Transgender Rising: Baltimore Riots After Mya Hall

"Trans women of color were on the front lines of Stonewall, 

are leading our movement today 

and are criminalized 

and killed by police #MyaHall"

@HMeltChicago

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A Movement

On April 1st, the story broke about the death of Mya Hall, a trans woman of color, when she was gunned down by police in Baltimore. Early reports referred to Hall and her friend, and fellow trans woman who was wounded in the shooting, as "men dressed as women," "cross dressers," "men in drag," and "transvestites." Even in later accounts, Hall continued to be named by her birth name and gender. By casting her gender identity in derogatory and dismissive terms, the stories cast them as divergent criminals who stepped out of line (socially and legally), insinuating that the excessive police violence was somehow deserved. For nearly a month this story has gone unnoticed and unregarded as the Baltimore Uprisings fought back against the police violence that ended the life of Freddie Gray and the systematic marginalization of people of color in and beyond the city. Slowly, as more people begin to tell her story, the violence against the trans community has been recognized as inextricable from the violence against people of color. Among a growing number, the Baltimore Uprising has begun to be recognized as a fight #NoJusticeNoPeace yoking the argument #BlackLivesMatter with coextensive #TransLiveMatter politics. This critical intersection, however, remains in the outskirts of an already marginalized political movement. Even after #MyaHall, Baltimore still struggles to know how to respond to the rise of transgender stories and activism.

On Monday, April 27th, 2015, while marching in the Baltimore Uprisings, Deairra Michelle Venerable, a transgender woman of color, is taken prisoner by the newly militarized police. At first police booked her as a woman, but when they discovered that she was trans, they reprocessed her as a man and moved her to a men's jail. "Officials then forced the woman to remove her bra and hand it over to officials," reports Megan Specia and Colin Daileda. "[S]he was forced to wear the semi-transparent shirt that reveals the outline of her nipples" (Mashable.com). During this move, authorities also upped her bail for participating in the march from $75,000 to $100,000. Reporters note that these charges are unusual for a misdemeanor charge and clearly punitive for a protestor who nets $300 a week working at a salon.

On Friday, May 1st, 2015, Deairra Michelle Venerable is released from jail. Friends of hers worked hard to pay the police the $100,000 ransom bail for her release. That night, as I march the streets of Baltimore with a host of other members of the trans and queer community, I wonder where Venerable finds herself. Is she walking amidst the crowds? Is she at home? Did she leave the city? Can she leave? Indeed, part of the statement of such marches is the display of perambulatory power. As the Baltimore Curfew of 10:00 PM approaches, we will demonstrate through civil disobedience that we will go out where and when we will. The crux of this statement is that this liberty is highly contested and not everyone is free to come and go. At the end of the night, as a white trans woman working on her Ph.D, I got to go home. Walking during a similar march, a few days earlier, Venerable found herself caught up in a mass arrest, held in a jail cell, and now facing substantial financial as well as legal restrictions. After the death of Mya Hall and the Uprising, racism, classism and transphobia all work to limit movement(s) to keep persons and communities in their place.

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A Reflection

Even the ability to stop and reflect is a privilege. After weeks of protest, I recently took a pause to travel to Maine for Mother's Day weekend to celebrate with my partner and two little girls. At the airport, a woman of color working at BWI (Baltimore Washington International) asked me about my travel plans and insinuated that a lot of white people are fleeing the city right now. While I would want to argue that isn't my rationale for going up north, I have to admit that a host of liberties that allow me to travel are tied into a systematic segregation of transgender, race and class: there are those who have been given certain resources and can get away (even briefly) from the snares of Baltimore, then there are those who haven't and cannot. 

Mobility is something purchased through social and financial capital. Only recently have I risen from the station of student to Ph.D candidate capable of affording regular flights to be with my family. This small but significant shift in pay bracket has also been marked by a change in social status. Indeed the latter, demonstrates how class is not always tied to wealth. Being a part of the academy means I have access to opportunities (conferences, funding, grants, vacations, remote research) that allow me to move around more as part of my job without necessarily making a substantial amount of money. For instance, I am not tied to  show up to a workspace every day, like my machinist grandfathers and mechanic cousins. Yet I am keenly aware of how precarious is this liberty to travel and reflect. How many gatekeepers continually monitor my worthiness in the academy? How many loans do I have to manage in order to sustain a university lifestyle that remains incommensurate with my pay? Even with institutional support, how often do I get stopped by authorities, literal gatekeepers, the police, or the TSA, who interrogate me about my gender while they examine my body and my possessions? At least once literally holding up my underwear where other TSA agents and airline passengers to see while asking, "why do you want to be a woman if you also want to date women?" I am given some power to travel but its is a liberty that bears the contingency of walking the streets of Baltimore in the previous weeks. Authorities watch me and my communities, their weapons at hand, watching for any of us to step out of place.

