Today, Explained - Deadname
Episode Date: September 11, 2018Three transgender women of color have been murdered in the past two weeks. ProPublica’s Lucas Waldron explains why so many murders of trans people remain unsolved, and why a lot of it boils down to ...something called a “deadname.” ****************************************** Watch the Vox-ProPublica video on how ID laws can put trans people in danger: https://bit.ly/2MkETod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I'm Lucas Waldron.
I'm a multimedia journalist at ProPublica.
My colleague and I, we were able to identify 85 murders of transgender people over the last three and a half years.
Those 85 are only the cases we were able to actually find
that had actually been reported.
We know that there are many more murders of trans people
than simply 85,
but because trans people are often misgendered,
they are frequently dead-named.
Dead-naming means that you're using a name to describe someone that they no longer use and
no longer identify with. Frequently what we see is the ID that they carry has a name on it that
was their name given at birth, but it's not the name that anyone really knows them by. You know,
trans people often change their name. I myself changed my name from my birth name to the name
that I chose for myself, which is Lucas.
There's actually another problem called misgendering,
which essentially means that you're calling someone using a pronoun that is not how they identify and is not how they present themselves.
Because trans people are frequently dead-named and misgendered by law enforcement,
cases of trans folks being killed are often not known about.
In fact, we found multiple cases
where the loved ones of a trans person who was killed
didn't even find out that they were killed,
in some cases for months,
because the police were using a name that that person wasn't known by.
We found that in 74 out of 85 cases, that's 87%, the victim was deadnamed and or misgendered by police.
That's a pretty high percentage.
And we actually followed up with every single one of those police departments, sheriff's offices, making phone calls, emails.
We used the Freedom of Information Act, essentially filing a public records request asking for documents and police reports.
That's called a FOIA, F-O-I-A.
Why are all of these trans people being deadnamed and misgendered?
And how is that impacting the police investigation?
One of the places we really focused on in our reporting was Jacksonville, Florida, which is a city where four trans women have been shot this year.
Three of those women died, and the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office has really mishandled some of these investigations.
Jacksonville is an interesting place.
It is the largest city in America by land size.
It is the 12th largest city in the country by population.
It's also in the deep south.
It's in, you know, northern, northern Florida, very close to the Georgia border.
It's an extremely conservative city.
It's an extremely segregated city.
It's a place where the relationship with the community
and the police is incredibly tense. When Selene Walker was shot to death in a hotel room in
Jacksonville, Florida, the police referred to her as a black man. And that's what they put on,
you know, their incident reports. That's how they referred to her
when talking to the media. 36-year-old Celine Walker, she was a transgender woman police
identified as a male when she was killed. Someone has been killed. And the police are going around
saying, oh, a black man named, you know, XYZ was killed in this hotel room. So you can imagine if
you're a bystander and you saw a woman walk into that room,
when the police say they found a man killed, it creates this huge sort of hurdle in the
investigation of these homicides. In Selene Walker's case, the trans community and kind of
the LGBT community in general started making calls to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office,
to local news outlets.
Can you please, you know, treat her respectfully and describe her the way that she lived?
Essentially, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said, no, we have a policy.
We only use the name and the sex listed on a victim's ID.
Or the coroner says that it's a male, and that's it. Celine Walker was killed in February.
And then in June of this year, another trans woman was killed.
She was killed in the street.
She was shot to death.
The woman's name was Antoche English.
And, you know, again, they referred to her as a man.
About a week later, another trans woman, a Black trans woman, was shot.
She luckily survived.
But again, police incident reports, they use a name that she didn't identify with.
And then at the end of June, there's a fourth shooting of a Black trans woman in Jacksonville.
Tragedy for the transgender community.
Four women have been attacked in Jacksonville since the start of this year.
Three are now dead.
JSO says a black male in his 20s who appeared to identify as a woman
was found dead at the Quality Inn on Sunday afternoon.
And the police again released her dead name.
In just the past 90 minutes, Jacksonville police have released that victim's birth name.
We're working, though, to learn the name she went by.
