Repeat After Me: All Black Transwomen AREN'T Hookers
Monica Roberts
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2008/07/repeat-after-me-all-black-transwomen.html (http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2008/07/repeat-after-me-all-black-transwomen.html)
I get so sick of hearing the 'Black transwomen are hookers' shade. Every time one of my transsisters gets killed, in just about every story I read, the assumption is made that they are either hookers or if they had a prior arrest for it, it's played up in the story.
When the Duanna Johnson story broke last month, I cautioned some people commenting on it on the Bilerico Project not to jump to conclusions and assume that's just because the Memphis po-po's who beat her charged her with prostitution, that's not necessarily what she did for a living.
It does seem that any transwomen of color that interact with the police for whatever reason get pegged in the media as sex workers. Ahhh racism.
Monica is definitely exactly spot-on. And you see it within transsexual groups as well, that discomfort with the difference. Ya know, it matters not what someone does to make a living, how much they make or what ethnic background they have. Transsexuality doesn't just appear in white, middle to upper class, and well-heeled people.
And that's a good thing. If it did then those who spend a lot of time telling us and others that we are 'crazy,' demonic Satan-spawn might have some reason to at least accept the first of those falsities. IMO, it's high-time for the community to get that right. "Those people," yes all of us, need to be accepted for whom we are: human beings doing the best that we are able.
That there are differences should be seen by "the community" as being yet another srgument that being trans is a universal human characteristic, not just some fanciful imagining by bored, decadent Caucasians who have more money than they have sense.
Nichole