Yesterday I went to a vigil for yet another murdered Black trans woman here in Washington DC, victim of a hate crime. Dream Johnson should still be here, and her family shouldn’t be mourning her loss. Her family said they wanted her to be known worldwide, that they didn’t want her to be erased like so many other Black trans women’s deaths. So here, as long as this site is up, we will say her name and remember her: DREAM.
A GoFundMe has been made for Dream’s family. Please go donate as long as it’s open: https://www.gofundme.com/f/honor-dream-johnson-support-her-memorial
I want you to know what we’re facing, but I also want you to have a reprieve and space to mourn—whether it’s Dream herself, or yet another Black person, another trans person, another Black transfemme gone after this.
Please know that with the current political and social climate, all these numbers I’m about to give you in the first half have gotten significantly worse. We made some strides forward but in practice, only so much can be done locally when nationally we are made into a political pawn to sacrifice our safety and wellness.
I’ve modified some liturgies from Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies in the second half of this, please take your time and space with them to grieve your loss, our losses after reading the first half. If you’re coming back to this more than once, I’m so so sorry, and I hope they find justice in death. While I write this with the loss of Black transfemmes in mind, I hope that you may find comfort in the liturgies for the passing of any trans or queer person.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
According to the 2015 Access Denied study of the DC trans community, Black and Hispanic trans women suffer the most from the effects of systemic transmisogyny. Transfemmes in DC report having been physically or sexually assaulted at a rate of 57% and 47% respectively, 62% of Black transfemmes report being assaulted, and 70% of Hispanic transfemmes. 14% of whites reported it. and 14%/27% of Black and Hispanic transmascs.
Only 14% of Black and Hispanic trans people reach education above High School, 57% of Trans People of Color (TPOC), and particularly Trans Women of Color (TWOC), make less than $10,000 a year. For TWOC this is primarily through grey economy jobs such as sex work. 55% of Black trans people report being unemployed, and 49% of TPOC report being denied jobs explicitly for being perceived as trans.
For those who do get a job, half of us report workplace harassment and a quarter of us are forced by our employers to use inappropriate restrooms or present incorrectly. Additionally, 21% of TPOC report physical or sexual assault in the workplace, vs. 6% of whites.
20% of trans people in DC are homeless, with HIV-Positive trans people being much more likely to be homeless—making up 43% of the homeless trans population. 27% of homeless trans people report having sex with people for housing, and 70% have been denied a lease previously. Homeless trans people also report that 25% have been physically or sexually assaulted by police, and 41% by shelter staff.
Half of undocumented trans people are currently homeless. This is before politicians began bussing migrants/undocumented people to DC, so this number is likely higher now. 58% of undocumented homeless trans people report being denied a lease, compared to 19% of documented. Black and Hispanic trans people are three times more likely to be denied a lease than white trans people.
Half of transfemmes and over half of TPOC are or previously did sex work, and 30% have used some kind of unlicensed care/source such as DIY or mutual aid to access transition materials. 60% of trans people are uninsured or insured through public or family insurance, while 20% are fully uninsured.
60% of trans people had considered suicide, 34% had attempted, and 10% within the 12 months prior to the survey. Among those who had attempted, 61% had been physically assaulted and 54% had been sexually assaulted.
Transfemmes of color deserve better than this. We deserve more than this suffering. We deserve to be ourselves without going through hell and hoping to make it past 40. We deserve more than to just become another statistic, because people only care when we die, only move for our pain, not our joy.
Grieve, and then find ways to actually act and do something to help us now. Fund our mutual aid, house us, use your privilege—whether white, cis, any of it—to keep us alive. if you can’t personally, help them find someone who can. Every new person that knows is another chance we can keep us alive. Every doll taken from us by force, by hate. every trans suicide? Is a murder. Every time we die due to the failings of the system, our community, all of it, is a murder.
A’nee deserved better. Skylar deserved better. Dream deserved better.
I’m tired of mourning another dead trans girl. Do something about it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These liturgies have been modified from Cole Arthur Riley’s original Black Liturgies versions because I know a lot of trans and queer folks got complicated feelings around spirituality. I wanted to give y’all something you didn’t have to chew around to feel comfort, but the words remain overwhelmingly Cole’s.
These mean a lot to me in my processing of death and mourning, because I never truly had a language around it I felt comfortable with until I found them. I re-read and process them each time another is taken from us, and each Trans Day of Rememberance. Thank you.
It may help to read these aloud, whether in a group or to yourself. I chose pieces for Lament, Rage, Justice, and Memory, in that order.
For us.
Lament
For you who know sorrow,
We have nowhere to hide from this void. Thank you for being moved to tears by death, for in doing so, you remind us that one can know healing is imminent and still make space to grieve what is. We’re reminded that hope and grief are not mutually exclusive. Help us hold the departed in our minds, in our bones; help us hear their laugh echo, their voice hum across our skin.
But also may we not idolize them in their absence, purging our memory of their flaws, cleansing them in death of all that made them human. May our mourning look how it must from one moment to the next, free from guilt about how much sadness we can muster. And as we meet grief in all its complexity, may we have a small company capable of remaining with us in our loss, those who journey with us as we heal. Not so that they can speak platitudes or try to drag us towards happiness, but so they can hold space for our pain.
