Be alert, Houston
Across the nation, murders of black transgender women continue to terrorize.
Another black, transgender woman has been killed in Texas.
This time it happened in Dallas, where 23-year-old Muhlaysia Booker was found shot to death near her apartment Saturday morning. Just 18 months ago, Brandi Seals, 26, black and transgender, was murdered at a construction site in Houston. In January, someone shot Candy Elease Pinky five times in a Houston gas station on Richmond Avenue. She survived, and the shooter remains at large.
Houston, are these attacks on your radar? They sure should be.
Our city has a complicated history full of progress and retreat when it comes to support for LGBTQ residents. It’s the city, after all, where police arrested John Lawrence and Tyron Garner in their own bedroom one September evening in 1998 and charged them for having gay sex. Their legal challenge to the arrests ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court and in the history books as arguably the most powerful gay rights decision on record.
Houston is the place where banker Paul Broussard was murdered in a 1991 gay bashing, but also where activist Ray Hill confronted the police about solving the murder and never stopped demanding, changing gay activism in the city forever. It’s where we elected Annise Parker, the first lesbian to lead a major American city, and re-elected her twice, and where we passed a sweeping gay rights ordinance in 2014, only to spark a Mike Huckabee-led backlash that not only repealed Houston’s law but fueled an ugly, statewide push for a bathroom bill that demonized transgender men, women and children.
“It’s one step forward, two back sometimes,” said Lou Weaver, the Houston-based transgender services coordinator for Equality Texas.
Despite this topsy-turvy history, Houston is also now home to thriving communities of support for transgender men and women, and for the LBGTQ community as a whole. One of the pioneering voices for transgender acceptance, the oft-honored Phyllis Randolph Frye, now wears a black robe as the nation’s first openly transgender judge, appointed to the Houston municipal court bench in 2010.
Still, the threat to transgender Texans, especially transgender women of color, has seemed to only grow. It’s something Houston as a whole can’t afford to ignore.
Across America, 128 transgender men and women were killed between 2013 and late 2018. Twentynine were killed in 2017 alone. Of those killed in 2018, most of them were in the South. Two-thirds were under age 35. And fully 82 percent were African-American. Last summer, over 10 weeks, nine black trans women were killed in eight states.
Booker was the fourth transgender victim of fatal violence in 2019. The day after she was killed, a fifth victim was identified in Philadelphia as Michelle “Tamika” Washington.
“There is a lot of anger and a lot of fear,” Weaver told the editorial board Tuesday. “Transgender women of color are being targeted. … It makes it hard to live their lives fully when they are afraid of what might happen when they walk out their door.”
Just a month before Booker’s death, she was savagely beaten in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Dallas on April 12, following a minor fender bender. A stomachturning cellphone video of the incident shows the beating clearly. One man had been charged and released in the attack, and Dallas police have said they have found no evidence linking the shooting to last month’s beating.
“I pray it wasn’t,” Booker’s father told CBS News. “I don’t want to see nobody’s child go through this. Nobody’s family.”
At a vigil held shortly after the initial attack, Booker thanked a gathering of supporters in Dallas. “This time I can stand before you; whereas in other scenarios we are at a memorial,” she said.
It’s safe to say that most Houstonians make it through any given week without having to spend much time thinking about their transgender neighbors or co-workers, much less about their safety. It’s time to start thinking about it. And to think about what each of us can do to oppose the stigma, the hatred and the bigotry — just as we stand against racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination. More and more, transgender men, women and even children are stepping out of the shadows, out of a place of relative safety, into the vulnerability of living their true identities. As neighbors, we should offer support and compassion for the great risk they are taking.
This isn’t about embracing lifestyles or making judgments. It’s about recognizing that transgender Texans aren’t going to be pushed back into the closet, despite the dangers. They are part of our city, and it’s everyone’s job to extend a hand of welcome, and to stand against the hate-fueled violence that threatens them.