Transgender Deaths: Where Is the Outcry?

http://www.theroot.com/views/your-take?wpisrc=root_lightbox



(Special to The Root) -- On Aug. 14 Tiffany Gooden, 19, a black transgender woman, was stabbed to death on Chicago's West Side. She was found dead just three blocks from where Paige Clay, 23, another black transgender woman, was discovered in April with a gunshot wound to the head. Just four days after Gooden's killing, Kendall L. Hampton, 26, also a transgender woman, was shot in the parking lot of a Dairy Mart in Cincinnati.

Their murders are jarring reminders of the injustice that transgender women of color face. In fact, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (pdf) has reported that violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people has increased 23 percent from 2009 to 2010, with people of color and transgender women as the most common victims. Of the victims murdered in 2010, 70 percent were people of color, while 44 percent were transgender women.

"Stop killing and beating down my family," says Sharon Lettman-Hicks, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. "As a mother, sister and advocate, I am deeply troubled by the violence that plagues our trans sisters. I'm even more saddened by our level of indifference and inaction. Where is the outcry?"

The black and civil rights communities are shamefully silent when victims of violence are black and transgender. That is why the NBJC, the nation's leading black LGBT civil rights organization; the Hip Hop Caucus, a civil and human rights organization that aims to promote political activism for young U.S. voters, using hip-hop music and culture; and the Trans People of Color Coalition, a national social-justice organization that promotes the interests of transgender people of color, are calling on the Department of Justice to establish a special task force to investigate the serial and systemic murders of countless transgender women of color who are attacked for living their truth. These groups are urging all civil rights leaders and community members to join their appeal to consciousness and action.