Although LGBT communities as a whole face structural
violence from the external institution of the heteronormative State, many
members of the LGBT community suffer under collective internalizations of
raced, gendered, and classed forms of silencing that have grown into blatant
systems of intra-community oppression. A prime example of this transition from
the external to the internal can be found within the transmisogynistic dynamics
that transpire within the LGBT community. In other words, the dehumanization of
trans women by queer and trans male/transmasculine circles serves as a form of
injustice that must be recognized, acknowledged, and destroyed.
On an
economic scale, transgender women are disproportionately targeted by homo-capitalism.
In her Salon article “If I became a
man, would you pay me more,” Catherine Price notes that a TIME study observing
the wage gap between transgender men and transgender women detected (on average)
a 32 percent decrease in trans women’s salaries (post-transition) in comparison
to a 1.5 percent increase in trans men’s salaries (post-transition). Consequently,
it is no coincidence that transgender women face disproportionate poverty
rates.
Furthermore, the policing of trans female retaliation against these
forms of casual and institutionalized transmisogyny—whether it be manifested
within literal forms of policing by the penal system or manifested within more abstract
methods of policing perpetuated by queers and/or female-assigned trans people—is
also prevalent within the LGBT community. According to the authors of Queer (In)Justice, a black trans woman
named Monica James was sent to court in 2007 for allegedly assaulting a “white,
gay, off-duty police officer.” Although James asserted that she was defending
herself from the officer, she was silenced under the premise that (white) gay
men could not exert agency over her (misgendered) body (Mogul et al. 76). Asstated by Yezmin Villareal and Dawn Ennis of Advocate magazine, the LGBT community’s disposal of/disregard for
trans women’s bodies had extended to tangible and hypervisible political realms
when trans Latina activist Jennicet Gutierrez was reprimanded for interrupting
President Obama’s Pride speech at a White House event (in order to bring
attention to the horrors that undocumented trans women of color regularly face
under his deportation policies). Instead of supporting Jennicet, the gays and
lesbians who attended the White House Pride event cheered as Obama vocally shamed
her. When revolutionary Sylvia Rivera shouted “I’ve been trying to get up here
all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every
motherfucking week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a goddamn thing
for them” and “The women have tried to fight for their sex changes or to become
women of the Women’s Liberation and they write STAR…not to the women’s groups…they
do not write to men…they write STAR” in 1973, her cries were not in vain; her
disdain for the transmisogyny that plagues the LGBT community still rages within
the hearts of many trans women—and anti-transmisogynists alike—today.
Trans women matter and their lives must be protected; the
LGBT community must not forget that it was trans women of color (e.g., Sylvia
Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Miss Major) who helped—and continue to help—queer
liberationist rhetoric and action thrive. However, neoliberal reformation and
legalized equality will not eradicate transmisogyny. The passage of laws that
will theoretically ban the denial of housing, fair wages, and the freedom to
simply live without prosecution and/or persecution (e.g., a reformed police
system coupled with the introduction of new hate crime bills) to trans women
will not erase the fact that in 2013, “…more than half of all LGBT homicide
victims were transgender women of color” (This rate reached an alarming brand new high this year when approximately 17 transgender women—many of whom were of
color—were murdered between January and August). The law will not banish the
systemic hatred of trans women from the psyches, behavior, and actions of
individuals who do not identify as trans women (or who are not male-assigned
trans people); instead, it will only “…fail to address larger social forces influencing
individual acts of violence [against trans women (of color)]” while “…[implying]
a false equivalence [in power] between [trans women and transfeminine people]
and [those who are not male-assigned trans people]” (Mogul 127). As proposed by
activist Urvashi Vaid and the authors of Queer
(In)Justice, community and healing-based organizing that advocates for “…access
to [violence and STI] prevention tools,” the destigmatization of sex work/homelessness/drug
usage, copwatches, the destruction of the prison-industrial complex, autonomous
“self-help health [movements]” organized by trans women for other trans women
and male-assigned trans people, and the dismantling of patriarchy will greatly assist
trans women in their current struggle for liberation (Mogul et al. 127, 156-7; Vaid
149).
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