The uncertainty of my ability to leave Baltimore for a time demonstrates that mobility is not only a privilege, it is a bribe. Control over my body and where it may go is constantly under threat of various physical and institutional lashes, which makes the carrot of a plane ticket all the more alluring. By allowing some bodies to leave Baltimore, systems buy their complicity in the oppression that keeps other bodies tied to a city, a job, a jail-cell, a coffin. By allowing some bodies to march in the Baltimore Uprisings, authorities drive a wedge between allies they push to the sidelines and those on the frontline who they arrest, abuse, or kill. What then is the significance of the BWI worker's observation that a large number of white people are fleeing Baltimore? Even if we grant that many may be traveling for Mother's Day, like me, what does it mean that they can take this respite? How does giving power of flight to some de-power those who stay grounded in Baltimore? Beyond marking privilege, how does my absence from Baltimore this week affect the Uprising's power of presence? Can I stand in solidarity while I walk away? Can I shout in the streets while I pause and reflect?

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A Resource

A bribe is not destructive because it offers someone something nice, but because it circumvents the just distribution of resources. These divested resources may come in the form of money, jobs, people, or time and consideration. The movement of one of these bodies away from a community, by choice or by force, diminishes its power. Authorities took Mya Hall off the streets with a gunshot, Deairra Venerable with a jail-cell, and me with a holiday plane-ticket. Through carrots and sticks we have been further separated from one another. Yet how might we reconcile through these divisions? How might we subvert the forces that pull us in different directions? How might be maintain solidarity even while the resources of our community become scattered? By remaining loyal where and when we can do the most for each other.

After her death, how are we to stand with Mya Hall? By remembering her story and her communities. Remembering does not only mean thinking about or recounting her life. Re-membering also means reconstituting a community. A life has been taken away. Let us fill that void by redoubling the lives we devote and support. This is the significance of the #BlackLivesMatter and #TransLivesMatter movements. We need to rebuild the social value of these communities by also rebuilding physical and financial capital. We need to rebuild the system to give homes, jobs, healthcare, education to give more lives the opportunities denied to Mya Hall. We cannot bring Mya Hall back from death, but we can make sure more trans women of color do not need to die in poverty. We can make sure more trans people do not need to sell their bodies on the streets in order to buy their bodies in over-priced doctor's offices. We can make sure that stealing a car will not be the only way for a trans woman of color to travel the streets of Baltimore. We can make sure that when trans women of color find themselves in the wrong place and time that they are not gunned down by police. We can rebuild our world so that fewer places are considered the wrong or right place for trans women of color. These are depleted needs that we can resource by surrendering those securities, mobilities, and bribes that divide us. We can make re-sourcing a part of re-membering.

How can we stand with Deairra Venerable? In the end, raising money is a great direct action campaign. A lack of financial resources to fight back at a big factor in how people are being oppressed and exploited in Baltimore. We can assist in her legal fund after her community has expended vital resources in paying her $100,000 bail. Funding such battles and communities do more than placate a justice department that arrest vulnerable persons in order to extort money from the citizens. Together we can fight the systems and hold them accountable. We can demand the system pay reparations for its histories of taking lives and resources from those it claimed to protect. It may be that the movement does not need our physical presence as much as it needs our financial and social capital. It may not need our voices as much as it needs active listening. It may not need more leaders or martyrs, as much as it needs community members. It may not need plane tickets away from Baltimore, as much as it needs good neighbors. We should not despair at the overwhelming demands of justice but be humbled by the countless ways that we can contribute. We can turn our bribes into resources for those to whom power and mobility is denied. The system has separated us through our individual vulnerabilities, but through a common movement we can come together in power.

