Visibly Unknown: Media Depiction of Murdered Transgender Women of Color

• DOI: 10.1177/2153368719886343
• Author: April Carrillo,Frank Wood,Elizabeth Monk-Turner
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Visibly Unknown: Media

Depiction of Murdered

Transgender Women

of Color

Frank Wood

1

, April Carrillo

1

, and

Elizabeth Monk-Turner

1

Abstract

Specific examples of transgender people misgendered and misidentified in media have

been well-documented; however, little work explores how media depicts the murder

of transgender people. The current work examines media coverage of the 23 trans-

gender women of color murdered in 2016. Utilizing content analysis, we identified five

themes including the brutality of these murders, the trivialization of the murders,

misgendering the victims, the emotional toll on significant others, and resiliency among

the transgender community. In general, media reports of deaths of transgender

women of color in 2016 reveal the saliency of stigmatization. Did these lives matter?

Keywords

media, transgender, content analysis, murder, minority women

On April 29, 2013, an article published in Cleveland Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper

had the following title, “Oddly dressed body found in Olmstead Township pond

identified” (Caniglia, 2013). The article described a body found in a retention pond

belonging to a “man” who was reported as missing. Yet, upon review of the article, it

becomes clear that although the “body” was described as male, the victim was a

transgender

1

woman of color whose actual name was Cece Dove. Throughout the

article, Cece was misgendered (the author used he/him rather than she/her pronouns)

and she was often referred to as “the body.” Despite descriptions of Cece’s body found

1

Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk,

VA, USA.

Email: eturner@odu.edu

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368719886343

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2022, Vol. 12(2) 368–\ 386

tied up and attached to a block of concrete, there was little acknowledgment that she

was the victim of a brutal murder. Instead, the author of the article chose to stress that

Cece was “oddly dressed” because her clothes did not match her biological sex.

The author of this article, and another that appeared the next day, used Cece’s mug

shots rather than a picture from her social media profiles. A quick search of her name

unearths several smiling, pleasant pictures of Cece that were more indicative of her

life rather than the criminalized undertones illustrated by the mug shots. When

reported on at the local level, many articles utilize practices known as deadnaming

(using the name a transgender person used before their transition) and misgendering

(using gender pronouns that reflect a transgender person’s physical sex instead of their

gender identity

2

; Barker-Plummer, 2013; Roshke, 2017; Sloop, 2000). The case of

Cece Dove is one example of local news articles mishandling information; however,

national news outlets such as Cable News Network and Slate also reveal challenges

when covering topics related to the trans community (Riedel, 2017).

The murder of transgender people, especially transgender people of color, is on the

rise. Analyzing media coverage of this topic is important because news coverage helps

shape our views of social issues (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation

[GLAAD], 2017a). The year 2016 was the deadliest recorded year for the number of

transgender people killed in the United States, but by 2017, a new record was set when

29 transgender homicide victims were identified (GLAAD, 2016; GLAAD, 2017a).

Our work focuses on transgender deaths in 2016, when 27 transgender people were

identified as murder victims. A clear majority (23) of these individuals were trans-

gender women of color (GLAAD, 2016; Human Rights Campaign [HRC], 2016).

While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has included gender identity as a

form of bias in annual hate crime statistics since 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics

posits transgender deaths are 40 times higher than what the FBI reports (FBI, 2015;

Stafford, 2015). Official statistics are conservative because countless victims are

misgendered and thus misidentified.

For these reasons, we use statistics provided by GLAAD, a U.S.-based LGBTQþ

3

advocacy group as well as other nonprofit organizations including the National Center

for Transgender Equality and the HRC as our primary data sources. Utilizing

resources provided by these organizations, it is important to recognize that the

invaluable stories and statistics surrounding the murders of trans women of color often

begins from places such as TransGriot. TransGriot is a blog run by Monica Roberts, a

trans woman of color, who,

matches the name of a slain transgender person to a murder victim identified only by their

legal name in local coverage [after she has been made aware of the death of someone in the

community]. Then she publishes findings on her long-running blog. (Allen, 2019, para. 2)

Yet, despite this tireless work, public awareness of this social problem remains

scant because mass media coverage habitually deadnames the victim, misgenders, and

dehumanizes them (Barker-Plummer, 2013; Roschke, 2017; Sloop, 2000). Hence, the

current work aims to better understand how media described the murders of the 23

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Wood et al.