Brutalization and the deaths of Black transgender people were some of the topics highlighted by speakers outside the San Jose City Hall Rotunda on Saturday.
Co-organized with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Silicon Valley and Maribel Martínez, director of the County of Santa Clara Office of LGBTQ Affairs, the Black Trans Lives Matter protest was in honor of Riah Milton, Tony McDade, Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells and many more Black trans people who recently died.
“All Black lives matter and all Black trans women get brutalized at alarming rates,” said Sera Fernando to the crowd of about 40 people.
Fells and Milton were both found dead the same week with Milton shot and killed during a robbery in Ohio on June 9 and Fells found dead one day earlier in Philadelphia according to a TIME article.
Only three days later on June 12, the Trump administration reversed protections for transgender people in the U.S. health care system.
Fernando, who identifies as she/her, talked about mourning the deaths of transgender women every November 20, otherwise known as the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
According to a report from the Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming people in the U.S. died from fatal violence in 2019. The majority were Black transgender women.
In 2020, the organization reported 16 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means.
“This is during shelter in place, 16 lives lost,” Fernando said.
Crystal Haney, who identifies as she/her, followed up Fernando by speaking on sex safety issues, an important topic for the transgender community.
Haney said because a lot of trans women are forced into sex work, selling drugs or other means to survive, there is a high risk they will face police brutality.
She also talked about trans women who needed help gaining access to condoms because they didn’t feel safe carrying them for fear of being labeled as a prostitute by police and getting pulled over.
“They have to hide them in bushes, they have to hide them in places around them just so they don’t get pulled over,” Haney said.
According to an international human rights advocacy organization called the Human Rights Watch, in 2012 police in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco stopped, searched and arrested sex workers using condoms as evidence for prostitution charges.
For many sex workers, particularly transgender women, arrest meant facing degrading treatment and abuse at the hands of the police, according to the July 19, 2012 news release.
“We need to change this system so it is not making people criminalized for what they are, for who they are,” Haney said.
Gabrielle Antolovich, President of the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center, which serves as a resource and community hub for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of all ages and backgrounds, spoke about her personal experience with being discriminated against for being lesbian.
She said she was 19 years old when the Stonewall riots took place. These riots, which often turned into violent demonstrations, were the LGBTQ+ community responding to a police raid on June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City.
“I was one of the first people naively coming out of the closet on national television,” Antolovich said.
While Antolovich lived in Australia in the 1970s, she said her sexual preference hindered her ability to get a job because “no one wanted to hire an openly gay.”
She said she and the San Jose trans community are happy to see the Black Lives Matter movement coming together with the LGBTQ+ community and organizations to raise awareness.
She also said it’s just as important to work with city officials to see more nonprofits working with sex workers and homeless people and said there are already city funds working toward that goal.
One other important topic touched on by not only Fernando, but by some of the heterosexual speakers, was abolishing toxic masculinity.
Rev. Jethroe Moore II, president of the NAACP’s San Jose chapter, spoke on how he needed to change his perspective as a heterosexual man to be able to support the LGBTQ+ community as equal humans.
“I can’t say I love you, if I don’t understand you, if I don’t know you, if I’m not there to back you up,” he said. “I was brought up heterosexual and I don’t get it, so let me understand.”
Fernando said it’s important for more cis people like Moore to stand up for Black and transgender lives to better amplify the movement.
“It’s not the ownership of Black trans women to be able to fight for their own goddamn lives, it's up to us as allies, as individuals,” Fernando said.
She said she loves seeing people protest for Black trans lives and even people who might be uncomfortable with transgender people or others with different sexual preferences, they need to educate themselves because it was most likely taught to them.
“If it’s built in, if it’s learned animosity and learned hate, learned discrimination, then you can unlearn that,” Fernando said.