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A few related articles:

Baltimore is Burning: 
Is this Mya Hall's Uprising?

The Hanging Tree: 
Remembering the Trans Community

The Lives and Afterlives of Leelah Alcorn: Remaking Meaning from Transgender Suicide

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Baltimore is Burning: Is This Mya Hall's Uprising?

"Set the world on fire.

#MatchboxDreams #NoJusticeNoPeace

#FreddieGray #Baltimore 

#BlackLivesMatter"

@DaneLawrence

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A Story

On April 1st, 2015, the first day of the month, Mya Hall (27) and Brittany Flemming (20), two trans women living and working in Baltimore were gunned down by police. Hall died. Flemming was injured. "When police initially noted that the two were dressed in women’s clothing, it seemed a strange twist," wrote Peter Herman for the Washington Post. "Later, authorities made a point to say that the garb had not been meant as a disguise." The two were later identified as two trans prostitutes that work near North Charles and 22nd streets. This is no April Fools joke. This strange fruit, this sort of violence, is not restricted to one day.  "Death," writes Herman, "comes too often, too young and too easy to a transgender population marginalized by a society that they say forces some to resort to prostitution, or what they call becoming 'survivor sex workers.'" This is the life and death of trans women of color in Baltimore.

On April 19th, 2015, Freddie Gray, a young black man (25), was killed when his spine was broken by Baltimore police. Immediately an "unrest" begins to swell across the city.

On April 25th, 2015, what was later called protests, riots, and uprisings began in the city citing Gray's death but responding to wider systems of marginalization, oppression, and violence against people of color in Baltimore.

On April 28th, 2015, after calling in the National Guard, flooding Baltimore with armored cars, troops with assault rifles, and around the clock patrolling, a 10PM curfew was set for the city. Peace and safety will be imposed by armed forces at the expense of citizens' liberty. Ignoring the outcry of its people, the city authorities declare a state of emergency, marking its citizens as potential threats. The city effectively became military occupied territory.

On April 30th, 2015, the last day of the month, I sit in my apartment listening to the constant din of sirens as the lights of armored vehicles periodically flash across my screen. It is after 10PM, I am confined to stay in for the night. There will be no going out to bars or the movies. Following updates about the continued protests around Baltimore and in other cities, I am drawn to reflect on the arc of recent events. I am humbled by the specificity of the life and death stories of those like Mya, Brittany, and Freddie. Their joys and pains, and those of their community, are their own. That I want to respect with deference. Yet, I also feel implicated in the narratives of gender, sexuality, class, and race that systematically dictate our shared experiences. That I want to honor with solidarity. I want to be an attentive reader of this wider story that connects lives too often held apart. Isolated, we become all the more vulnerable, oppressed, erased. Mya's circumstances and death are forgotten in discussion of Freddie's, and too many in my communities wish to hold both at arm's length as groups assert their privilege, indifference, and safety. The question is thus raised: who gets to claim this story? In whose memory and on whose grave do we lay down the injustice and uprising in Baltimore? Who gets to be remembered?

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A Question

Baltimore is burning and I ask, is this Mya Hall's uprising? It is Freddie Gray who gets his name shouted as protestors march down the streets. His life comes with a tragic death. Yet so too does hers. His story is being told. Hers is forgotten. In raising this question I do not mean to diminish in any way the impact that the systematic oppression and killing of a man of color. Nor do I wish to downplay his marginalization as a black man by playing up Mya's transness. Indeed the intersections of the city in which they live and the intersections of identity by which they died seem too intermeshed to allow us to separate them. To follow on path long enough will require us to cut across the other, even at times to share the road. Yet the authors and readers of this story can and do begin their plot with a cis, hetero man of color and cuts a path around the trans woman of color. In a narrative about unjust systems of difference, such as race, it is still be manicured to keep other systems of difference, such as gender, separate. Whether it is being stated or not, there are reasons that a massive protest that calls upon the sympathies of cities across the country arises in the name of a cis hetero man and not a trans woman. To say the choice was discussed is wild speculation. To say that sexist, transphobic, even homophobic sentiments are at play when the death of one sparks a few articles and the other becomes the rallying point for a large-scale public demonstration testifies to a consistent seclusion and erasure of trans lives from intersecting politics. Put simply, Freddie Gray is a safer poster boy for the Baltimore Uprisings than Mya Hall. 

