Black Trans Lives Matter

In loving memory of the 21 transgender Americans killed in the first seven months of 2020.

1. Dustin Parker
2. Neulisa Luciano Ruiz
3. Yampi Mendez Arocho
4. Monika Diamond
5. Lexi
6. Johanna Metzger
7. Serena Angelique Velazquez Ramos
8. Layla Pelarz Sanchez
9. Penelope Diaz Ramirez
10. Nina Pop
11. Helle Jae O'Regan
12. Tony McDade
13. Dominque "RemMie" Fells
14. Riah Milton
15. Selena Reyes-Hernandez
16. Brayla Stone
17. Merci Mack
18. Shaki Peters
19. Bree Black
20. Summer Taylor
21. Marilyn Cazares

Transgender people of all races have been beaten and killed in America, even as far back into the times when there was no common word to describe our family members.

I'm an open gay black man with zero connection to where we merge with black trans people because most idiots try to convince gay black boys growing up in "the hood" that to be gay is a choice, and transgender people are gays dressed in drag because they want to be a female.

Amplify that with being called abominations and having birth defects, pretty much adds to the mis-education of prisons filled with straight black men who have been exposed to the same ignorance.

In my natural self, black, handsome, masculine with no sexual interest in our transgender family members, yet, to this day, I find it hard to understand why more gay black homies don't engage that valuable transgender family to the degree where we openly engage each other in prison.

Allow me here to be more specific. I know it's rough for gay homies to get jumped and treated horribly in prison by fellow black inmates. Yes, spit, urine, feces, dirty condoms—the whole bit, and we do what we can to support each other. The issue here for me is when we see this exact something happening to our transgender family. We don't do more, we don't speak out—and it's kind of like they are devalued to us, as we are to straight inmates.

I heard a closeted homies say, "They (transpeople) get all of the special treatment as far as programs go in prison."

I'm going to tell all of you now what I told him, so to inspire resolve.

"What the hell? Everybody has the right not to be killed, man. Favored or disfavored, rich or poor, gay or transgendered, and they are just as black as we are, and we are just as black as our straight brother. I'm not going to be silent when I see our straight family abuse you, so why should we choose silence when we see them abuse our trans family?"

I want to end this message by saying, people create all sorts of superficial justifications as to why it's okay to abuse, bully, and kill transgender people but nobody has yet offered one justifiable reason why the rest of us just sit around and allow it to continue. There is a difference between snitching and exposing injustice, even when that injustice is at the hands of our own people.

Straight black people never called John Lewis a snitch, or Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, or anyone who exposed the mistreatment of fellow human being. But when it comes to gay and transgender people in prison, silence gives consent to violence.

The police kill us, too. We caught COVID-19 just like everybody else and straight black people kill us, too. We get unjustfully and massively incarcerated with the rest of us. Wrong is wrong, in spite of the so-called codes that are morally selective by non-moral subculture groups inside of prisons. Wrong is still wrong. Black Trans Lives Matter TO ME.

Black Trans Lives Matter
—Parallaxboi