The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project

After enjoying a night of dancing at a Jackson Heights nightclub, Carmen, a Latina transgender woman living in Queens, began making her way home.

At 3 a.m., she started walking down Roosevelt Avenue at 90th Street when a man in a black car approached her.

“He told me, ‘I can take you wherever you want’ and kept insisting ‘get in mami, don’t be afraid,’” Carmen said, in Spanish.

Since she was tired and needed a ride home, Carmen said she proceeded to enter the vehicle and told the man to take her to 77th and Roosevelt Avenue.

But, instead, the man sped in another direction and parked the car on 32nd Avenue.

“He told me that I had to do oral sex on him, but I told him no,” Carmen said. “He said ‘if I pay you or don’t pay you, you should still do it’ and took a police badge out of his pocket.”

Afraid that she would be arrested, Carmen did as the man asked.

“When I finished, he told me to get out of the car,” Carmen said. “The place was dark and deserted. He gave me $20 and told me to take a cab back to Jackson Heights and left me stranded. I felt really powerless, humiliated and used.”

While Carmen had withheld her story from police in fear of retaliation, on Oct. 23, she stood at the Make The Road New York offices in Jackson Heights to make her tale known.

In conjunction with her testimony, the nonprofit organization released a new report that surveyed more than 300 Jackson Heights residents about their experiences with police in the neighborhood.

Findings from the report, titled “Transgressive Policing: Police Abuse of LGTBQ Communities of Color in Jackson Heights,” detailed that of the two precincts governing Jackson Heights, the 110th and 115th, 90 percent of stop-and-frisks conducted last year were made on people of color.

Researchers contend that within the communities of color impacted, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bi-Sexual or Queer people of color were particularly targeted.

According to the report, out of all the people who said they had experienced a police stop, 33 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said that they had been harassed by police in some manner.

By comparison, 51 percent of LGBTQ respondents who had been stopped by police indicated that they had experienced police harassment.

In addition to the stop-and-frisk statistics, the report also asserts that many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood.

“Many of the people living in this neighborhood who are transgender come from another country where they consistently are harassed,” said MRNY spokeswoman Nicole Duyuca. “They should not have to live in fear.”

Like many of the survey’s respondents, Duyuca said that she too is a transgender woman who has experienced harassment by the police.

At the age of 16, Duyuca migrated to New York from Mexico. Seeking to make income in her new city, Duyuca said she began working as a sex worker in Jackson Heights.

Although she no longer engages in prostitution, she recalled one night in 1998 when she had been assaulted by police.

“Two police men picked me up,” Duyuca said. “I thought they were going to take me to jail, but instead they took me to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and forced me to have a threesome.”

Seeking to help others who may be experiencing similar issues, Duyuca said she began working with MRNY.

“We want the policemen to identify themselves and call us by our chosen name,” Duyuca said. “They still call me ‘Mister.’ I am not a ‘Mister;’ I am a woman. All we want is to be respected like everyone else.”

Supported by openly gay Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), the report’s list of recommendations urge the City Council to pass the Community Safety Act, which includes a ban from profiling and requires officers to announce to stopped individuals they have a right to refuse a search, in addition to providing their rank and reason for a stop-and-frisk.

“The testimonies I have heard are not new to me, unfortunately. Sometimes we in the LGBTQ community think things are getting better, but they are actually getting worse,” Dromm said. “The police have conducted 18,000 incidents of stop-and-frisk in this neighborhood alone between Shea and 69th Street. To me, it is an issue of racial profiling and LGBTQ profiling with a particular emphasis on the transgender community.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.

(After enjoying a night of dancing at a Jackson Heights nightclub, Carmen, a Latina transgender woman living in Queens, began making her way home.

At 3 a.m., she started walking down Roosevelt Avenue at 90th Street when a man in a black car approached her.

“He told me, ‘I can take you wherever you want’ and kept insisting ‘get in mami, don’t be afraid,’” Carmen said, in Spanish.

Since she was tired and needed a ride home, Carmen said she proceeded to enter the vehicle and told the man to take her to 77th and Roosevelt Avenue.

