Campaign Focuses on Young, Gifted, Transgender and Black
Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual date to recognize the struggles and perseverance of members of the transgender community. Leading up to the internationally recognized event, the National Black Justice Coalition launched its #BlackTransProud social media campaign to raise awareness about what it means to, as organizers put it, “live at the intersection of racial justice and trans equality.”
More from the National Black Justice Coalition:
In 2010, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, transgender women represented 44% of anti-LGBT murders but only represented 11% of the total reports. Within LGBT communities, transgender people represent 8.6% of the general population. Most hate crimes go unreported because of police bias. In fact, NCAVP’s findings suggest that transgender people of color are three times more at risk for anti-LGBT violence from police officers.
There is an epidemic of murders against the Black trans community, yet our nation is deadly silent. Together we can change that.
People.com editor Janet Mock wrote this in solidarity with the campaign:
I’m a woman. I’m black. I’m trans. And I’m alive. That’s a radical idea if you really think about it because trans women of color – specifically black and brown bodies – are active agents in our own survival despite unbearable statistics, lack of resources, dehumanizing media stories and exiling from many spaces.
And this notion of survival and resistance isn’t new.
We’ve always been survivors (I bow to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as I write this). For me, personally and politically, there’s no separating my womanness, my blackness, my transness from my me-ness.
