The Trans Free BET Who's Who In Black GLBT America List

I was shocked that BET.com even puts out such a list, so just out of curiosity I decided to see which peeps they chose for their 'Who's Who In Black GLBT America'.

And as I suspected, out of the 33 people selected, there were no trans brothers or transsisters on it.

And no BET and rest of world, a Black New York based drag artist does not equal to transman or transwoman. Kevin Aviance is a drag artist

While I'm happy for the people that did make it such as Jasmyne Cannick, it speaks once again to how invisible Black trans people are, even in our own damned community.

There's a transman who is the board chair of the National Black Justice Coalition in Kylar Broadus. I've talked about Dr. Marisa Richmond on more than a few occasions on this blog.

But once again the Black trans community gets shut out.

I'm in agreement with my sis Dionne Stallworth. It's time that we Black trans people really start tooting our horns, seriously raise our profiles, compile our history, interview and pump up our people and fight for our place in the GLBT spotlight.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting more than a little sick of getting dissed, erased and ignored by the entire fracking GLBT community Black and White.

Dissing Of Sonia Williams On Semi-Homemaker Blog

One of the things I gripe about on TransGriot is how the beauty of African-American women, be they trans or cisgender is disrespected.

It's also interesting to note how quickly African descended women are labeled as 'unfeminine' vis-a-vis the model of vanilla femininity that all are supposed to bow down and aspire to.

It happens far too often to the Williams sisters, and they aren't alone in that regard either.

Thanks to reader Lurlean I was advised of a thread occurring on the Food Network Humor Blog that illustrated this perfectly.

As usual, the folks that called out the disrespect of Sonia Williams were slammed as 'lacking a sense of humor' or 'overly sensitive'.

Ain't nothing humorous about a Black woman being disrespected. It's also playing into and perpetuating the 'Black women are unfeminine' stereotype that dates back to slavery.

Since it escaped these peeps in science class, or they graduated from 'Christian' private schools that teach Flintstones science, let me school y'all on something.

You get half your genetic material from mommy and half from daddy, and we are all blends of features from our parents.

Just as there are plenty of cisgender women who have 'masculine' body builds or combinations of features considered 'masculine', there are also cisgender men who have body builds and combinations of features that are considered 'feminine'.

Just an FYI, unless a person declares themselves to be trans, they ain't. Nor is it our business if they are.

TransGriot Note: Seems like in the last few hours, the Food Network Humor blog where that crappy post was housed is down for maintenance. Interesting.

We Want The Same Things You Do

"The ideals and ambitions which the Negro entertains for himself are precisely those which the white man entertains for himself. And this the white man foolishly resents."

NAACP founder Archibald Grimke spoke these words ninety years ago, and they still ring true for African descended people be they gay, straight, bi, cisgender or transgender.

All I or any African descended person wants in life is to have a decent job at a livable wage, a nice place to call our own and lay our heads, affordable health care, a quality primary and secondary education, love and marry the person we choose, raise happy, healthy, morally upright children, and live our lives free of unnecessary bull feces.

In other words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Is that too much to ask?

Alas, for some people it is. Our 400 years in the Americas and across the Diaspora has been a long sorrowful tale filled with having to deal with unnecessary caca, violence and racist negativity in between the fleeting moments of spectacular forward progress as a people.

The negativity toward African descended people has been directed at us by whites either wallowing in privilege or who foolishly refuse not only see our common humanity, but resent and resist any progress made toward first class citizenship.

Heaven help you if you are a member of the TBLG community. Your humanity is further diminished in their eyes.

As I will continue to repeat until I'm buried six feet under my native Texas soil, I didn't give up my Black Like Me card, my American citizenship, or my humanity when I transitioned, and you are sadly mistaken if you believe that.

The 'We the people' in the United States Constitution applies to me and my TBLG/SGL brothers and sisters as well.

President John F. Kennedy stated in a televised June 11, 1963 speech on civil rights that, "When you give rights to others, you expand them for yourself."



