Trans women live and in color.

• Author: Devereaux, Shaadi

I was having my morning coffee and decided to plug into the Twitter matrix for my daily dose of media and current events. I was greeted by a picture of a beautiful black trans woman with flowing purple hair and a link to the report of her murder. Friend and writer Sydette Harry said it best, "I'd like to wake up one morning and see a picture of a beautiful black trans woman without a murder headline next to it."

When tragedy and violence are inextricably linked to your existence and death is as much a part of your daily fare as your morning coffee, how do you cope? When your name could be the next headline, how do you survive?

After Ferguson, we saw a deep desire emerging in this country to understand how violence grips our communities and shapes relationships among race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. We also see a battle over who gets to frame the ways we look at violence. Who is a victim and whose behavior is pathological and criminal?

Police often profile black trans women as sex workers, seeing us through a lens of hypersexualized criminality. The criminalization of sex work, one of the few informal economies to which trans women have access in the absence of economic protection or labor rights, is a major feminist issue. When trans women are murdered there is often a mention of sex work as if sex workers are disposable and homicide is one of the unavoidable consequences of their behavior. We are always assumed to be somewhere we weren't supposed to be, doing something we weren't supposed to do.

The more visibly black, trans, femme, woman, disabled, and poor we are the more we must have "had it coming."

Alongside the trail of YouTube videos, articles and think pieces on incidents of police violence, we see all the parallel headlines of missing and murdered trans women of color. But somehow it's a conversation that doesn't seem to take off quite the same way. There's a stillness and silence around this issue. People seem reluctant to fully engage this topic. Why is there no collective outrage and immediate call to action from our anti-violence, racial justice and feminist movements?

When we talk about valuing black life, it's most often as a rallying cry to the defense of black men. We rarely rally around black cisgender women, and certainly not black trans women. We tend to look at black men as the number one target of state violence despite even more staggering rates found among black women. When we talk about violence against...