Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  I asked LaLa about a case that stuck out for her, and she didn’t have to think before she told me about the murder of twenty-one-year-old fashion intern Islan Nettles, who was attacked in Harlem in August 2013. Her attacker was a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn man called James Dixon who, as he later told police, had attacked her when he realized that she was transgender because his friends had started teasing him for trying to pick up a trans woman. He knocked her to the pavement with a punch, and then hit her again as she lay on the ground. She died in a coma five days after her attack. The police made a wrongful arrest at first, then Dixon handed himself in to the police. He was eventually sentenced to just twelve years – a bargain struck for pleading guilty. The murder sparked protests across New York City, including one in January 2014 outside the New York Police Department that was attended by around a hundred people, roughly half of whom were trans women of colour like Islan. LaLa told me this was the first case she’d been involved with all the way through, from the murder to the protests, the court hearing and the convictions.

  The Nettles case was a prime example of one of the most common circumstances of these killings: a man who felt ‘tricked’. But when I tried to grasp the ‘reasons’ for these murders more broadly – although really, there was no reasoning – all I could think of was that to be trans must really offend people’s basic beliefs. A fixed and binary gender is the first thing that we experience or are given when we come into the world. It becomes something we think we know to be true. When those foundations are rocked, or when people go changing their gender, all structures start to give way and people can feel a deep-seated sense of discord and panic. It is incomprehensible to me, but this is how I tried to make sense of it.

  LaLa told me she had the same kinds of questions when she asked herself how anyone could do this. ‘Where did you learn that from, that you hate someone in that way, that you think it’s OK to attack someone simply for who they are, in the United States? It shouldn’t happen nowhere, but this is the United States, New York City, where the Stonewall riots happened,’ she exclaimed, visibly furious, but also puzzled. ‘I was attacked in the Village, where we had trans folks fighting the police in a riot that liberated the LGBT movement fifty years ago. For New York City to not have an analysis around these things, it’s really shocking to me.’

  ‘What part does Trump play?’ I asked, thinking about how the 2017 spike in hate crime coincided with the first term of his presidency.

  She tutted. ‘People say Trump did this, Trump did that, blame Trump. These things have existed, he just opened up the door as permission to be more hateful. Because as the leader of this country you have made it a clear mission of yours to show that there’s no room for LGBT folks.’

  LaLa was talking about how, under the Trump administration, federal protections for trans students had been rescinded, there had been an attempt to ban transgender people from serving in the military, the Justice Department had decided to stop applying workplace discrimination protections to trans people. On top of that, since the Republican win, sixteen states considered employing bathroom bills in 2016, after President Obama outlawed them. Later, an anti-trans bill surfaced that sought to define gender as unchangeable and based on the sex assigned at birth. Mix this government-sanctioned transphobia with a climate of top-down misogyny and racism, and you had a truly deadly concoction, one that went some way to explaining the disproportionate deaths of trans women of colour. According to the New York Times, the National Center for Health Statistics found the annual murder rate in 2017 for Americans aged 15–34 to be about one in 12,000. Mic.com found the rate to be one in 2,600 for black transgender women. The vulnerability of this group was not new, but LaLa believed Trump’s attitude towards trans people, people of colour and undocumented immigrants only served to empower those who were already transphobic, racist and xenophobic. As she put it: ‘It doesn’t empower them to say, “Let me shift my mind or how I’m thinking, because he’s the President of the United States and he agrees with me!”’

  Sadly, I told her, it had been the same in the UK after Brexit: for the first eleven months there was a 23 per cent spike on the previous year in religious and racist hate crimes, and a 147 per cent spike in homophobic hate crimes in the first three months. People who harboured racist and homophobic views had taken the outcome of the vote as an affirmation that those views were supported, and acted on them. Of course, the people affected most by this kind of bigotry were the people who were both LGBTQ+ and persons of colour.

  ‘Black women are marginalized in this country, so why would it be any different for black trans women?’ LaLa said. ‘We are looked at in such a way that is beneath everything that’s already going on in a black community: colourism and classism, living in a bad neighbourhood. I mean, you’re already combating things that come with living in a bad neighbourhood and now you wanna be black and trans in a bad neighbourhood? It’s like, why would you do that to yourself? I got an uncle that says to me, “What’s wrong with you? Why would you give up your manhood to be a woman?” I was like: “I never was a man, and if having man privilege is supposed to put me above someone, I don’t want it!”’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no education around it, or any conversations around it. It’s like . . . you just don’t do it.’

  There was a pregnant pause. I had been in LaLa’s tiny office for thirty minutes, and I had accidentally welled up twice but stopped myself crying because it would have been too self-indulgent to cry about a problem that didn’t affect me. It was a given that I had no frame of reference for experiencing transphobia or racism, and that I would never know that experience, but the conversation was, quite unexpectedly, reminding me of experiences I’d had as a woman but tried to forget, experiences that made me feel powerless: slurs, sexual harassment from strangers on dark streets at night, sexual assault by people I knew.

