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New U.S. Transgender Survey

December 8, 2016 By HKearl

transgenderreportThe U.S. Transgender Survey was released today by the National Center for Transgender Equality. Among the findings are alarming ones relating to discrimination and harassment in public spaces:

Public accommodations and bathrooms

“Accessing basic goods and services is also a major hurdle for transgender people:

  • 31 percent of trans people experienced mistreatment in the past year at a place of public accommodation (stores, hotels, etc.), including being denied equal service (14 percent), verbal harassment (24 percent), or physical attack (2 percent).
  • 20 percent avoided at least one type of public accommodation because they feared mistreatment.
  • 9 percent of respondents were denied access to a restroom in the past year.
  • Restrooms were often unsafe, with 12 percent experiencing verbal harassment, 1 percent experience physical attacks, and 1 percent experience sexual assault when accessing a restroom.
  • 59 percent avoiding a public restroom in the last year out of fear of confrontations, with 32 percent actually limiting what they ate or drank to avoid the restroom.
  • 8 percent reported a urinary tract infection, kidney infection, or other kidney-related problem in the past year as a result of avoiding the restrooms.”

And…

  • “46 percent of trans people experienced verbal harassment in the past year.
  • 9 percent of trans people experienced a physical attack in the past year.”

H/T our board member Patrick

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Filed Under: LGBTQ, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: research, transgender

TDOR 2016

November 20, 2016 By HKearl

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Via HRC:

“Now in its 18th year, TDOR is a time for the transgender community and allies to mourn those who have been victims of anti-trans violence, and to recommit to ensuring that their lives – and deaths – are not forgotten. TDOR allows us to call attention to the continued violence and injustice transgender people face every day.

In 2015, HRC reported the murders of at least 21 transgender people in the United States, more than any previous year on record. A disproportionate number of these victims were transgender women of color. That alarming trend has continued in 2016. HRC and the Trans People of Color Coalition (TPOCC) just released A Matter of Life and Death: Fatal Violence Against Transgender People in America 2016, a new, heartbreaking report documenting the often deadly violence faced by the transgender community and exploring the factors that fuel these tragic attacks.

“TDOR is about mourning those who have been taken from us through violence, transphobia and hatred, and it is a way of recognizing the loss that those lives represent to our community,” said Nicole Cozier, HRC Director of Diversity & Inclusion.

picture1

“TDOR empowers HRC’s steering committees, members and other activists on the ground to support members of the transgender community in their regions. It’s about mobilizing our communities to reach out and say, ‘We’re here and we stand with you.’” Cozier said.

It’s for this reason, I’m so pleased that the latest anti-harassment transit campaign we worked on in the Washington, D.C. area includes a transwoman of color in one of the ads. Trans people, including Trans people of color deserve respect, dignity, love and — to not fear for their lives!!!!

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Filed Under: LGBTQ, race Tagged With: person of color, transgender

This New Survey on Trans Bathroom Discrimination Should Alarm Everyone

July 13, 2016 By Contributor

Patrick Ryne McNeil, SSH Board Member

Toilet sign 4.pptxThis is a fact: LGBTQ people experience public harassment – and according to our spring 2014 report, LGBTQ people in the United States are more likely than straight, cisgender people to report experiencing it (both verbal and physical forms). The sample size in our research forced us to group the entire LGBTQ community into one category. While this lumping is not ideal and cannot account for the ways that intersecting identities lead everyone to experience the world differently, it did show that queer people – as past research has shown – are victims of public harassment.

Preliminary findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, out this month from the National Center for Transgender Equality, show that trans people face one particularly dangerous form of public harassment: the kind that takes place in public restrooms.

According to the preliminary results:

  • 59 percent of respondents have avoided bathrooms in the last year because they feared confrontations in public restrooms at work, at school, or in other places.
  • 12 percent said they’ve been harassed, attacked, or sexually assaulted in a bathroom in the last year.
  • 31 percent said they’ve avoided drinking or eating so that they didn’t need to use the restroom in the last year.
  • 9 percent report being denied access to the appropriate restroom in the last year.

These findings should concern and anger everyone. In the same way that street harassment can force women and other marginalized communities into making consequential life changes – like adjusting their commute, moving homes, or switching jobs – harassment of trans people in public bathrooms, as the survey shows, can cause them to avoid using public facilities or can discourage them from drinking or eating in the first place. Those are harmful choices that no one should have to make.

While 12 percent reported experiencing harassment, attacks, or sexual assault, 59 percent have avoided restrooms because they’re afraid it will happen to them. That fear – even in the absence of harassment – is unhealthy. And bills popping up across the country to restrict restroom access aren’t helping.

The full U.S. Transgender Survey will be released later this year.

Patrick works in communications at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where he writes on a range of social justice issues. He is a board member of Stop Street Harassment and he wrote his thesis on the street harassment of gay and bisexual men at the George Washington University. He was awarded SSH’s Safe Public Spaces Trailblazer award in 2013 for his street harassment-related work.

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Filed Under: LGBTQ, News stories, Resources Tagged With: bathrooms, transgender

USA: Maya Young and Transgender Homicides

February 25, 2016 By Correspondent

Kathleen Moyer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Maya Young. Image via Philly.com
Maya Young. Image via Philly.com

Maya Young, a 25-year-old transgender woman of color, was stabbed to death in the Frankford section of Philadelphia late Saturday night. According to police, she was found lying in the street with multiple stab wounds to her chest and neck before being rushed to a nearby hospital, where she died 20 minutes later.

No arrests have been made in the case yet. The city is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer. People with tips can call 215-686-3334.

