unlearning transphobia: my ancestors are black trans women

In early June I attended a press conference on the steps of City Hall led by trans activist and member of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s LGBTQ Task Force Mariah Moore that featured a number of powerful trans activists and speakers. I left inspired and mobilized to do deeper digging as to my personal relationship with Black trans people, their identities, and the ways I can be of better service to our bound liberation. The result has been a good amount of research, a lot of reflection, a few vulnerable and important conversations with Black trans friends, and this essay. This is the first in a planned series of three reflections, addressing my relationship to Black trans women, Black trans men, and Black trans non-binary/non-conforming people and identity in turn.

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CW: historical and current depictions of sexual and physical violence

In the fight against White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, there is perhaps no statement nor sentiment more subversive or essential than Black Trans Women Matter. In a country and culture which continues to devalue Black lives wholesale, centering the safety and thriving of those most endangered is a necessary act in this fight for liberation. In order to meaningfully engage in this work, however, I must first understand my own relationship to trans identity, to trans women, to my trans ancestors, and to transphobia. I must unpack the relationship between my identities and experiences to those of Black trans women. I must unearth and acknowledge my own transphobia, my own complicity in trans violence, and the ways the environment which encourages transphobia and violence towards trans women has shaped my beliefs and also harmed me.

As a cisgender Black man, I exist in a singular position in this reality: I stand oppressed by the very same racism and anti-Black violence which befalls all Black people in the White supremacist West, but I also stand in much closer proximity than others to the patriarchy that differentiates racialized experiences between the different gender identities of Black people. The facts are clear and undeniable: Black trans women experience higher rates of economic and physical violence than any other demographic of Black people. Disturbingly, a startling amount of interpersonal violence that contributes to this fact is perpetuated by cisgender Black men. We may not have control over broader systems and institutions, but we do have control over our communities and our bodies, both of which we are far too often using to do harm. As much of our societal worth comes from our ability to perform conventional Westernized masculinity as defined by long dead White supremacist colonizers, cis Black men often have an inclination to reject any person or idea that we feel threatens our manhood, and violently in far too many situations. Many Black men, including myself, have long seen it and heard it and stood by idly while it has happened: the misgendering, the deadnaming, the insulting, the exclusion, and in many cases, the outright physical violence, murder, and rape. 

This has to end. I must assume the same responsibility for the self-determination, safety, and joy of my Black transgender sisters that I assume for myself and other Black men. I wish to speak into the world, however, that these toxic and damaging behaviors are not my natural state of being, rather they are a weaponization of restrictive White supremacist Christian ideations on gender and sexuality that continue to be socialized into my culture and community for the express purpose of harming and dividing it. My people, historically, roll a little different.

In Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003), professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill James H. Sweet explores expansive gender identity in pre- and early colonial Central and West Africa. In his research, he found local records of a trans woman and slave named Vitória, who was brought to Terceira Island (a Portuguese colony at the time and island in the Azores archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean) in 1556. A native of what is present day Benin, Vitória was a sex worker by trade and by all accounts very popular, as her business became widely known and ultimately drew the attention of the Inquisition. While being interrogated in Lisbon, she admitted to having five clients who were men. When asked whether her clients believed she was a woman, she replied in no uncertain terms that she was a woman and that these men paid her for her services. Importantly, she also remarked that there were many like her in her native culture. She was arrested and imprisoned for “abominable sin of sodomy against nature”, a victimless act criminalized by White supremacy and Christian puritanism.

There is further evidence of not just the existence of pre-colonial African people with expansive gender identities but also culture-wide acceptance and normalization of such people. Both James H. Sweet’s research and that of Roberto Strongman, associate professor in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, support the existence of an important group of 17th Century spiritualists and political actors in various Central African kingdoms known as the jimbandaa. Records describe these people as a “discreet and powerful caste” in pre-colonial Angolan society. I do not wish to assign modern gender identities to these ancestors as, unlike Vitória, I have found no evidence of them identifying directly as women, but research indicates that their assigned sex at birth was male and they wore traditional women’s garb, engaged in women’s cultural roles in their societies, and their chosen name, jimbandaa, is a feminine engendering of the word mbándá, which translated means “medicine man.” More information about the jimbandaa and the ways their cultural and gender identity creolized in Brazil and across the Diaspora can be found in Strongman’s book Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería and Vodou (2019) as well the research of Brazilian anthropologist and LGBTQ rights activist Luiz Mott.

The conclusions I draw from this research are twofold. First, some of my ancestors are certainly trans women. Second, trans womanhood and expansive gender identity were accepted and normalized in a diversity of the indigenous cultures of African people who were colonized, enslaved, and forcibly transported across the Atlantic. Africa is a huge and pluralistic continent, so I have no doubt that there is great variance in the expression and acceptance of these people across the various tribes and cultures therein, but the fact remains that Central and West African societies held real cultural and societal space for trans womanhood as well as expansive gender identity nearly a half millennium before the United States required the justices of the highest court in its land to don their robes just to consider the legal implications of gendered bathroom usage.

