I want to ask about the violence against trans women.
Last month, Ja’leyah-Jamar, an African-American trans woman,
was murdered in Kansas City, Kansas.
She’s at least the 19th transgender person to be murdered in the U.S. this year.
Thirteen died from gun violence.
The majority are women of color.
Laverne Cox, you have long spoken out on this issue.
Talk about the climate in this country today.
It is really hard for me to continue to talk about the murders of trans women of color.
I was talking to my makeup artist, Deja, who’s also openly trans, early yesterday.
And I told her, when I started transitioning medically in 1998, that violence — that
this was a reality in my life in 1998, that there were trans people being murdered all
around me, and this insane fear: “Will I be next?”
I remember going to a memorial for Amanda Milan, a trans woman
who was murdered in the early 2000s here in New York City.
She was stabbed outside of the Port Authority.
And for my entire life as a trans woman, for 21 years, I have been hearing about, witnessing,
going to memorials, going to Trans Days of Remembrance.
And the trauma of that is — I don’t actually even have words for the trauma of that.
And I think about just black people in general who have watched our people be murdered in
the streets and the collective trauma of that.
And I disassociated from it so much because it’s too much.
It is way too much.
And we live in a culture that consistently stigmatizes trans people, tell us that we
aren’t who we say we are.
When I read the Alliance Defending [Freedom] brief on Aimee Stephens’ case, they bent
over backwards to not use female pronouns to refer to Aimee Stephens.
There was this insistence in misgendering her.
And what underlines most of the discrimination against trans people is the insistence that
we are always and only the gender we were assigned at birth, that we’re somehow fraudulent.
And when we have an administration and we have government policies that continually
stigmatize us, it makes it OK for the person on the street who sees a trans person and
decides that we should not exist anymore.
And it is just — I’m really at a loss, because I know it’s intersectional.
I know that it’s about employment.
I know it’s about healthcare.
I know it’s about homelessness and having access to all of these things to keep us out
of harm’s way, that so many of us don’t have access to.
The unemployment rate in the trans community is three times the national average,
four times that for trans people of color.
The majority of us make less than $10,000 a year.
And so, when you cannot make a living, you find yourself in street economies,
you find yourself homeless.
That makes you more of a target of violence.
And so, there’s so many things that we have to do as a culture to end this violence.
And showing up tomorrow at the Supreme Court, letting your friends and family know that
it is not OK to discriminate against trans people, that when we are living our lives,
so many times just walking down the street as a black trans woman, people saw it as some
sort of affront to them, when men would find themselves attracted to me because I was walking
down the street, and they would get upset about that.
I talked a lot about Islan Nettles’ case, and she was just walking down the street,
a black trans woman, in 2013, and two men catcalled her, realized she was trans and
beat her until she died.
We should not be killed simply for being who we are.
We are not — we deserve civil rights.
We deserve to be able to work and to live and to thrive.
And so, the targeting that this administration has done,
the very first — one of the very first things that Jeff Sessions did in his Justice Department in 2017,
February 2017, was rescind the guidelines that the Obama administration
set forth for transgender children in the United States of America.
And then the military ban happened, and then so many of these other things.
And that consistently sends a message that it is OK to discriminate against us.
I think part of this is a backlash against the unprecedented visibility we have in the
media now.
Trans people are coming forward and saying, “This is who I am.
I have a right to exist.”
We’ve always existed, and now we’re coming out of the shadows.
And as we come out of the shadows, people want to force us back into the dark and to
back pages.
And we are saying, “No, we deserve a right to live in the light.”
And that’s all we want.