Cast out any timeline we’ve made for our own healing. May we remember that grief rests and wakes as she chooses but remains with us across time. May we hold our tears as sacred, never being too quick to wipe them away or keep them prisoner, knowing that our freedom is wrapped up in theirs. May it be so.
For you who are unmoved,
Whether out of trauma or pride, you have left your emotions in the pastor have turned against them altogether. We feel safer in our stoicism, protected from looking the fool, from the risk of doubling the pain by recognizing it. May you be reminded of the beauty and necessity in our tears. Bring into focus our child selves that wailed without shame. Remind us that our need is not a nuisance.
We’ve grown calloused from the overwhelming helplessness of mass information,so may we return into a wholeness and nuance that honors the dignity of the world with mourning. Soften our hearts to tragedy, even our own. Bring us into proximity with the wisely vulnerable, that they may teach us true courage. May we find aids in our anguish, to journey with us in and out of sorrow. May we find a way to hear our own grief, and to welcome it into our body as a friend once lost, found again. May it be so.
Rage
My rage intensifies because I am not a victim. It burns in my psyche with an intensity that creates clarity. It is a constructive healing rage…. [It is] a way for us to learn to see clearly.
—Bell Hooks
For Black transfemmes,
For you who seek liberation and safety. We are exhausted from living within the narrow quarters the world has constructed for us. Our societies fail to recognize the full spectrum of human emotions because they fail to recognize our humanity itself. For too long we have been villainized for our rage, when we have had to be wiser, more strategic, and more accommodating than any other.
May we keep us from surrendering our anger out of fear of being reduced to it. We deserve better than that. We will be grounded in the same fire that protected the trans women who came before us and survived. May we find a sacred company that does not require our anger to be polished or contained in order for us not to be destroyed.
May we find friends who aren’t threatened when we name a thing for what it is and don’t shrink back, let our rage pass down to our sisters, that they would never settle for anything less than dignity. Let our anger be a beacon to the rest of the world, whose attunement to their own rage is so atrophied that all they can do is demonize ours. In us, may they glimpse an emotional truth-telling that heals.
Ours will be a beautiful rage. Ase.
Breathe
INHALE: There is space for my anger.
EXHALE: My pain won’t be dismissed.
INHALE: I will not grow numb.
EXHALE: There is beauty in anger.
INHALE: My truth-telling is a gift.
EXHALE: I am free to say so.
Be reminded that the world deserves so much more than apathy in the presence of injustice. Go with anger, not as enemy but as guardian. Befriend your anger as if the liberation of the world depends on it. May it be so.
Justice
For you who seeks true solidarity,
Thank you for being willing to enter the suffering of the world, to not run from those in pain but rush to the site of blood and tears. May we be unbound from empty cravings for unity that come at no cost to the oppressor, even those who pretend to be in full solidarity with us. We must lead towards spaces of costly advocacy—that we do not become too enamored with the sound of our own voices and let our egos spoil our best intentions.
May we realize when the voices of the most vulnerable are being drowned out by the cacophony of the privileged. May our presence and dignity be known in a world that perpetually eclipses the voices of the marginalized. We shall work unto a solidarity that demands something of us, to risk ourselves on behalf of the vulnerable, believing that when one of us are harmed, we all are.
May we be kept safe from those who would demonize the fight and the rage and the desire for justice in us, who would prefer us complacent in the status quo, the stagnation, the defaults of white supremacy and patriarchy intentionally or unintentionally. Secure in us the courage to resist, knowing that together we will restore what the world has tried to suffocate in us. Ase.
Memory
For those who remember together,
May we be grateful for all the ways this world echoes with memory—ancient etches in stone, gorges carrying the shape of water. May we be and remain people of deep remembrance. In a world that would be content to have us forget our own names, keep them on our tongue. Keep our siblings’ and ancestors’ names near to us; not that we would idealize them, but that we would practice an abiding reverence for all that has formed us.
May we be awakened along with our families–blood and found—to the necessity of story exchange. May we learn how to both recount memories and receive them with a dignity worth of its subjects. When our own memory wanes, may we be surrounded by people who can carry our memories for us. May we find the far places in ourselves, that we could practice compassion where it was not, kindness where it was absent, and find some manner of healing through the portal that is memory. Ase.
For those who grieve the ones forgotten,
Each of you, unknown or forgotten, we grieve for you. Those who have been lost to time or who have never been known. Be near to us as we lament those moments or stories that we may never know with you, you live in us nonetheless. May we hold fast to the memories we can, and release what can be held no longer; you are not lesser because you are no longer known or never were, and we keep a place in our hearts for you.
May your stories, though unknown or forgotten, remain sacred to us in the knowledge that all stories need not be clear in order to remain meaningful. May we have the wisdom and tenderness to hold these memories hidden by the world and our own fallibility, that it is no less beautiful now. May time not be a thief to us, but a friend. Ase.
Breathe
INHALE: May we protect our stories.
EXHALE: Make us keepers of our memories.
INHALE: I come from pain.
EXHALE: I come from beauty.
INHALE: I will not protect the lie.
EXHALE: I remember.