Chapter 9: Personal Safety

• Author: Ally Windsor Howell
• Pages: 103-133

The bias and prejudice towards transgender persons leads to an inordinate

amount of violence directed toward transgender persons.

§9.1 Indifference to Violence against

Transgender Persons

While the following article may seem lengthy to some, the story that it

relates is important to an understanding of the problems faced by transgen-

der persons, and especially those transgender persons of color. In his article,

Disposable People, Bob Moser relates the following sad story:

In a city with no shortage of desolate neighborhoods, you’d be hard-

pressed to nd a bleaker spot than the corner of 50th and C streets

in Washington, D.C.

On one side, there’s a decaying school, its playground barren as a

prison yard. Extending up a couple of blocks is a string of deserted

apartment buildings with boards and burned-out holes where win-

dows used to be. Just across the way, folks still live in a set of matching

brick buildings.

It’s a tough place to grow up, especially when you’re different. Espe-

cially when you’re convinced that you’re a girl with a boy’s anatomy.

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Personal Safety

CHAPTER 9

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Especially when the other kids taunt you and throw bricks at you and

you have to quit school because you can’t stand it anymore. Especially

when you’re determined to live openly as a transgender woman, con-

sidered by many the lowest of the low.

Stephanie Thomas could have told you all about it. Until last Aug.

12, 2003.

Around 11:30 .. the night of the 11th, 19-year-old Thomas and

her best pal, 18-year-old Ukea Davis, reportedly told friends they were

going to a nearby gas station for cigarettes. Nobody can say for sure

where they actually went.

But just about everybody in the city knows that a little after 3 ..,

the friends were sitting in Thomas’ Camry at a stop sign on the corner

of 50th and C. Almost home. Then a car came up beside them, and

the two were pelted with re from a semiautomatic weapon.

According to an eyewitness report, another car approached after

the shooting. A man got out to see what had happened. Davis was

already dead. When the man nudged Thomas’ shoulder to see if she

was still alive, she moaned in conrmation. But her helper ed as the

rst car returned. The gunman got out and red more shots, making

sure Thomas was dead.

By the time rescue workers reached the bloody car, she was. Like

her friend’s, Thomas’ body had been pumped full of bullets—at least

10 apiece.

A block up 50th, Thomas’ mother, Queen Washington, got the

news at 5:30 .. She’d been well aware that it was dangerous to be

transgender in D.C.—or anywhere else in America, for that matter.

But she hadn’t seen this coming.

“If he’d known somebody was after him, I’d have known,” says

Washington, a feisty administrative assistant at the federal Bureau

of Land Management who never got used to calling Stephanie “she.”

“We were tight. He’d come by just that afternoon with his girlfriends,

before he went to get his nails done. We kept it real, him and I. He

knew I’d always protect him as much as I could.”

TRA NSGENDER PERSONS AND T HE LAW104

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