“I know of seven girls who have been murdered out here,” said Lakyra Dawson. Out as a transgender woman for seven years, Dawson was standing across from Detroit’s Palmer Park on Woodward Avenue. The area is known as an enclave for LGBT people during the daytime, but at night, the park’s 300 acres of fields and forest are the city’s epicenter of violence against transgender women — a problem worsening at the same time awareness about transgender people has been growing.
“People are kinda ruthless now more than ever, you know,” said Dawson. "The killers, the murderers. The violence is getting more wild and more crazy. I feel like we are being targeted.”
In a three-month span, three black trans or gender-nonconforming people were killed in Detroit this year, two near Palmer Park. During one week in summer 2014, three transgender women were shot, one fatally, near the park. Those incidents don’t include countless other stories relayed to BuzzFeed News by police and trans women about robberies, knifings, sucker-punchings, more homicides, dismemberment, charred bodies, trans women being shoved out of moving cars, and other acts of violence against trans women nearby in recent years.
"I feel like we are being targeted."
“I seen people get shot, jumped on, robbed, everything,” said Beyoncé Carter — she has a name like the singer — while checking over her shoulder every few seconds to keep her eye on a man standing on the corner. “I don’t want to be out here — hell no. But some days, I just say, ‘Fuck it, I need some money.'”
For Carter, Dawson, and other trans women BuzzFeed News interviewed in Detroit, facing this environment isn’t a choice. “I want to be a girl, so if that’s the risk you take, I’m taking it. I’m sorry,” Carter said. “It’s about who I am, and I love me. I do what I got to do to survive.”
Woodward Avenue begins at the Detroit River, forming the city’s central aorta through downtown. The six lanes go northwest past glass towers, then chic bars and salons, then strip malls and auto shops and empty industrial buildings, and eventually reaching the hulking beige Déjà Vu strip club near the southern tip of the park at the intersection of Six Mile Road.
“Six Mile and Woodward?” the front-desk man at the Holiday Inn Express said. “That’s where all the trans women are.”
Just past the intersection, directly across the street from Palmer Park, northbound drivers slow down to assess the “stroll,” as it’s called, a strip for johns to find a date. The women sometimes linger, or they strut south past the Fontaine Motel. They check themselves out in what they call “the mirrors” — dark reflective windows of a real estate office on the corner of Worcester Place — and head south past a coin laundry, the Bread Basket, a 24-hour video store, and a sports bar, until they reach a gas station.
From where she stood on Woodward Avenue on a frigid Thursday night, Dawson pointed out where 20-year-old Amber Monroe was shot dead after she got out of a car on Aug. 8. Dawson was around the corner from the side street where a person who simply went by the name Melvin — who numerous people said was a gay man who worked as a transgender woman — was found fatally shot on Oct 5. Dawson said she was pistol-whipped and robbed one night last year by a man behind a restaurant up the street. And down the block, a 53-year-old transgender woman’s body was found two years ago stuffed into a trash container in the back alley, the woman’s corpse so badly burned that police could not identify her remains (a medical examiner identified her weeks later by the male name Calvin Curtis Lipscomb).
“People say we’re not normal, we’re freaks or something,” said Dawson. “They just feel like they can dispose of us, because we really don’t matter to them. My reaction is kinda like, tired, because it’s still going on and it’s not enough justice. The police come, and they ask questions and do their slight investigations, but I don’t see any change.”
Confirmed homicides of transgender women have nearly doubled in the United States within the past year. Friday, Nov. 20, marks the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reported 24 homicides between Nov. 20, 2014, and the same date in 2015, compared with 12 during the previous year. Seventeen of the victims since this time last November were black trans women or black gender-nonconforming people; four were Latina; just three were white.
The circumstances of each killing are different, and by no means is sex work a common thread among all transgender women or among those who were killed. Still, in several cases in recent years, cops have treated transgender women as sex workers regardless — sometimes making arrests and then releasing the women — even though there was no evidence of sex work. Many other people undoubtedly assume the same.