  The irony in all of this was that at home, 3,500 miles from where LaLa and I were sitting, a war was raging between some cisgender women and trans women. Mostly playing out in the pages of the British mainstream media, ‘feminist’ writers were penning transphobic articles for big newspapers (and they were, somehow, getting published) and self-describing feminists were taking to Twitter to say that trans women were not women, or that they posed a threat to society. The argument often made was that, if we let trans people self-determine their gender, it would allow anyone to use gendered spaces like female toilets or changing rooms, putting cis women at risk of assault. I’d never had any doubt that using trans women as the thin end of the wedge in a conversation about toxic masculinity and rape culture was dangerous; I’d written about it in newspapers, and I’d watched my trans friends dealing with the mental-health fallout of these unwarranted and vile accusations. But now, during my conversation with LaLa, it was really hitting home not just how perverse it was to suggest that the trans people we were talking about, under extreme threat of violence and living in fear, might be a threat to others, but also what an oversight it was. These British ‘feminists’ were trying to create a divide between cis women and trans women, when really the threats trans people and cis women had historically faced were the same: domestic violence, rape, murder. Every individual’s circumstances were different, sure, but we had a common enemy – violence at the hands of the patriarchy. And furthermore, when it came to seeking justice for this violence the law disadvantaged us both.

  Call a hate crime a hate crime, I thought, when I was later reading about Kedarie Johnson, the teenager killed in Iowa, and learned that the killers were not charged with a hate crime because state law only included race, religion and sexual orientation as grounds. In the case of Ally Lee Steinfeld, the trans woman killed in Missouri, the county sheriff maintained that the murder was not a hate crime, before adding that all murders are acts of hate. When a cis woman is killed just for being a woman, because her life is not so valuable, that is not classed as a hate crime either. In some countries, there is even a defence that can be made to attempt to e
xplain why you have harmed a woman or an LGBTQ+ person. In Bolivia, for example, there’s a crime called estupro, which minimizes charges for the rape of girls aged fourteen to eighteen, blaming it on carnal desire caused by seduction or deceit. Until recently, in America, the ‘gay panic’ or ‘trans panic’ defence was brought up in court to try to justify why men kill gay people or trans people, often in the context of being deceived. Around the world, crimes against LGBTQ+ people are not prosecuted, because it’s illegal or despicable to be LGBTQ+.

  When I brought up the fact that justice is rarely skewed in favour of trans people, LaLa told me about a problem she perceived: that the police often prejudge who the aggressor was. This reminded me of the case of Eisha Love and her friend Tiffany Gooden, two trans women who were filling up their car at a petrol station in Chicago, in March 2012, when men began yelling abuse at them. One of the men punched Love, so the women got into the car and tried to drive away, only to be blocked by one of the men’s cars while the other tried to prise open the women’s driver’s door. They tried to turn the car around, and in doing so, injured one of the attackers. Love and Gooden escaped, but when Love later went to the police station to file a report, she was booked for aggravated assault, which was later updated to first-degree attempted murder. She was sent to jail on an attempted-murder charge, at a men’s prison, which did not correspond with her lived gender, putting her at great physical and psychological risk. Two months after the attack, Gooden was stabbed to death and her body found in an abandoned building. She was nineteen.

  ‘We have a culture where you can do something to a trans person and there’s no recourse,’ said LaLa. ‘The convictions are rare and the turnaround is high. It’s like a granted permission [to attack trans women]. In New York there might be something, but in Arkansas, or Ohio, there’s not gonna be a conversation, it’s gonna be washed away. Islan’s case was high profile across the country because AVP made it their mission not to let people forget her, but every case is not that lucky.’

  And yet, LaLa explained that, for her, conviction was not always the answer.

  ‘Those systems cause us harm. There’s a nuance here, of this black man being convicted of something he was not taught not to commit. I’m not saying people shouldn’t go to jail, I’m not judge nor juror, but I know there has to be another nuanced way. We expect people to know right from wrong but we don’t give people the tools they need to understand. That goes for transphobia – systems were created around these biases and then we expect people in the world to understand that that is wrong? Religion is saying me being myself is wrong, political regimes are saying me being myself is wrong, your parents are transphobic, your homeboys are transphobic, so how they gonna have the nuance to understand transphobia is wrong? But then when they get convicted we put them away in the system where they’re still not gonna learn a lesson and they’re gonna be stuck in it? Because that’s the prison industrial complex, it’s real. It’s no good me throwing more of my people in the prison system, it’s about finding alternatives.’

  I asked LaLa what this alternative might look like, and she told me a story. When we are born, she said, the expectation is that we will fit into neat categories of boy or girl, male or female, which align with our sex. There is no expectation that because of biology, or DNA, or chance – whatever you want to call it – something might be there in that child or something might shift out of sync with the conceptions of what our gender should be in relation to our biology. Many parents are not prepared for this eventuality; they don’t have the ability to understand that the individual they’ve created has the agency to define themself.

  ‘Some parents might have hopes their child is going to be a basketball player, and force them to play basketball. Then what happens? They’re terrible at it!’ LaLa analogized. ‘So, you throw your child out, and what happens when your child is homeless? They get into risky behaviours, doing all kinds of things, whether it’s stealing, or other things life traumas lead them to – sex work, substance abuse, getting killed because they can’t afford it . . . it’s a cycle of pain within a system that doesn’t have anything in place to address those things.’