I want rights expanded not only for transpeople like myself, but you cisgender ones as well.

No delays, no bull feces, no excuses.

The beautiful thing about passing the just introduced ENDA and hate crimes legislation is as President Kennedy wisely pointed out, extending rights to the TBLG community expands them to the cisgender community at the same time.

So who in their right mind would have a problem with that?

The usual suspects on the wrong side of the arc of the moral universe.

Even if the laws are passed, it's signed into law by President Obama and the moral arc finally begins bending in the direction of justice for TLBG/SGL people, it will still take time for the heartless to get with the program and realize that it's no longer open season on the lives of TBLG people.

The sooner the haters realize that, the sooner we can all get to work building a better America we can be proud to pass on to our future descendants.

And for the first time in a long time, I'm hopeful of seeing that occur in my lifetime.

Congrats Laverne!

My sis Laverne Cox had a wonderful trip to San Francisco recently. During the May 27 GLAAD Media Awards her appearance in the I Want To Work For Diddy reality show tied with Calpernia Addams' Transamerican Love Story for the Outstanding Reality Series Award.

Here's Laverne's speech from that evening, followed by Calpernia's.



Congratulations to both of you ladies for representing us with class, glamor and dignity. As you said in your speech, Laverne, it was an amazing year for transgender representation on television. Hope it only gets better.



Deepest thanks and appreciation to you Laverne for ensuring that for the first time, we had a media portrayal of a Black transwoman that wasn't rooted in stereotypes.

Don't Want EBONY Or JET To Die

Tami had a post in March that discussed her take on whether we should do more as a community to keep our iconic magazines alive.

While some folks are hollering 'let them die', I have a problem with that knee jerk shortsighted view of the situation, even though I have mixed emotions about it.

As a historian, I don't like the idea of losing EBONY and JET, much less contemplating a world without its needed voice. As many of you did, I perused the older issues of EBONY and JET at my grandparents house growing up and I spent hours perusing those issues and reading the history that unfolded before my eyes. I also chuckled at some of the back in the day ads that served as a time capsule for the period.

It seems that everybody had a subscription to those two magazines when I was growing up, and whether you were at your cousin's house in Mississippi, your uncle's place in Los Angeles, EBONY or JET would be sitting in a prominent place in their living rooms. One of the first things I did after moving out of my parents house was get my own EBONY subscription.

Thanks to the late visionary John H. Johnson, these magazines since 1945 have been covering our stories, our people and our history when white owned magazines would barely touch our communities, much less tell our stories in a balanced way.

Without EBONY and JET, much of the Civil Rights history probably wouldn't have seen the light of day. Many of Dr. King's essays were published in the pages of EBONY. Our iconic stars on stage, screen, television and the sporting worlds wouldn't have gotten the coverage they deserved.

Our history would have less documentation, especially in the 70's when it seemed that every time you turned around there was another African-American breaking new ground or we had another 'First Black' making history.

And tell the truth, many of you already have copies of the issues of EBONY and JET relating to the historic 2008 election of President Obama, the inauguration and the historic Obama administration.

One of the reasons that African descended supermodels grace the catwalks now is because of Eunice Johnson and the Ebony Fashion Fair. Not only did it clue designers in on the fact that Black women had dollars to spend on high fashion clothes, the traveling fashion show has raised tens of thousands of dollars over the years for various charitable organizations in the African-American community.

Fashion Fair Cosmetics and its success clued white owned makeup companies into the fact there was a large customer base they weren't meeting the needs of.

But on the other hand both those magazines have been behind the curve for a while in terms of developments inside the AA GLBT/SGL community, something I've long complained about on TransGriot.

It's sad for example, when Isis got more love in white owned magazines than she did in our iconic Black ones (and ESSENCE falls in that category as well).

I'm for giving Linda Johnson Rice the help she needs because the Johnson family deserves that much from us. I'm seriously thinking about renewing my subscription especially since I'm buying them off the racks so much these days I may as well save myself some cash and get it delivered to the crib.