But in Detroit, the six black transgender women or gender-nonconforming people who were killed in the last three years had been involved in sex work, Officer Danni Woods told BuzzFeed News. It was not known if sex work was linked to their killings. Among the victims was Ashton O’Hara, who was reportedly stabbed on July 14 on the city’s east side before being run over by a car.
“I don’t think it’s a target on the back of trans women or trans women of color,” said Woods, who serves as a liaison between the Detroit Police Department and the LGBT community. “But it’s more violent to me than other crimes — like you hate this person. It tends to be more aggressive; it tends to be more hostile. It’s definitely more graphic.”
But trans women in Detroit who spoke to BuzzFeed News believe they are targeted, attacked simply for being who they are or because they are in a neighborhood where trans women are known to congregate.
Ashia, who declined to provide her last name, said she was standing on Woodward one night when a man approached. “‘How are you?’ he said. I said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ Then he just hit me. He hit me as hard as he could. Like you know when you see the light?” she said, touching the side of her eye.
“Next thing I know I am fighting this strong man, and I can’t get away. He didn’t try to rob me or anything,” she said. “He was way stronger than me. He wasn’t stopping. He would have killed me. I would have died. I ran, and he chased me, but he didn’t catch me. He didn’t say, ‘Give me your purse, give me your phone, give me your money.’ It was nothing. He just fought me.”
Around 11 p.m. on a cold, wet, windy evening, one woman walked the stroll heading south, then north, then south again. “I’m assuming she has no other way to eat or a place to stay — that is the only reason why anybody would subject themselves to being out here,” said Julisa Abad, a trans woman and activist. She works a 21-hour-a-week job that pays $8.50 an hour — barely making enough to eat and pay rent — but uses her spare time advocating for trans women in Detroit.
“They always say they’re scared,” Abad continued. “But if this is the only way you know to make money to eat, or have a place to stay, where else are you gonna go? If attackers were trying to do something, we’re kind of making it easy for them.”
“We’re just sitting ducks,” she said. “We are making it too easy for them.”
Julisa Abad at "the mirrors."
Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News
Dawson came back out to Woodward a month after Monroe was gunned down. “Once someone gets killed, some girls come out here the same night, the next day,” said Dawson, getting into a Toyota sedan parked on Woodward. “But some girls, we stay away for like a month, probably two. When things like that happen, and you don’t have another route, you just have to suck it up and do what you have to do. I needed to get my hair did, buy clothes, eat, you know.”
Personal anecdotes and academic studies echo common explanations for how transgender women end up working in a survival economy: Families ridicule or beat transgender girls when they try to come out. Kids tease them at school, and teachers punish them for wearing clothes that clash with gender expectations. They leave home young, often without diplomas, and move to cities and neighborhoods where they can find transgender families that offer emotional support. And then, turned away from employers who make empty promises to “call you back,” the women come to places like Six Mile and Woodward for money.
“We’re just sitting ducks,” she said. “We are making it too easy for them.”
Joblessness among transgender people was at 14% in 2011, double the national average at the time, according to the most comprehensive survey to date on anti-trans discrimination. Black transgender respondents were unemployed at double that rate, 28%, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s survey.
“I’ve tried to apply for jobs before,” said Dawson, “but I never gotten a lot of callbacks. I can’t say what happened. We want to have careers. Everybody don’t want to be out here.”
Forty-four percent of the survey’s 6,450 trans or gender-nonconforming respondents believed they didn’t get a job they applied for due to gender identity. And those who had been unemployed due to their gender identity were far more likely to be engaged in sex work. Again, the survey authors wrote, black trans women reported “the highest rate at 44%.”
Those national figures were reinforced by a November study by the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights. The government-run investigation found that 48% of employers tested in the capital preferred a less qualified non-transgender applicant over a more qualified transgender person seeking a job. In 33% of the cases, the less qualified applicant was offered an interview when the trans person wasn’t.
Ashia was invited to sign paperwork and give fingerprints for a job in Detroit, she said, but the hiring manager paused after seeing her ID. “Once she figured out what was going on and that I was born male, she kinda totally changed her whole demeanor,” Ashia recalled. “Then she was like, ‘We’ll call you.’” Ashia remembers thinking: “You called me to come in today. What happened between now and then?”