While investigators are still searching for a motive, the brutal murder of Young seems to reflect the murders of Keisha Jenkins and London Chanel – two transgender women of who were killed in Philadelphia last year. These murders are part of a pattern of increased transgender homicides across the United States. Statistics indicate that transgender homicide is becoming an epidemic, especially among women of color like Young, Jenkins, and Chanel.

In 2015, 23 transgender people were killed – the highest annual total since advocacy groups began keeping a record of transgender murder rates. Nineteen of those victims were transgender women of color. According to a 2013 report on LGBT hate violence by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, transgender women are the victims of 72% of LGBT homicides, and 89% of LGBT homicide victims are people of color.

Statistics also show that violence against transgender people is not limited to physical violence; over half of transgender individuals experience verbal street harassment. A report by SAVE Dade, an LGBT advocacy group, showed that 53% of transgender people surveyed experienced harassment and disrespect in public areas. These numbers show that transgender violence is a serious problem and it’s progressively getting worse.

We have to take a stand now more than ever. The motive in the case of Maya Young may still be unclear, but it is clear that this pattern of transgender violence is not coincidental. As the LGBT community and allies mourn the loss of Young, we need to remind society that no one’s gender is up for debate. An individual is whatever he/she identifies as and it’s no one’s place to object to that, because nobody knows how that individual thinks and feels.

No one deserves to be put through hell, verbally, mentally, or physically for simply being who they are. The transgender community deserves better; it’s our responsibility, as a society, to ensure that they receive better and to bring those who harm transgender individuals to justice. For Maya. For Keisha. For London. For every transgender person who has been victimized in the past, and those who will be victimized throughout this year.

Kathleen is a full-time graduate student studying professional and business communication. She plans initiatives to increase awareness of sexual assault, domestic violence, and other related issues through her university’s anti-sexual violence group, Explorers Against Sexual Violence.

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Filed Under: correspondents, News stories Tagged With: homicide, justice, killing, LGBT, maya young, philadelphia, transgender, women of color

USA: Police Violence is a Form of Street Harassment

October 24, 2015 By Correspondent

Hannah Rose Johnson, Arizona, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

This month I talked with Pat Farr, a member of Hey Baby! Collective, in Tucson, AZ, about the intersections of sexual violence that are embedded in societal institutions; the sort of intersections that are more complex to organize around—specifically how profiling by police and police brutality constitute street harassment.

Farr presented an analysis of the nuances, scopes and the limits of perfect-victim narratives. When we think of street harassment solely as a cat-calling, where is power moving, what identity is created and who is being left out?

Farr says, “…rape culture is really a complex system that creates a framework for identifying who is a victim and who is a perpetrator. And if someone doesn’t fit into these tropes of victim/perp then it they fall outside of the discourse and are not victims and not perpetrators. So I like the term perfect and imperfect victim…[…] With street harassment it’s even more difficult. There’s very few protections against street harassment to begin with. So this notion of a perfect victim becomes subjectively very difficult to define.”

The first is the Office on Violence Against Women’s definition of sexual assault, which is defined as: any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs by force or without consent of the recipient of the unwanted sexual activity. Farr says that “The definition of sexual assault by the OVW includes street harassment.”

The second is the Center for Disease and Control’s uniform surveillance on sexual violence, which extends to noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. “This,” says Farr, “is very similar to non-consensual behavior of a sexual nature as described by the OVW.”

The third is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s definition of sexual harassment which includes offensive remarks about a person’s sex. The EEOC goes on to define sex-based discrimination as: discrimination against an individual because of gender identity, including transgender status, or because of sexual orientation. “As such,” Farr argues that “because sexual harassment is a form of sexual discrimination, according to the EEOC, harassment based on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination.”

“This gives us the opportunity to extend the definition of street harassment,” Farr says, “according to these definitions, it is street harassment when a transgender woman walking down the street is attacked because of her gender identity, and hence this would count as sexual violence.”

Farr brought up the case of Monica Jones—a black transwoman, sex worker rights activist and MSW student in Phoenix, AZ. She was arrested after a demonstration for sex workers when she took a ride from an undercover, and refused the driver’s proposition. Farr told me that “even though she refused the driver’s propositions, she was still arrested on the prostitution related crime against morality, manifestation of prostitution.” This kind of law, within the city municipal code crimes against morality, is known as “manifestation of prostitution.” It’s a kind of profiling law when a police officer thinks someone looks like a sex worker and is doing something in an area where sex workers would be.

“…it’s essential to recognize that people of color, lower class people, LGBQ people, transgender people, and HIV positive people all are at greater risk of police violence that’s based largely on culturally defined stereotypes of sexuality,” Farr states, “Compulsive heterosexuality, heteronormativity, white supremacy, neoliberal economics, and the prison industrial complex are all bound up with street harassment as a form of institutional violence against particular identities.”

Identities in the margins present different relationships to power which are reinforced through all of our state-sanctioned systems. These identities—these people and their lives—are vulnerable in the face of systems that reproduce heterosexuality, white supremacy, patriarchy and transphobia. These systems rely on exclusion and violence to function, and create our cultural understanding of who is a victim and what terms make a victim.

What Farr is saying here gives us a wider framework to think about who is a victim of street harassment. It is no longer only the person walking down the street being cat-called, it’s also person being profiled by police and arrested because of their gender identity and race.

This allows us to see police violence as a form of street harassment that is inevitably tied to the state.

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Filed Under: correspondents, LGBTQ, police harassment, race, street harassment Tagged With: ACLU, monica jones, police harassment, sexual violence, transgender

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