But, instead, the man sped in another direction and parked the car on 32nd Avenue.

“He told me that I had to do oral sex on him, but I told him no,” Carmen said. “He said ‘if I pay you or don’t pay you, you should still do it’ and took a police badge out of his pocket.”

Afraid that she would be arrested, Carmen did as the man asked.

“When I finished, he told me to get out of the car,” Carmen said. “The place was dark and deserted. He gave me $20 and told me to take a cab back to Jackson Heights and left me stranded. I felt really powerless, humiliated and used.”

While Carmen had withheld her story from police in fear of retaliation, on Oct. 23, she stood at the Make The Road New York offices in Jackson Heights to make her tale known.

In conjunction with her testimony, the nonprofit organization released a new report that surveyed more than 300 Jackson Heights residents about their experiences with police in the neighborhood.

Findings from the report, titled “Transgressive Policing: Police Abuse of LGTBQ Communities of Color in Jackson Heights,” detailed that of the two precincts governing Jackson Heights, the 110th and 115th, 90 percent of stop-and-frisks conducted last year were made on people of color.

Researchers contend that within the communities of color impacted, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bi-Sexual or Queer people of color were particularly targeted.

According to the report, out of all the people who said they had experienced a police stop, 33 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said that they had been harassed by police in some manner.

By comparison, 51 percent of LGBTQ respondents who had been stopped by police indicated that they had experienced police harassment.

In addition to the stop-and-frisk statistics, the report also asserts that many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood.

“Many of the people living in this neighborhood who are transgender come from another country where they consistently are harassed,” said MRNY spokeswoman Nicole Duyuca. “They should not have to live in fear.”

Like many of the survey’s respondents, Duyuca said that she too is a transgender woman who has experienced harassment by the police.

At the age of 16, Duyuca migrated to New York from Mexico. Seeking to make income in her new city, Duyuca said she began working as a sex worker in Jackson Heights.

Although she no longer engages in prostitution, she recalled one night in 1998 when she had been assaulted by police.

“Two police men picked me up,” Duyuca said. “I thought they were going to take me to jail, but instead they took me to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and forced me to have a threesome.”

Seeking to help others who may be experiencing similar issues, Duyuca said she began working with MRNY.

“We want the policemen to identify themselves and call us by our chosen name,” Duyuca said. “They still call me ‘Mister.’ I am not a ‘Mister;’ I am a woman. All we want is to be respected like everyone else.”

Supported by openly gay Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), the report’s list of recommendations urge the City Council to pass the Community Safety Act, which includes a ban from profiling and requires officers to announce to stopped individuals they have a right to refuse a search, in addition to providing their rank and reason for a stop-and-frisk.

“The testimonies I have heard are not new to me, unfortunately. Sometimes we in the LGBTQ community think things are getting better, but they are actually getting worse,” Dromm said. “The police have conducted 18,000 incidents of stop-and-frisk in this neighborhood alone between Shea and 69th Street. To me, it is an issue of racial profiling and LGBTQ profiling with a particular emphasis on the transgender community.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.

(Megan Montalvo, Queens Tribune)

janetmock:

Thank you, Fierce, for publishing these letters. I, too, am upset that the Times has not issued an apology for this lacking-in-context piece and/or published any of these letters from others who are angered by the piece. 

fiercenyc:

On July 25, 2012, FIERCE organized a Call to Action asking supporters to submit letters to the New York Times demanding Dignity for Transwomen of Color and LGBTQ Youth in their reporting. The Call to Action was organized in response to a July 24th article: “For Money or Just to Strut, LIving Out Loud on a Transgender Stage.

The article, which relied on and fed into harmful, negative stereotypes of young transwomen of color, neglected to highlight or consider the root causes of why LGBTQ youth are disproportionately on the streets and finding it harder to maintain access and ownership over this historical safe space.

Over the weeks following the action, we received dozens of letters that were not only powerful, but also the acts of solidarity were incredibly moving for all of us here at FIERCE!  Seeing your words and feeling the support of so many allies, we saw the depth and strength of our struggle against transphobia, homophobia, gentrification, and criminalization of LGBTQ youth of color, especially transwomen of color.

