We are a few weeks removed from Trans Week of Awareness, and our collective communities are honoring all the trans relatives we’ve lost this year. The conservative number is 281 trans people murdered this year. Our two-spirit, trans and gender non-conforming communities know what it’s like to be put in a closet for someone else’s benefit and to be put in someone else’s crosshairs. To have rhetoric weaponized on large platforms in ways that endanger all of our trans community members, but particularly the Black trans women who are disproportionately the victims of transmisia and transmisogynoir — the intersection of misogyny, transphobia and anti-Black racism.
Three weeks ago, many Oklahomans read about how one person’s alleged interaction with a store employee is being used to engage in the violence of anti-trans rhetoric. In this instance, despite stated care for the 2SLGBTQ+ community, Oklahoma County Jail Trust Board member and local pastor Derrick Scobey is using his platform to conflate a single experience with his choice to misgender and more largely dismiss trans women. We all deserve to live in our full dignity. That includes not being touched without consent and having our identity recognized and respected. Our commitment to liberation cannot stop with our immediate family, and our response to harm cannot be to cause louder and more expansive harm.
The reality is there is no shortage of transphobic hate, from pulpit to government, and it has serious consequences that increasingly result in the deaths of our 2STGNC+ siblings. Those lost include Nex Benedict, Fern Galindo, Daniel Davis Aston, Brooklyn Stevenson, and so many more Oklahomans lost amid unchecked transphobia, transmisia, transmisogyny and transmisogynoir. An undeniable truth: There has never been a world without people who live and love beyond the western gender binary, and there never will be. We cannot tolerate folks who are supposed to represent the people’s best interests using their platform to further harm trans communities.
We know what happens when people in power use their words to spread hate. Trans people die. Trans people are killed. Trans people are imprisoned. Trans people are denied access to health care. Trans people lose their jobs. Trans people lose their housing. Trans people cannot survive. Because words mean things, and at a time when Oklahoma has already declared anti-trans messaging to be at the core of our gubernatorial race, we know it’s critical to proclaim that anti-trans rhetoric is not only patently untrue (trans people exist, full stop), but it’s incredibly dangerous.
Trans Week of Awareness and Trans Day of Remembrance take tiny slices of the calendar. But for two-spirit, transgender and gender-nonconforming folks, we are deeply aware of the threat to our lives all year long. We cannot go a day without remembering the siblings we have lost to the violence of this world. We are tired and are trying to keep each other, and ourselves, alive. If the burden of survival is placed on those who are being harmed and not those with power and influence, then what do we have left? We’ll tell you — we have directly impacted communities that only survive because of ourselves.
As a result, Oklahoma County’s jail trust should be talking about trans folks, but the conversation should be about how even in one of the most awful carceral facilities in the country, trans folks can face disproportionately awful treatment. The discussion at the jail trust should involve keeping us alive and keeping people out of jail — not on personal persecution of an already persecuted group.
Trans people will always exist. Our dignity is inherent, and we deserve government bodies that remember this and address it in all they do.