  I knew this cycle of pain to be true for a lot of my trans friends in the UK – some were now sober, because at one point or the other, they had experienced substance abuse problems. Many had experienced homelessness, and almost all of them had been violently attacked. I also knew that trans people in the UK and America, on the whole, earn less than cisgender people, with many trans people trapped in poverty through employment discrimination, further increasing their chances of homelessness.

  ‘My mother loved me. My mother was a pastor so it was hard for her to juggle religious things put in her head. She knew this doesn’t seem right that I should have to disown my child cause my child is trans. She couldn’t tell me I couldn’t be trans, cause that would go against what she taught me as a child, which was to be me. But she also knew that she was releasing me every day as a fifteen-year-old into a world that didn’t understand me.’

  I just looked at LaLa and she just raised her eyebrows and looked back, and we let it sit for a minute. Then she continued.

  ‘So, if we have conversations in school that might prevent someone in the future from being transphobic, if people in religious platforms stop preaching hate so much, it may help a parent not to throw their child out. Or if we say to parents when they’re having their kids, “Yes, this may be a boy or a girl,” then maybe that would help them when that moment happens. Like, stop putting gender on a child and let it be a baby. Teachers don’t wanna talk about it in schools because parents are like, “You’re pushing it on them.” You’re not pushing it on them, you’re just helping a child understand what the world is – there’s trans folks in the world, and so many people come here from small cities and they see a trans person and they’re freaked out cause that’s what they’ve been taught to hate, to stay away from. Until we have education and culture, how do we shift people’s view?’

  ‘What about visibility? Do you think having visible trans people in the media helps? Black trans women like Laverne Cox, or Janet Mock?’

  ‘It is empowering to see. They’re making their marks, they’re making a platform for some trans person to have some possibility model of what life can be, that trans person who had that dream to be an author or be an actress or actor or whatever. But it’s not enough. We have to think about expanding what visibility means. “Go to Hollywood, write a book – you’ll be OK!” But people’s access to those things is based on race and classism and possibility, and on passing. Some girls don’t aspire to pass. They want to be themselves. And everybody is not going to be able to pass – people don’t have the resources or the money to pass; surgeries are very expensive. It depends where you live too – there’s a waiting list for these affirming surgeries. And surgeries don’t define whether you’re trans or not, that’s for you to define for yourself. So when we see these trans celebrities we expect other trans folks to emulate these things – it sets a precedent.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ I said quietly.

  ‘I think the range and the complexities of what’s visible and who is visible and who can have a voice, I think that dynamic needs to change. All of us don’t want to be an actress or on a magazine. Some of us just want to be a doctor. I know a trans girl who’s a firefighter. I know trans people who are parents. Who have had children, or adopted children. Trans folks who are scholars. I knew a trans girl who was like the trans Martha Stewart! She wants to have a cooking show. She cooks down! Some of us just want to be an everyday girl. Some of us just want to be a soccer mom. And now we have all these beautiful trans politicians. This is what we need – we need to expand what we see trans folks are because right now it’s one-dimensional. We have to think about expanding visibility so people can think about trans folks as humanized, the people you walk past every single day. Because right now they see us in Hollywood, we’re modelling, we’re successful book writer
s, but then you have the other path – where we’re dying, or you hear on the news that there was a sex worker sting, or scandals are happening like we’re tricking people, celebrity exposure stories. That’s what the media focuses on. But we need to show our community as an array of things. We need more contextual stories beyond what’s between our legs, and the surgeries and the pain. Yes, there’s a lot of pain. But there are a lot of joyful stories too.’

  As I left LaLa’s office, I thought about something my friend Kai-Isaiah Jamal, a black trans man, a spoken word poet and activist, once wrote that stuck with me. He said one of the problems with transphobia was that, in a lot of people’s minds, trans people were more idea than human, an abstract identity. It was easy to understand why this might be; if you were trans and living in fear of the violence that LaLa talked about, you might not be feeling too social. People like LaLa were out there breaking the cycle, but were enough people who were not trans doing their bit?

  At one point, when I was talking to LaLa, she told me that the final thing we needed to improve the lives of trans people – on top of justice, education and better visibility – was a stark conversation about alliances within the LGBTQ+ community itself. People wore the word ‘ally’ like a badge, she said. ‘“I’m not a racist! I have black friends, I’m an ally!” What does being an ally actually mean? Is it just to say you’re an ally? If you see transphobic things happening what are you gonna do? What is your role? If you see someone being attacked are you gonna step in and help or are you gonna get your phone and record for retweets? If you’re in your job, in a position of power, what are you doing to dismantle transphobia? Or in your school systems and your neighbourhoods?’ she asked, before implicating herself. She told me that she was having to unlearn the racism and white supremacy that was passed down through generations of black women in her family to her. She told me that when she moved to New York, she didn’t know what ‘non-binary’ meant; she had to do her research and learn it. She told me that she had to check her relatively small amount of privilege every single day.