Kerry didn’t want to make anyone else sad; he just wanted pretty things.” The other kids at school tormented him. In second grade, he stopped doing homework. “Nothing I could do mattered,” Anne said. “About a month before the end of school last year, he was sitting on the front porch, with his little knee propped up under his chin, looking out across the field. He said, ‘I wish I was a girl.’”
Anne called several local psychologists before finding Darlene Fink in Knoxville, a transgender activist and therapist. After Darlene diagnosed Kerry with GID, Anne spent two solid days researching the subject. “Then we went to Walmart and bought clothes, purses, fake jewelry, and a Barbie doll,” Anne said. “Different colors of lip gloss. She was so excited. Then it was ‘I want to change my name.’ Her first choice was Pearl, from SpongeBob. I killed that one. So we went with Kelly.” The change was palpable. “She was the child I wanted to raise, the happy one who’s comfortable in her own skin.”
Clay was angry, and for a couple of weeks he refused Kelly’s hugs. Then he told his father, eighty years old, what was going on. Clay’s father said, “Don’t blame Kelly, or Anne, or yourself. These things happen. I saw it on TV.” Clay hugged Kelly that night. Anne’s mother, however, said not to think of bringing this child back to Mississippi, and Anne’s sister stopped speaking to her. “But it’s more complicated,” Anne said. “My sister’s had to work really hard to have respect in our town and not have people say, ‘You were that dirty, poor kid.’ Kelly could have made her a topic of gossip and ridicule.”
Anne went to tell the principal at school. “I had already talked to two teachers, and after I’d explained for half an hour, they were fine,” she said. Anne felt confident; Anne felt beloved. “In our town, people would come over for dinner; they’d invite my kids to birthday parties; I made friends with people on the block. I had a church. I really thought that we were part of the fabric of that community. Well, it turns out, I really didn’t even know what that fabric was made out of.”
The day after Anne went to the school, the phone calls began. “I didn’t recognize the voices,” Anne said. “They were going to gut her. They were going to cut off her genitals and treat her like the woman she wanted to be. They were going to snatch her from school or in a parking lot, and I would never see her again. Some of them were going to raise her up right. Some of them were going to kill her.” Anne was at a loss. “She’s eight,” Anne said. “She’s the tiniest kid in class.” Anne had never thought about the Klan much; they had a rally on the main square once a year that was like a big parade. “I thought they were just a bunch of fools who dressed up in their costumes. It turns out, they’re in charge of things.” When Anne tried to go to the school the next day, the janitor she’d known ten years wouldn’t let her in the building. Her pediatrician asked her to see him in his office. “He had been sitting around the country-club pool, with the other people from the Baptist church. He said, ‘People are not talking about if they’re going to hurt you and Kelly. They’re planning when and how and what they’re going to use to do it. You have to put your child in a foster home somewhere else, or he’s not going to live till the next school year.’” Anne was reeling. She went home, loaded the shotgun, and slept in front of the door. “I’m getting cell phone calls from neighbors saying, ‘Anne, there are people parked in front of your house, and they’re peeking over the fence.’ Of course, they didn’t know yet. Those phone calls stopped when the gossip reached them.”
Anne met a mother online, Maureen, who said that things were better in the big Southern city where she lived. Anne decided it was as good a destination as any. She sold whatever she could online; Maureen offered to put down the deposit on a trailer for her to rent. “I let it be known I was armed,” Anne said, “and that I would kill anyone who stepped on my porch. The phone calls continued and I told them, ‘We’re no threat to you. We’re leaving.’ I put the kids in the van with as much stuff as I could and left. Everything fit except the dog.” Clay stayed behind because he needed to keep his job. A few days later, he came home to find that a crowd had disemboweled the dog and nailed its remains to a fence. “It was just a message to us not to ever come back,” Anne said. “We never will. I’ll never see the town I grew up in again. I’ll never see my mother or my sister.”
Anne began to cry as she recounted all this. Shaking slightly, she said, “I knew I was a lesbian when I was fourteen years old, and I kept that to myself for twenty-one years. I married to fit in and be wanted and keep my home and family and church and everything that was important to me. It wasn’t worth it to give all that up to be myself; I preferred to live a lie. I gave it all up in a month for Kelly. That’s how important she is. I came out to Clay two days ago.” Anne’s fear was that Clay would say she and her lesbian ways had done this to Kelly; Clay’s fear, as it turned out, was that Anne would think this had happened because he wasn’t a good father. “It boiled down to, neither of us is guilty,” Anne said. “He just said, ‘Well, that explains a lot.’ We’re better friends now than we’ve ever been.” Anne looked out the window. “It’s funny how your priorities change. I’ve got this happy little girl. All of a sudden, the house my daddy built me doesn’t matter. Don’t get me wrong. I miss it. But when she gets off that bus and you see this happy little face, you’ve got the whole world right there. I haven’t given up one thing that’s worth that.”
Daily life remains difficult. For the first week, Anne didn’t let the kids outside, in case they’d been followed, and even when we met she wouldn’t let them out of viewing distance. Teaching jobs require references, and she didn’t want anyone from her new town to be in touch with anyone from the old one, so she
couldn’t work in her field. Anne had to work with the kids on not blowing Kelly’s cover. Marshall and Glenn both complained that they didn’t know how they could keep it all a secret, and what if people asked them? So Anne said she was going to do an exercise with them. She told them all to sit together right inside the trailer door while she went outside for a few minutes. Then she walked in, flung open the door, and said, “Hi, kids. I’m Anne O’Hara, and I have a vagina.” They all ran away screaming, as she’d known they would. “No one wants to hear that,” she said. “It’s not secret. It’s private. Kelly’s anatomy is private, too.”
As long as Clay keeps his factory job, they have insurance to pay for the kids’ medications. Other than that, his salary pays for his life in Tennessee. Anne is living on the money from selling the lawn mower and the four-wheeler, and on the assistance check she receives for having adopted special-needs children. “We get about nineteen hundred dollars per month,” she said. “Living in this trailer, rent and utilities, is nine hundred dollars per month. I spend about a hundred dollars a week on groceries and about twenty-five a week on gas. We have a lot of Tuna Helper, pea soup, bagels, and yogurt. At first, I’d get up in the morning, get them ready for school, and they’d get on the bus, and I’d go to sleep. I’d get up in time to take a shower before they got home. I’d play with them until bed, do their homework, and go back to sleep. I’m awake more than I was. But I haven’t put up curtains, and I haven’t decorated anything. I don’t have the energy.”
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