The brutal killing of a third transgender women of color in just a week is shining a spotlight on hate crimes and anti-transgender violence in the U.S, with some experts calling the trend a “serious crisis.”
In the early hours of Sunday, May 19, Michelle “Tamika” Washington, 40, a longtime advocate for the transgender community, died after being shot several times at the Franklinville neighborhood of North Philadelphia.
Her murder came just a day after Muhlasysia Booker, 23, was found dead in Dallas, Texas. Booker made headlines last month when she survived a mob-like beating following a minor traffic accident at a parking lot. In the video, she can be seen fighting several attackers who threw her on the floor and assaulted her in broad daylight. She ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist and several face fractures.
A week earlier, 21-year-old Claire Legato was fatally shot in the head in Cleveland, after an argument broke between Legato, her mother and John Booth, the suspected shooter.
“This is definitely an ongoing trend we are seeing,” Beverly Tillery, executive director of the Anti-Violence Project (AVP), the country’s largest anti-LGBTQ violence organization told the Daily News.
“We’ve been seeing now [that] for years trans women of color in particular are disproportionately impacted by hate violence,” she said, according to anti-LGBTQ violence data the AVP has collected for over 20 years.
According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), there have been five known deaths of transgender people in 2019, all of them were black transgender women. The actual number could be a lot higher, human rights advocates and anti-violence groups claim.
Jay W. Walker, an organizer with the Gays Against Guns (GAG) told The News that sometimes trans women’s murders are not even accounted for. “Law enforcement often mis-genders trans women who are murdered in their official police reports. So unless there are family members or community members who come forward to identify these women publicly as trans, sometimes their trans existence just gets completely wiped away.”
GAG is an anti-violence organization made up by LGBTQ people and their allies who fight flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia. “The need to have better restrictions against access to guns is of paramount importance,” Walker said.
But when it comes to violence against trans women “there’s also the issue of law enforcement’s frequent unwillingness to treat trans people as people deserving of protection.”
Since the group’s formation in 2016, in response to the massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., that killed 49, GAG stages demonstrations to put a face to the senseless violence faced by the victims. They want to show that “these women’s lives are not forgotten, and that their stories don’t get lost,” he said.
The violence, which affects black transgender women disproportionately, highlights the intersection of sexism, racism and LGBTQphobia. And what’s worse, they can also experience it in different parts of their lives.
“Our data shows that people are consistently experiencing hate violence not just by strangers on the street, but they’re also experiencing hate violence by people they’re dating, landlords, people they’re working with,” said AVP’s Beverly Tiller said. “So if you are trans person of color you might be experiencing hate violence in a number of different pockets of your life.”
“The climate is such that a lot of the homicides and attacks against trans women of color there is an underlying climate of transphobia and hate that is underneath a lot of what is going on.”
The New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG) is organizing a rally in Washington Square Park Friday evening to demand justice for the deaths of Muhlasysia Booker, Michelle “Tamika” Washington and Claire Legato. And calling for action from the institutions that are designed to protect people.
“No more death, violence, or fear for trans women,” NYTAG director of policy and programs Amanda Babine said in a statement. “Our lives deserve to protected, [the three recent] deaths deserve to be investigated.”