They never called.
In Detroit, the city council has banned LGBT discrimination in employment and housing — but it’s not clear that employers in the city know about the law, or that job applicants feel they have recourse if they’re turned away. Discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation is legal in Michigan. (There are no federal laws explicitly protecting LGBT people from employment discrimination, though several federal agencies argue current civil rights laws provide those protections.)
None of the transgender women in Detroit who spoke to BuzzFeed News felt like victims, powerless to get a job, intractably subjected to violence — they all had agency to work as they wanted and defend themselves. But they didn’t like their conditions, either.
“I don’t wanna do this, but I have got to eat, have to have somewhere to go. It’s $60 a day here,” Ashia said, sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel room. An empty Little Caesars pizza box was by the door. “Lately I haven’t really applied myself, and that’s because I got comfortable with the sex work. It’s fast money.”
But she knows it’s dangerous money. “It is scary not knowing if this could be your last time living or your last time being able to speak to your family because you were trying to eat.”
Stats on trans women are scarce, but the scant examples show that anti-trans discrimination is also common among landlords. In a report released in June, 67% of landlords gave different treatment to transgender people seeking apartments in a test conducted by the the Seattle Office for Civil Rights. In one case, the Seattle Times reported in June, the city agency found a property manager who told a transgender person that no units were available. But within 30 minutes, the company told a cisgender person — the term for people who are non-transgender — about two units for rent.
Rebecca O'Hara with Ashton O'Hara's remains in her home.
Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News
“That’s Ashton in that box,” Rebecca O’Hara said, gesturing to an end table in her living room. She carried the black container, which bears the date of her child’s cremation, to the dining room table. “I’m trying to get an urn. I sit with him every day.”
Ashton was gender-nonconforming, using female and male pronouns and sometimes identifying as transgender. “At home, he would say he was my son. So maybe you could word it in a way where he could be identified the way he wanted to be identified, but when you refer to me speaking about him, you can refer to me speaking about my son,” she said.
Like many mothers who love and support their transgender kids, O’Hara feared for Ashton’s safety.
“I would always ask him, 'If you are going to dress like a girl, could you please do it while you’re on your way to the club so you’ll be among your peers, where people accept you?'” she began. “Please don’t do it in the daytime, and please don’t feel free to walk at night, because somebody else may not agree with it, get violent because of it.”
Although many people won’t answer calls from unfamiliar phone numbers, “I always have,” she said. “I never knew if it was somebody calling to say something was wrong with my son. So every time my phone would ring late at night, I was always terrified it was going to be that call, and one day, it was in the morning, and it was actually that call. So it was something I was ... trying to prepare myself for.”
“He was such a free spirit and he never really felt like something was going to happen to him,” she said. “He always felt like he would be able to handle it. I mean, all the way back in middle school people used to try to attack him, and he had never had a problem with fighting his way out of the situations. It’s been a long time coming, I believe.”
The attack on Ashton happened around 4 a.m., she said. “By the time we got the phone call, it had to be about 11 in the morning. When the ambulance got there, he still had a pulse, so he had to be laying there that whole time.”
O’Hara said the violence against transgender women in Detroit has been getting worse as support for marriage equality grows and transgender people gain prominence. “I’ve known for the maybe last 10 to 15 years that violence against transgender people was a problem,” she said. “It wasn’t highly publicized.”
She stood up to grab some tissues and wipe her eyes.
“I wouldn’t want anybody to misinterpret my feelings about this, but there were, like, mixed emotions,” O’Hara said. “For years I was living, waiting on this call. And so when it happened, I was mortified because I knew I was going to miss my son forever. And I really didn’t how to deal with that. But at the same time, it was like this heavy burden was lifted, like it’s happened, you know. So I don’t even really know how to express that feeling — because I felt bad for feeling like a weight had lifted off of me.”
A photo of Coko Williams — a transgender woman who was killed in April 2012 — in a remembrance display at the Ruth Ellis Center.
Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News
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