In January 2014, CeCe McDonald, hate-crime survivor and transgender activist, walked out of prison.
McDonald served 19 months for second-degree manslaughter for stabbing the man who physically assaulted her and made transphobic, homophobic and racist slurs against her and her friends.
Since she was released, she's described her life on the outside as one of the celebration of everyday things: hugging her family without a prison guard watching, the everyday details of transitioning, getting her career back on track, and especially using her public platform to teach other people about transgender rights, the prison industrial complex, and, as she puts it, "to help people understand what it's like for me and for other trans women who are in prison, and people in general who have to deal with the policies and the martial law of prison."
She has used an experience of great trauma and injustice to bridge multiple identities and causes, to sculpt from her pain new knowledge, and to free others. This is most definitely the work of a free woman.
But is CeCe McDonald truly free? What is the quality of one's freedom, when transgender people are still at a high risk for hate crimes, harassment by the police, bullying violence and domestic violence? According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, in 2011, the year that McDonald was attacked, the murder rate of LGBTQ people was at an all-time high. There were 30 hate-related murders of LGBTQ people; 87% of those anti-LGBTQ murder victims were people of color and 40% were transgender women of color.
As Laverne Cox, actor , producer, activist and CeCe supporter, put it in an interview on Democracy Now!, for transgender people, "The act of merely walking down the street is often a contested act, not only from the citizenry, but also from the police."
McDonald's case underscores the everyday brutality and violence faced by transgender people. Moreover, her case is part of a larger pattern of surveillance of and violence on bodies of color, made hypervisible by their perceived wrongness: the wrong gender, the wrong color, the wrong age, caught in the wrong neighborhood, too loud, too queer. I think here of murdered transgender women of color Lorena Escalera and Paige Clay. I think here of lost son and friend Trayvon Martin.
CeCe McDonald still isn't free when transgender people face brutality and discrimination by the healthcare system, ranging from lack of access, to violence by hospital staff, to ignorance by many doctors and medical schools of specific health concerns for transgender people. The 2001 film Southern Comfort documents the last year of the life of Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual who died of ovarian cancer. More than a dozen doctors turned down Eads's case because they were afraid that treating him would hurt their reputation. By the time that Eads found a doctor who would treat his cancer, it was too late.
CeCe McDonald still isn't free when the judicial system operates so unjustly. In her own case, the court ignored as admissible evidence her gender, race and class, even as she, a 23-year-old African American transgender woman, was assaulted by a 47-year-old white man bearing a swastika tattoo. The court admitted as evidence the fact that McDonald had written one bad check, even as it dismissed the fact that her assailant had faced past criminal charges for assaulting his girlfriend. This also suggests a strong link between transphobia and the larger culture of violence against women—even when transphobic culture attempts to create a gulf between the experiences of cis-gendered women and transgender women.
McDonald's case has brought renewed awareness of the violence faced by transgender women of color. We are in the midst of an energized public conversation about transgender rights, due in part to McDonald's own activism, and that of supporters Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Leslie Feinberg, GLAAD, The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and others. But there are still so many stories that need to be told in order for all of us to be free—including McDonald's forthcoming documentary, Free CeCe, produced by Laverne Cox and Jacqueline Gares.
Can we rely on this public conversation about transgender people's lives and rights to continue without some serious cultural and political change? As Mock points out, "[S]adly, the reality is that a black trans woman is not society's ideal subject. … We are not invited to contribute to the national conversation, we are told to stay in the dark, live our lives at night, never to be heard from unless we're found lying dead on a street corner."
As a queer, cis-gendered African American woman, I claim CeCe McDonald's and other transgender women of color's struggle to be free as linked to my own. We are on the edges of one another's battles. Her fight reveals the importance of coalition building for social change.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era ( University of Michigan Press, 2013 ) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon ( Palgrave, 2003 ).
