All of them were Black. All of them were trans women. All were under 33 years old. That includes one woman who was just killed in January in Baton Rouge. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, and if it were its own country, would have the highest in the world.
Of the 11 mentioned above, most remain unsolved. We know that much of the interpersonal violence our community faces is at the hands of intimate partners.
Read the full story at Autostraddle. Ages of the eleven known trans and nonbinary victims of fatal transphobic violence in Louisiana between , plotted from low to high on a stacked row chart. Nine of the eleven known victims were between ages Jaquarris Holland and Vontasha Bell were the youngest victims, both 18 years old. It was not long ago that police in Louisiana could stop trans women on the street and threaten to bring them to jail in exchange for oral sex.
Even today, law enforcement continues to wield its power to inject fear into the Louisiana trans community, using discriminatory laws as their accomplice. Failure to pay fees would result in jail time, a policy which disproportionately reintroduced Black trans women to unsafe conditions in state prisons. Trans women in Louisiana continue to push back against the narrative that they are inherently threatening or predatory, while fighting to survive by any means necessary.
Unsurprisingly, persons of interest have been identified in fewer than half of these cases. This illustrates a violent reality of Black trans feminine existence: that law enforcement allocates drastically greater effort and resources to criminalize their lives than to pursue justice for their deaths.