So there's a pretty clear pattern in Jacksonville of the police responding to shootings of trans women this way.
And it happens that all three of these were Black transgender women.
And there are some pretty clear explanations for that.
When you're a Black trans woman, you really have three things stacked against you.
One of the folks in our story, Aya Celestis from Jacksonville, talked about this really explicitly. She said, not only am I black and facing discrimination, not only do I present
and identify as a woman and face discrimination, but I'm also transgender and face discrimination.
So you have this basically triple threat lined up against you. And for many of the trans women we
talk to, they live in states that
don't have a non-discrimination law that includes gender identity. You could be fired from a job
simply for being transgender. Black trans women are often pushed out of the job market.
They can be fired simply for being themselves. They are often victims of violence. And without the ability to be in sort of the mainstream economy, these folks are pushed into the underground economy.
You can be pushed into sex work.
Some folks call that survival sex.
Basically, you need to eat, you need to pay your rent, so you do sex work. There have been several studies that have shown that sex workers face an enormous amount of violence when they're working. women being killed in particularly brutal ways by people who had paid them for sex work and then
felt ashamed that they had had sex with a trans person and, you know, brutally killed them.
There was one particular case that I haven't been able to get out of my mind since I first
started looking into it. A trans woman in southern Mississippi met up with a guy that she had met online for sex.
He had sex with her and then claims he realized that she was trans and he flew into a rage and stabbed her 190 times.
She died and he admitted to it after the fact that he did it because he was so freaked out about her being trans.
What we see in our set of 85 homicides that we've looked into is that sex work is a common pattern.
Poverty is a really common pattern. Folks who don't have access to the job market being,
you know, pushed into unsafe situations was a very common pattern.
In Celine Walker's case, what friends of hers told us is, you know, she was probably working the night she was killed. She was staying in a hotel in Jacksonville. She wasn't from Jacksonville,
she was from Tampa. But she was shot to death, quite possibly by someone who was meeting up with her to, you know, exchange sex for money.
One of the women that we talk to quite a bit is named Savannah Bowens.
She's a Black trans woman.
She lives in Jacksonville.
She talked to us a lot about how hard it is to deal with employment issues when you're
trans.
A lot of times, trans women, they're resorting to things
such as prostitution because society has made it so hard. And I thank God again that I've never had
to prostitute. But when she goes in for interviews, she also experiences this panic that her employer
might find out that she is trans and fire her. This could be the best job ever.
But in Florida, there are no laws that say you can't fire someone for being transgender.
And now all of a sudden they see my gender marker and now they're treating me different.
You know?
So that's scary. Hello?
Auntie Shanta. Hello? Auntie Shantaanta can you hear me hi sean yes how are things in sri lanka
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We are doing well.
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How many police departments did you actually talk to about this? We reached out to 65 total police departments or sheriff's offices
to ask about their investigation into these cases and to find out specifically if they had any
formal policy about how to refer to a transgender victim of a crime. And what did you find? In almost
every case, there was, you know, no policy whatsoever about how to refer to transgender
people. And that means that officers
are probably not getting any training about, you know, what does a trans person even mean
and what is the right way to talk about these people respectfully, but also in a way that
will help you solve the case. What could states do to address this head on? One of the critical
things that states can do is make their ID laws a lot easier for trans people to navigate.
Right now, as it stands, the laws in every state
about how to update your ID to reflect the gender that you identify with
and the name that you identify with are extremely confusing.
In some cases, they're very burdensome.
In certain states, you have to actually show proof of having a very expensive surgery
just to get that little gender marker on your ID changed from, you know, an M to an F or an F to an M.
How expensive are we talking here?
Surgeries that trans folks might pursue can range from in the low tens of thousands to $20,000, $30,000.
In places like Alabama, we've seen cases where folks have gone ahead and had a really expensive surgery and gone to apply for their new ID and been denied. have such a large amount of discretion in these issues that in some states they can actually really deny your gender marker change for any reason.
They don't even have to say why.
