About a week ago we reported on the murder of JoJo Sriker, a 23 year old Black trans woman who was murdered in Toledo Ohio. Now, sadly and horribly, we have to report the murder of another young Black trans woman, Keke Collier. Collier, who also went by Tiara Lashaytheboss Richmond, was just 24 years old when she was shot and killed on Tuesday morning in Chicago. Collier, like Striker and so many others, was initially misgendered by police and media reports.
Thank you to her friends and community activists like Shasha Lauren, a friend who, according to Mic, confirmed that the police reports were about her, and LaSaia Wade who reported that she also went by the name Tiara Richmond. Also thank you to trans women on Twitter like Venus Selenite (who has a Patreon and Paypal.me where you can support her and the work she does). These women got out the news early and made sure that Collier will be respected and remembered as her true self and with her true name.
From Lasaia Wade’s Facebook
America and the world hate Black trans women. Horrible, tiny people like Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions use the power that bigots, hatemongers and white supremacists give them to strip away protections for trans kids and healthcare for all trans people. We’re told that we have to give Nazis and racists a chance, and that we need to be tolerant of their beliefs if we expect them to be tolerant of us. Women are treated like pieces of meat that can be grabbed and beaten and thrown away. When a talentless hack can make a career out of anti-blackness, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and transphobia, Black trans women are sent a strong message about how much they matter in America.
When Trump was elected I, and many other trans woman warned that it was going to embolden the kind of people who murder trans women — that is, usually men who sleep with them and then consider them to be subhuman and worth less than their supposed pride. We’re not even two months into the year and four trans women of color have been murdered, three of them Black, and the last two have been not even twenty five years old.
So far this year we’ve lost Mesha Caldwell, Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, JoJo Striker and now Keke Collier, and there are almost certainly others that we don’t know about. Plus there are the countless others across the world. This is just the United States that we’re reporting on. This is a shit trend, it needs to stop. Allies need to do more work, it’s cis people who are murdering us, it’s on cis people to stop it.
11 cis women were murdered in the UK at the hands of men in January 2017 alone.
This is a terrible death but it’s not endemic. At least not in the same way. Please don’t erase that.
No, pointing out the fact that trans women of color live with an outrageously high risk of being violently murdered doesn’t erase the fact that men also kill cis women, and I think you know that. You can’t truly believe that acknowledging one truth results in the erasing of another truth.
Thank you for the cisplain. Now are you going to attack Black Lives Matter on the grounds that cops sometimes kill white people?
oh just fuck right off.
You do realize that trans women, more specifically twoc have a way lower average age than cis women. It’s somewhere around 33-37 years old.
32 if you’re a trans woman of colour, 35 for trans women in general.
Rzbg, that’s very sad, but not at all relevant to this conversation.
Oh fuck right off with your attempt to hijack this thread.
Just because it hasn’t been said enough… your post was bad and you should feel bad. Fuck off.
According to Wikipedia, approximately 700,000 transgender people live in the US, and approximately 32,000,000 census identified women live in the UK.
Obviously any murder is a tragedy, but when you consider that 4 of those 700,000 have been murdered, while 11 of those 32 million have been murdered, the odds of being murdered are clearly much higher if you’re trans than if you’re cis.
“Women are treated like pieces of meat that can be grabbed and beaten and thrown away.” – This sentence is in this article, already.
Right, this is definitely the place to bring that crap up.
Are women being killed by men all over the world? Yup. No one can forget that.
Are ciswomen being killed? Yeah.
Is this article about that, or hinting in any way this it is saying cis women aren’t being killed?
NOPE.
And we are Erasing what? That 11 cis women died? Do you somehow see the murder of women as a zero-sum bullshit game where, if we acknowledge trans women dying, we have to scribble out the names of other women.
That’s fucking ridiculous and you know it. Terf is terfin’ hard.
Sheesh OP do you see a Funeral train of vehicles and chase them down screaming “OH YEAH WELL MY UNCLE DIED ONCE! IT WAS AWFUL! WE DIDNT MAKE A BIG TO-DO ABOUT IT!”
Tl:DR Fuck all the way off, like when you think you have fucked off enough, don’t stop.
Push on through, I believe you can get all the way.
Course this was meant as a reply to the above comment. So, bleh.
*hugs if wanted* No bleh. You did awesomely. :)
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Moderators, please delete this comment
Why should they delete it ? Because you disagree ? Was Obama to blame for the plethora of similar murders during his time in office ?
Because this is a post honouring the memory of a murdered woman, not a forum for your bullshit debate. If you can’t show some basic fucking respect then leave.
This comment has been removed as it is in violation of Autostraddle’s Comment Policy. Repeat or egregious offenders will be banned.
Congratulations on finally coming out of your long coma. Unfortunately, you seem to have suffered brain damage. I recommend that your caretakers eliminate or restrict your internet time until you have sufficiently recovered.