In an importance sense, Baltimore is not burning for Mya Hall. The trans community reaches out to claim her narrative, asking the critical questions that sparked the Uprising. Who claimed Hall’s body? What did her parents say? How many times was she shot? Why did the police have to shoot her?  Yet the wider community does not remember nor tell her story. Neither the fires nor the passions are claiming her story as fuel. People ask, "Who Is Freddie Gray?" but not "Who is Mya Hall?" The tragic figure to spark and fuel the Baltimore Uprising has been chosen. Yet the choice of exclusively cis-male propellent is by no means compulsory or finalized. The unrest in our hearts may yet find room for more life than one. Indeed, it is in our own best interest not to isolate our joint narrative to either Freddie or Mya. Already those seeking to secure the city and the story are working to discredit Freddie Gray as no fallen hero. They are trying to reduce a mass movement against systematic oppression into a narrative that rises and falls with Freddie Gray. By limiting the story to Freddie's crime record, the systems of marginalization that made crime a presumed path become mostly elided and the systems of violence that killed him are partially exculpated. 

If Mya was considered on her own, reduction to the life and death of a single individual would be no less a part of the program of extinguishing the movement. Readers would forget, as Bryanna A Jenkins, who runs a trans advocacy group in Baltimore testifies, “[Trans women] are being driven to their deaths. Out here, you can be attacked. You can be raped. You can be arrested for being trans.” Likely the same agents that work to discredit Freddie and the Baltimore Uprisings would not write more sympathetically following the story that Mya was "a friendly but troubled loner," that she worked as a prostitute, that "she was high and looking for a date," that she was driving "a stolen car" when she encountered the police, that she had "a history of theft and assault," and that she "did not obey a guards instructions" which put her in the situation that served as the trigger for police to open fire (The Huffington Post). What little consideration of the cultural contexts and systematic violences that were given in the stories covering Mya's death would be drowned by character attacks if she was instead held up as the spark of the Baltimore Uprising. 

Anyone singled out as a hero could be pulled apart by cutting out and showcasing the least sympathetic parts of their lives. As much as supporters choosing Freddie Gray over Mya Hall, the oppositions' obsession with isolating narratives to individuals testifies that our story needs more than one protagonist can offer.

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A Call

What we learn from considering Mya Hall's place in the story of the Baltimore Uprising is that our call to action may come from many directions at once. Already LGBT activists, in particular trans activists, are relating the Baltimore Uprising to the Stonewall Riots that fueled (not started) a movement. Might we look again at the reasons Baltimore is Burning in the light of such histories as is captured in Paris is Burning? Might the trans community become ignited in solidarity, drawn by the inextricability, with the fires of race and class already being fanned around the country? Whose else may have her story remembered in the flashing beams of the armored vehicles? Who else have have their story re-written in the flickering incandescence of the burning police van? To who else might our blaze call? What dark corner might answer it with fresh tinder?

The system of oppression and violence is too big to be brought down by an individual, living or dead, even with the force of mass movement behind him. Such an expansive problem requires a response just as complex. We need solidarity. We need as many matches as the powderkeg has fuses. The more of us willing to risk our safety by catching fire for change the more we can not only break down roadblocks towards justice, but we can avoid rebuilding the same systems of exclusion that we oppose. This means we have to give up the things that we suppose excludes our stories from intersecting with those of Freddie Gray, Mya Hall, and the rest of Baltimore burning around us. We need to step out of our apartments, our privilege, our individual narratives that make us feel secure. We need to surrender our safety if we are going to be dangerous, if we are going to be powerful. If we think critically about policing borders of identity, community, politics, and narrative, we discover that safety is not only a privilege, it is a weapon, a system of authority that separates us from you. The few become the tyrants of the many. All those made to feel outside that protection, the queer, crip, trans, femme, people of color, know how it is to live penned in by violence. Anything with power is dangerous, the difference now is that the authorities have momentarily lost control over that power. Moments like this, when the people awake, arise, and remember their strength, reveal how those authorities are dependent on the power of the masses. We have control over how our stories will be told and who gets included. Before those burning for justice are extinguished, may the fires find a home in you. Burn with us.

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What Story Will You Tell 
in Response?

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