At around 5:30 a.m. Sunday, April 29, an African American transgender woman was murdered in downtown Oakland. Brandy Martell was reportedly shot as she sat in her car socializing with friends near 13th and Franklin streets. Martell was a peer advocate TransVision team member. She was killed mere blocks from the Alameda County courthouse where the country's first elected transgender criminal court judge sits.
We don't know many details of the incident, and witness accounts are sketchy, as is often the case. It could have been an attempted robbery or perhaps the assailant discovered that she was transgender and killed her. At this point, it doesn't really matter. The bottom line is that a trans woman was killed in Oakland, a city where violence is all-too-common for many people, including LGBTs and especially LGBTs of color.
Tiffany Woods, the program coordinator at the Tri-City Health Center, oversees the center's TransVision program. She has witnessed an escalation of violence in downtown Oakland over the last couple of years. However, she's adamant that trans women have a right to be on public streets, even if just sitting in cars and socializing. There's often no other place for them to go that is safe, as many lack adequate housing, a drop-in center, or other facility. As Woods told us, if they get accosted on the street, they can run.
"They wouldn't be out there if there was a safe place," Woods said.
And that brings up another aspect of life for many trans women, especially women of color: Transgender people in the U.S. are often pushed to the bottom 1 percent of that 99 percent. A 2006 study in the Bay Area of 194 transgender individuals found a 35 percent unemployment rate, with 59 percent earning less than $15,300 annually – and that was before the economy tanked in 2008. There are so few job opportunities for transgender women of color that a lot of them resort to sex work, which exposes them to potential violence and harm. At the Transgender Day of Remembrance last year, names of trans people killed around the world were read, many of whom had worked on the streets in the sex trade.
The Oakland Police Department is cash-strapped and short of officers. The department is under threat of federal takeover for its past practices, including the use of violence during last year's Occupy protests. But OPD needs to prioritize this crime and dedicate appropriate investigative tools to solving the case.
Mitt's leadership style
That was quick. Just about two weeks on the job and Mitt Romney's gay national security spokesman was forced out in a hail of anti-gay rhetoric from the usual suspects like the American Family Association. It seems that we were overly optimistic in this space last week about Richard Grenell's appointment as a spokesman for the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.
But reading a Washington Post blog post about Grenell's sudden ouster on Tuesday speaks volumes about Romney's leadership style: "According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president's ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign," noted the post from Right Turn blogger Jennifer Rubin.
Grenell by all accounts was an expert on national security matters (his personal, catty tweets about political women and others notwithstanding) and yet Romney, rather than stand up to the homophobes and critics, kept Grenell off the stump and away from the TV cameras at a time when Grenell could have gotten Romney's message out in an effective way. According to Rubin, top campaign aides urged Grenell to stay on, but he could see what was ahead. There was no public statement of support from Romney or his campaign team, and "no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters," she wrote.
While Romney reportedly assured Grenell that his being gay was a non-issue, the candidate apparently had a change of heart after the Christian conservatives started whining. What Romney should have done is told those bullies that he had a superbly qualified foreign policy spokesman and that his sexual orientation was irrelevant. But no, Romney caved, surrendering before the blow-up went mainstream.
If Romney can't stand up to homophobes, he surely has little chance standing up to world tyrants if he's in the Oval Office.