Is part of the problem here that states are ill-equipped to deal with
a certain gender fluidity that exists inside and out of the trans community?
Yeah, I mean, there are two issues in play.
The first is that there are plenty of folks
who identify as non-binary or gender non-conforming
who would like an ID that does not necessarily say male or female.
They would prefer an ID that says something like an X or a T.
In certain states like California,
they're starting to allow people to actually
get this sort of third gender marker. But the bigger issue is not so much the fluidity issue.
It's literally just not allowing trans people to update their ID within the binary. For example,
we spoke quite a bit with one woman who lives in Georgia.
I think I actually intimidate some of the women at the facility by my makeup.
She went to get her name changed in Georgia and was able to do it. Georgia's name change laws
are not that burdensome. He just sent it down to the clerk and I was like, okay, so how long is
this going to take? And she said, well, we can go downstairs and get it now. And I was like, awesome.
But when she went to get her gender marker changed so that her gender marker could say F instead of M, she wasn't allowed to.
Georgia requires you to have proof of surgery.
The cost of gender reassignment surgery at the low end that I've seen in research in the United States is $15,000.
You know, she's not in a financial position to pursue a 15 or 20 or
$25,000 surgery. Just imagine for a second, every time that you show your ID, if you board a plane,
if you buy a drink, if you're pulled over because you're speeding a little bit,
and someone looks at your ID and it says something that they don't quite think lines up with what you look like,
there's all kinds of discrimination that can happen from those sort of simple tasks,
like buying a drink, trying to get into a bar.
When states are struggling to even like allow trans people to use
bathrooms, is changing state ID laws and police department practices just
something that's so far away, a long shot?
It's a difficult issue to talk about because at the fundamental level, many trans people are
discriminated against so much in their everyday life, like in going to the bathroom, you know,
in trying to get a driver's license. Asking police departments to make policy changes
can feel out of reach and extremely daunting. But there are certain departments that we can look at
who are actually making changes. Texas, for example, is an extremely conservative state.
They have, you know, ID laws that are burdensome for trans people.
Yet the Dallas Police Department, they have kind of an informal policy to not release the dead name
of a victim. And the deputy chief of the Dallas Police Department told us specifically, you know,
this is just the way we do it because it's more likely we're going to solve this crime if we're
referring to this person using the name and the gender that they were actually known by. They said it's just
good policing. The same thing with the Los Angeles Police Department. Both of those departments were
sort of examples of ways that police could approach this issue. Most departments we talk to,
the vast majority, are not doing anything like that. But because there are a few examples
you can point to of folks who are really trying, that makes it a little bit easier and makes it
feel a little bit more possible. As a trans person yourself, have you run into any of these issues
with police or with your own state ID or anything like that? I was interested in looking into this issue and doing this story in part because I have had problems updating my own ID.
I was living in California and I had gotten a court order to change my name and my gender marker.
And I went to the DMV with my court order and I was told by a DMV official that I couldn't get a gender marker change without proof of surgery.
And not only that, I needed to provide proof that the surgery had happened over three years ago.
That's like a totally made up thing. That's not a law in California. Even though it's not a law,
when the DMV officer says that to you, there's not really a lot you can do. I eventually did
get my gender marker changed, but it was like a whole situation. I had to consult a lawyer. It was a lot of things that,
you know, for me as a white trans male presenting person, I was able to access, you know, I was able
to take the time off work. I was able to pay the court fees, but that's not accessible to so many people in the community.
All of this just brings me back to something that Savannah down in Jacksonville told me during my reporting, which is, she said,
when I die, I don't want to be called a man.
I want to be called Savannah.
I don't want the news to disrespect me and call
me Emil. That's not who I live my life as. That is not my legacy. And it was really powerful when she
talked to us about that because she's living in a city where Black trans women are being shot
and their murders are not being solved. And she's afraid to walk around and afraid if she is killed that she'll be horribly
disrespected by the police. People knew me as Savannah. They knew me as she, you know what I mean?
People know me as Savannah. They knew me as she. Thank you. Transcription by CastingWords