As far as we know, theTimesdid not publish the letters. In an effort to empower LGBTQ youth and the communities that support LGBTQ youth-led organizing  in NYC and elsewhere, we wanted to share a small collection of these letters with you.

In love and struggle,

FIERCE

Two trans women in a San Diego prison entered their second week of hunger strike over the weekend.

Amazon and Catarina, both trans women imprisoned at that Richard J. Donovan Correctional facility, have refused food since Sept. 21 in a strike “against the unfair treatment of trans women within [the prison],” according to a release from radical trans women’s collective Gender Anarky (of which both inmates are members).

Since both Amazon and Catarina are trans women in a men’s prison, the inmates have been held in isolated, single cells — despite having asked to share a cell with each other. It is not clear what convictions the two inmates are serving time for — Gender Anarky does not list its members’ crimes; to do so would be to use the logic of the prison system, which they fight against.

Transgender individuals are regularly put on single-cell status, or even moved into solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system.

This particular hunger strike is underpinned by a militant anti-prison stance. The release from the inmates’ collective calls for “directly attacking the systems of domination that make living conditions of trans women, both inside and outside prison, a living hell.”

Amazon and Catarina’s situation is not the first in recent months to bring attention to the treatment of trans individuals in the criminal justice system. Notably, CeCe McDonald, a trans woman in Minnesota, was sentenced to 41 months in prison after killing one of her attackers when she was assaulted by a group, one of whom smashed a glass in her face. At the time, Mother Jones noted that trans women accounted for 50 percent of LGBTQ hate-crime murder victims in 2009.

McDonald is being held at a male prison in Minnesota, where she can shower alone and has a single cell. According to a May report from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Minnesota is currently incarcerating 10 trans inmates in a similar manner.

(Natasha Lennard, Salon)

DETROIT - About 50 people showed up Sept. 21 for the launch of Who’s That Girl, a media project presented by the Horizons Project and supported by the Michigan Department of Community Health’s Health Disparities Reduction Minority Health Section. The project, which includes images of four young transgender women, is a marketing effort to change media and societal perceptions of the transgender community.

“The purpose of the campaign is to provide understanding about HIV, especially in the trans community,” said Bre’ Campbell, the project’s coordinator. “A lot of times, when AIDS messages are put out they do not include trans women.”

All of the women featured in the campaign are under the age of 25 and active in the community. Campbell said they illustrate that “regardless of what society thinks about trans women, they are smart, they are successful, they are educated and they are loved.”

The Horizons Project launched the campaign at a reception at Wayne State University’s Student Center. About 50 people attended, and after they ate and had an opportunity to view the images, they were witness to a very informative panel discussion featuring the four women who comprise the campaign.

“If you look at the photos, it shows that even though we are in some ways different, we are still human and can still blend in,” said Sahray Arnold. “Even though we’re not all the same, we’re all the same inside and we’re all of value.”

Mia Cole said she believes society at large is misinformed about trans women and only knows what they see on trash TV.

“Everyone thinks transgender women are what you see on Jerry Springer and that’s not it,” she said. “We don’t walk down the street snatching our wigs off. We’re very smart and intelligent. You shouldn’t reject the unfamiliar because we have a lot to offer.”

A fashion model and harpist, WSU student Ahya Simone said she hopes to help change society’s perception of trans women.

“I take joy in educating people about women like me,” Simone said. “There are few [images] out there and I want to be that face. I just want to be a role model for girls like us, and women in general.”

Not all discrimination comes from outside sources, though. The women all shared that they were often marginalized by others in the LGBT community.

“The ‘T’ is in there,” said Krystina Edwards. “So I’m gonna need the L, the G, and the B to embrace us.”

The images in the campaign were all shot by photographer Jhordan Haliburton.

“At first I was kind of nervous about it because it was my first professional photo shoot,” he said. “But they came out great. I love them. They came out very wonderful.”

Look for images from the campaign to appear in the pages of Between The Lines soon.

