Not Easy Being Black and Transgender

It’s not easy for any person of African descent to be LGBTQ in our black communities, but our transgender brother and sisters, are the most discriminated against among us. And a recent study corroborates this fact.

The National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), in collaboration with the National Gay and Lesbian task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) released a groundbreaking study in September “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey,” exposing both the structural and individual racism transgender people of color confront. The study is a supplement to the national study “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.”

With misinformation about transgender people in our country still rampant and egregiously offensive, its impact is deleterious. And because of how transphobia, in this present-day and in its present form, has taken shaped in black communities, most of our trans populations have much higher rates of suicide, truancy, HIV/AIDS, drugs and alcohol abuse, and murder than we already have among our queer populations in black communities. They also have much higher rates of homelessness. The study reveals:

What saddens me about the discrimination toward my transgender brothers and sisters is that their contributions to the African American community and the larger LGBTQ community are not appreciated until after their death.

For example, the annual “Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR)” is an international event memorializing transgender people murdered because of their gender identities or gender expressions. The purpose of TDOR is to raise public awareness of hate crimes against transgendered people and to honor their lives that might otherwise be forgotten. This event is held every November, honoring Rita Hester, a 34-year-old African American transsexual, who was mysteriously found murdered inside her first floor apartment outside Boston on Nov. 28, 1998. The crime kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project.

Another example, in June 2006, the Ali Forney Center (AFC), in NYC, the nation’s largest LGBTQ youth homeless services center, aggressively launched an advertising campaign asking the simple question: “Would you stop loving your child if you found out they were gay or lesbian?” Carl Siciliano, Executive Director of the Ali Forney Center, stated, “Our goal was to address the rising rate of LGBT youth homelessness, particularly in communities of color.”

Ali Forney, for whom the center is named, was an African American transgender known as “Luscious” and was also a throwaway. And like many throwaways, Forney earned his living as a prostitute. However, once stabilized with a roof over his head, Forney spent his remaining years dedicating his time helping his peers. But on a cold wintry December night in 1997 at 4 a.m., Forney was murdered by a still-unidentified assailant. Like most bisexual and transgender youth, they don’t expect to live a long and fruitful life.

Black transphobia, in this present-day and in its present form, many opine, has a lot to do with the social alienation from the dominate white LGBTQ community and the cultural and religious isolation from the African American community.

Homelessness and residing outside their communities have not always been the case with our African-American transgender people. Black drag balls and then “drag houses” or “drag families,” as seen in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary film “Paris is Burning,” comprised of primarily African American and Latino transgenders who lived in their communities. Their performance at drag balls illustrates how race, class, and varying ranges of gender identities and expressions, deconstructs notions of masculinity, and redefines what it means to be a diva.

During the 1920’s in Harlem, the renowned Savoy Ballroom and the Rockland Palace hosted drag ball extravaganzas with prizes awarded for the best costumes. Harlem Renaissance writer, Langston Hughes, depicted the balls as “spectacles of color.” George Chauncey, author of “Gay New York,” wrote that during this period “perhaps nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem.”

And with constant harassment by white policemen patrolling the neighborhood, making the trans community their conspicuous target, along with public denouncements of them by black ministers, like the famous Adam Clayton Powell Sr. of Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem’s trans community was, nonetheless, unrelenting with their drag balls, because they were wildly popular and growing among its working class. And these drag balls were reported in the black press:

The study “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey” gives us just a small window into the everyday lived reality of my transgender brothers and sisters.