But my support comes with a condition and an ultimatum. I want EBONY and JET to do a better job of covering the entire African-American community. News of our community just doesn't begin and end in middle class African-American communities. There needs to be a serious effort toward inclusive coverage of the entire spectrum of the AA community.

Because as someone who grew up around Black radio and knows the power of Black owned media, it's easier to tell your story when you own the printing press, the television show and the radio station as opposed to depending upon someone else with built in biases to honestly tell the story of your people for you.

Black Transpeople's Burden

"It is a burden of Black people that we have to do more than talk."
Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) 1992

My fellow Houstonian uttered those words over a decade and a half ago, but they ring true for every person of African descent. For the last two centuries we've had the burden of having to do more than just pay lip service to the ideas of freedom and equality for all.

We've had to sometimes put our lives on the line for it in addition to march, shed blood, write about, orate, agitate and litigate as well.

As a transperson of African descent I don't have the luxury of disengaging from the battle for transgender civil rights because I'm 'stressed' over the tidal waves of bad news that come at regular intervals as some people do.

I'm helping to fight a two-front war not only for overall societal respect, but also to garner that same respect in my African-American family as well.


Since my skin color didn't change and as far as I'm concerned my Black Card is still in good standing, I also have to fight the same issues that my African descended cisgender sisters and brothers labor against in terms of police brutality, unequal justice, racism, sexism, and all of the other ills and isms that plague our community.

So no, I can't focus too long on the happy-happy joy-joy aspects of transition, not when Black transwomen are disproportionately targets along with our Latina transsisters for anti-transgender violence.

My transition along with those of my African descended transbrothers and transsisters is a reality based one. If talking about real life issues upsets some people's delicate sensibilities to the point they can't handle reading the truth on this blog about transgender life being harsh and unfair sometimes, then that's too bad.

I also look at many issues through an African flavored prism. That means my take isn't going to always line up neatly with the predominately WP flavored groupthink.

As the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks said, 'Truth tellers are not always palatable. There's a preference for candy bars."

We have people that hate us enough they want us to die. Ignoring that fact or drowning it in melted white chocolate won't make it go away.

As Black transpersons we are always in combat mode. When we step away from the civil rights battlefield for R and R, we have to keep our rifles loaded, boots shined, combat fatigues by our bedside ready to put on and be ready to step back into combat at a moment's notice.

That's just life as a minority for you folks new to that status, and it's the burden we Black transpeople share with our African descended cisgender brothers and sisters as well.

Erie, PA Cop Joking About Murdered Man

If you wonder why the African-American and other minority communities have the negative attitudes about the po-po's we do, peep this video of an Erie, PA cop making jokey-jokes about a just-murdered man and mocking the man's grieving mother.

"We're looking at it like, 'One less drug dealer to deal with,'" the Erie, PA, police officer says. "Cool." The murder victim, described as a loving father, had no history of drug violations, according to news reports.

The NAACP isn't laughing.

There are too many police offices who have attitudes like this toward the communities they are patrolling. Those attitudes can have deadly consequences for the people living in those neighborhoods and lead to outrages like the New Year's Day shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant by transit police in Oakland; the police shooting of Robert Tolan on his front lawn in Bellaire, Texas; and the questionable death of high school football player Billie Joe Johnson, killed in what was described as a "routine traffic stop" in Lucedale, Mississippi.

Bigots with badges exacerbate the problems of racial profiling, the high rate of unsolved murders in African American communities, police brutality and other forms of unequal justice for African Americans and Latinos.

There are two bills that have been filed to provide long-needed regulation of harsh and careless police actions throughout the United States called the End Racial Profiling Act and the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act. The NAACP is asking that you e-mail your congressperson and ask them to co-sponsor these acts.

The NAACP is also asking people to e-mail Erie, PA mayor Joe Sinnott and ask him to order an immediate independent investigation into the practices and policies of the Erie police department and to establish an independent civilian review board to investigate citizen complaints.