(Jason A. Michael, Originally printed 9/27/2012, Issue 2039 - Between The Lines News)

D.C. police are looking for a man who sexually assaulted a transgender woman at gunpoint in Northeast this week.

The assault happened behind the 5000 block of East Capitol Street Northeast around 4:45 a.m. Sunday [Sept 23].

The Metropolitan Police Department released details of the assault Monday [Sept 24] night, saying that a man approached the woman as she was walking on the 200 block of 51st Street Northeast and struck her. He then forced her at gunpoint behind the East Capitol location and sexually assaulted her. The man also stole the woman’s purse before fleeing the area.

There is no preliminary indication that the woman was targeted because she is transgender, said MPD spokesman Officer Anthony Clay.

Last summer, a transgender woman was fatally shot and another fired upon with no provocation in a neighborhood about a mile from the site of the sexual assault.

Police described the suspect in the sexual assault as a black man in his early 20s, approximately 5-feet-7-inches tall with brown eyes and short braids. He was last seen wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers.

(Andrea Noble  -  The Washington Times)

Two trans women incarcerated in the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County have been on hunger strike for over a week in an attempt to be allowed to share a cell together. Because they are trans, prison officials refuse to take them off single-cell status. Presumably, they have both been restricted to being in single cells to prevent them from having to share a cell with a man, however, it’s clear that this is not for their own protection when there are two of them and they want to share a cell together.

According to a statement released yesterday, the hunger strike began on Friday September 21st and they are asking their supporters to call in and help:

Call Warden Paramo the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility: (619) 661-6500

Demand that Eva Contreraz (C-45857) and Catarine LaPre (K-67313) be take off single-cell status and be allowed to share a cell. Demand that an end to the discriminatory housing policy against trans women in the correctional facility.

Isolation has commonly been a discriminatory practice prison’s have used against trans prisoners, and many confine trans prisoners to solitary confinement in order to avoid having to place them with either men or women. Often, such solitary confinement ends up being over extended periods of time or even throughout the duration of incarceration, despite many indications that extended solitary confinement can cause lasting psychological damage and may be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Being restricted to a single cell appears to be a different practice than solitary confinement. Nonetheless, it is a discriminatory practice where trans prisoners are subjected to additional punishment that other prisoners do not have to deal with.

Earlier this year the Prison Rape Elimination Act regulations put out by the Obama administration acknowledged the increased risk trans prisoners are at and put in place regulations to deal with the problem. Enforcing isolation for all trans prisoners against their will is not a recommended practice for reducing violence.

(Bilerico Project)

womenwhokickass:

Hello followers! The month of September has drawn to a close, and while this means that womenwhokickass is back to our usual posts, we’re already busy working on the next theme! (If you ask us nicely, we may tell you!)

In any case, it was wonderful writing for you all this month, and I hope you…

Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be hearing any bellyaching from right wingers like Mike Huckabee and Tony Perkins about this judicial activist (from the Oklahoman):

An Oklahoma County judge is refusing to let [trans women] switch to feminine names.

District Judge Bill Graves has denied name changes in two such cases so far — last year and again in August. The judge ruled both times the requests were made for a fraudulent purpose…

Five other Oklahoma County judges who handle name change requests told The Oklahoman they routinely grant them in transgender cases.

Graves does not, for scientific reasons. He has concluded a person cannot really change his or her sex because the person’s DNA stays the same.

Predictably, Judge Graves also cites Genesis in support of his transphobia:

“To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,” Graves wrote. “It is notable that Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’ The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”

Graves also makes it abundantly clear that in his courtroom, he intends to decide a person’s gender identity, rather than trusting their truth:

“You’ll give me publicity that maybe I don’t want,” Graves told The Oklahoman. “If you’re born male, you stay male, according to the study I’ve done on DNA. If you’re born female, you stay female.”

If this doesn’t meet the bar for “judicial activism,” I don’t know what would. Utterly reprehensible.

(John M. Becker, Truth Wins Out)

She’s asked state to rule whether bar’s exclusion policy is discrimination

Linked article includes quotes using the wrong pronouns and gender, also starts with a questionable lead.