(Part 3) Black Women of Trans Experience
Dear Cis Privilege,
We’re going to make it routine to recognize Black Women of Trans Experience even more frequently than before because we’re on the verge of complete extinction due to murders at the hand of uneducated and heartless cis folk. So we are appreciating the lovelies of today while they are here and some who have already left us.
I’m rather amazed by the older black women of trans experience like Tenika Watson and Tracy Gayle Norman (pictured above) who made it to be in their 50s and 60s without being brutally murdered, despite both confessing to near death experiences and viscous attacks due to living as trans—I hate that I sometimes see slice marks and stab wounds on them because it proves to me that it was a hard life experience. It’s unreal to see older black trans women. I see them and wonder how they did it and I wonder how many traumatic accounts have they endured with racism for their blackness and transphobia separately, which they have not complained about.
How when they were my age, there was still this paramount paranoia of walking the streets—in day time or at night, the amount of jeopardy they were in with employment and how they were forced to live stealth even if they didn’t want to and when discovered, they were on the streets with no one to offer support. How the laws were even less for the justice of trans people and how their close friends were murdered by men they were in romantic relationships with and who claimed they were “tricked” but knew all along and it was justified in courts—or how it their murders didn’t even go that far. How plenty of women and girls ended up missing and no one cared to find out where they were except their gay families who they adopted from homelessness—not their families who disowned them completely and felt an ounce of remorse for it.
How they fought for who they are because they knew who they were regardless of the complete lack of understanding and ignorance of trans people of their generations—there wasn’t even a name for it. How their black families disowned them and called being “trans” an exclusively “white” thing which is why they weren’t accepted. How so many black trans people —even today—are beat by parents for not following traditional societal roles since toddlers. How we are beat by our parents, our siblings, then have to go to school and we’re beat on by the other students, then grow up and get beat on by strangers, realizing that everyone is potentially an enemy and wants the worse for you. Crazy how we even get accustomed to be called “Its” and “Shims” and there’s so many people don’t even see us as humans.
I have three questions: Why do y’all hate us so much? I understand Black Women are hated but why are we hated by other black people—men and women? And can we live past 29 or 30 years old? We don’t have to be treated special or anything. Like we would simply enjoy existing. We disgust yall more than the white people who oppress you—all of us. Same black men and women who clown on us have white women all over their blogs. I don’t understand.
All that will be left to prove we once existed will be photos archived in the internet. The same internet where you laugh at the tweets and memes of trans people. No you may not be out here murdering us, but you’re handing these men the knives and guns.
Bye.
amen.
gamerfreakathon 