“Walking while trans”: How transgender women of color are profiled

It’s called “walking while trans” — the phrase used when transgender women, especially those of color, are profiled as sex workers by police. And one black trans woman in Iowa, 22-year-old Meagan Taylor, said that’s exactly what happened to her while she was visiting from Illinois.

Hotel staff called police into Taylor’s room on July 12 out of concerns that she was a sex worker, the Des Moines Register’s Rekha Basu reported. Cops found no evidence to support the accusation. But other things went wrong: Taylor gave police a fake ID. Police also claim that the hormone therapy drugs Taylor was carrying in an unmarked bottle were illegally obtained. And police later found that Taylor also had an outstanding warrant for credit card fraud — which she says she did her time for when she was 17, but hadn’t paid $500 in fines yet.

“It seemed like they were trying to find something to charge me with,” Taylor told Basu. “I lied about my name [but] I was not doing any illegal activity. The lady called police because I was transgender and was with a transgender friend.”

It’s hard to say this early on in the story who’s in the right, and Taylor acknowledged some mistakes — particularly using a fake ID. But it seems likely she wouldn’t be in jail today if hotel staff hadn’t profiled her as a sex worker, seemingly because she’s trans.

As TransGriot blogger Monica Roberts put it, “So because a transphobic Drury Inn hotel employee racially profiled two Black trans women who were minding their own damned business, Meagan Taylor is stuck in an Iowa jail at least until August 25, or until she gets some help from the local LGBT community.”

The good news for Taylor is a crowdfunding effort looks to have raised enough money to pay for her bond and Illinois fines and fees, and to help her get a new ID and legally change her name to help ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. But many other trans women of color aren’t so lucky.

In May 2013, Monica Jones accepted a ride from two undercover cops to a bar in her Phoenix neighborhood. She never offered any sexual acts, but her limited interaction with police and the cops’ suspicions were all police needed, under city law, to arrest her for “manifesting prostitution” — charges that would be later dropped in February after months of court battles.

The experience of Jones, who is black, isn’t unique among trans women of color, many of whom say they’re commonly profiled by police as sex workers.

“Trans women of color in particular key into subconscious bias about any gender nonconformity,” Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who worked on Jones’s case, told me earlier this year. “Women who are perceived to be gender nonconforming, even if they’re not and don’t identify as gender nonconforming, are perceived to be deviant.”

A 2014 report from Columbia University found LGBTQ youth and trans women of color in particular “are endemically profiled as being engaged in sex work, public lewdness, or other sexual offenses.” In these cases, law enforcement will even use the possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution-related offenses.

“Surely, no heterosexual white man would be arrested on suspicion of prostitution for carrying condoms in his pocket,” the report noted. “Yet policing tactics that hyper-sexualize LGBT people, and presume guilt or dishonesty based on sexual orientation or gender identity, are deployed by law enforcement every day.”

The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) found that 38 percent of black trans and gender nonconforming people who interacted with police reported harassment, 15 percent declared physical assault, and 7 percent claimed sexual assault — roughly two to four times the rates of all trans and gender nonconforming people who interacted with police. Trans women were three times as likely as trans men to report sexual assault by police, although trans men reported more harassment from police in general.

“The bodies of trans women of color are the site of multiple forms of deeply historical oppression,” Strangio said. “That’s a critical part of understanding the violence against trans people.”

The Columbia University report suggested the type of discrimination trans people experience when dealing with police creates a sense of distrust in law enforcement, which can further perpetuate crime and violence if people are unwilling to turn to police to solve potentially dangerous conflicts.

Angelica Ross, a trans activist and CEO of TransTech Social, previously told me that at her company’s career training programs she regularly hears about the distrust many trans women have of police. “As trans people, we are already seen as someone who is in disguise or deceptive,” Ross said. “So when it comes to law enforcement, we’re already at a place where they don’t believe us.”