I must honor these ancestors by fighting with Black trans women, not just against violence and harassment at the hands of police, White supremacists, gender fascists, and deeply misogynistic historical revisionists, but also against my own socialized transphobic inclinations and internalized White supremacy. Furthermore, I must learn to love myself and love Black trans women in the very same way. I do not have to be transgender or a woman to recognize that their liberation is my liberation. I do not have to be transgender or a woman to recognize that their safety is my safety. I do not have to be transgender or a woman to recognize that their joy is my joy. Recently, I have been engaging in correspondence (from which some of this essay has been adapted) with a friend of mine who remarked, “Our liberation is yours. This is partly why I don't like the word ally, especially from other Black ppl, as if this issue has nothing to do with them and as though they too are not suffering.” I am not an ally in this fight, this is my fight.

And make no mistake, Black trans women have always fought in the battle for Black liberation in this country. The friend mentioned earlier is Sultana Isham, and her speech/essay, “The Holy Presence of Frances Thompson” (2020), introduced me to another very important ancestor. Through it, I learned of Frances Thompson (??-1876), a Tennessean Black trans woman who was born enslaved and fought for Black liberation. She testified before a congressional committee (the first known trans woman to do so) about the Memphis Riots of 1866, in which she was raped and assaulted. The testimony of her and four other Black girls and women (the youngest was 16 year old Lucy Smith) is widely seen as a key part of the genesis of the Reconstruction Era and subsequent passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, which guarantees citizenship to all Black Americans. I owe my citizenship status and all of the rights afforded to me therein to Frances Thompson’s bravery and activism. Unfortunately, her trans womanhood was outed without her permission in an 1876 issue of The Pulaski Citizen (CW: this clipping is highly transphobic) and she was fined and arrested for "being a man dressed in women's clothing" and sent back into enslavement on a chain gang where her health deteriorated. This discovery of her transness was subsequently used to attempt to discredit the testimonies of all of the other Black girls and women who testified before Congress, which serves as proof of just one of the many ways transphobia and violence against trans women negatively affect cis women first via their common womanhood. She died shortly after her release.

There also is Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886–1954), a Black trans woman from Oxnard, California via Kentucky, who was a chef, hostess, madam, and socialite, and should be remembered in history as one of the great Black entrepreneurs of the Prohibition Era. She started living as a girl at a very young age with the support of her doctors and family. As an adult, she received much acclaim for her dinner parties and events and, eventually, founded and ran her own highly successful speakeasy and brothel. In an investigation of her proprietorship following an STI outbreak, her assigned sex at birth was discovered and she was arrested and imprisoned for perjury for identifying as a woman on her marriage certificate and collecting a pension as a soldier’s wife. I owe my freedom of entrepreneurship and successes therein to Lucy Hicks Anderson. More information about this ancestor can be found in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) by C. Riley Snorton, professor of English Language and Literature at The University of Chicago.

So, to summarize, I, a cisgender Black man, come from African trans woman ancestors. My freedom, as a cisgender Black man, was and continues to be fought for by Black American trans women. What does this mean for me? Why is this important? Not knowing this history and having been raised with such restrictive gender ideation have been immensely stifling to my development, my ability to express my own personal feelings and needs in a variety of contexts, and my ability to identify and be in solidarity in thought and action with those of all genders who have expressed even the smallest amount of femininity. 

For those who do not know, I spent my late childhood and teenage years as a competitive figure skater. I have so many stories (good and bad) from being a part of that world. Among other things, I experienced relentless teasing from classmates, violence (I was once stabbed in the neck with a pencil at school by one of the only other Black boys for being 'girly'), and was witness to the ubiquitous sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and body shaming inside of the sport. Being a boy and thin I was not subjected to the monthly weigh-ins, but being “too thin” it was not uncommon for my body to be compared to the girls in an insulting manner. All of this happened with me being a cisgender Black boy and teen. I internalized these beliefs, all of them. They affected the way I saw and treated myself and they affected the way I saw and treated girls, women, and as a result trans girls and trans women, in both cases into adulthood. A large part of me knew these beliefs were wrong, but what was the replacement? Who was going to teach me who my ancestors were and who fought for me and how or why I should fight for them? 

I believe little Black boys (and White boys and all color of boys in the White supremacist West) learn these toxic beliefs and behaviors as we are treated largely as receptacles for the insecurities, shortcomings, and lack of societal expectation to improve and seek accountability found in many of our fathers and brothers and uncles and elders who are men, the very men who dominate control over our communities. We are socialized to exalt these character defects and violent maladjustive behaviors. This is where the proximity to patriarchy I referenced at the beginning of this essay takes effect. Women are simply not afforded this latitude, neither are non-binary/non-conforming people. I am fortunate in that my father, while in no way explicitly radical in this regard, is a man who has always at least tried to give me the space to feel and express, but I know far too many cisgender Black men who were not afforded such freedom. It often feels like, among cisgender Black men--as a subsection of all cisgender American men--masculinity is more commonly seen as a means to get what we want than a part of our identity to vulnerably explore, reflect upon, evolve, and expand. 

I must see these conclusions less as an admonishment and more as a call to accountability, a call to healing, and a call to action. I must commune, as a cis Black man, with other cis Black men, to unlearn the ways this poisoned culture and society has distanced us from ourselves, our ancestors, and our sisters, and begin to take inventory of the ways in which we can reconnect with them and work towards our mutual liberation, safety, and joy. Make no mistake, I love my Black manhood and I love my Black masculinity, but for that love to fully serve myself and my community, a defining feature of it must be to uplift and stand with Black trans women rather than harm and exclude them. We most certainly need them in this fight, and they most certainly need us to do better. They need me to do better.

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I would like to thank Mariah Moore for her leadership and advocacy, Sultana Isham for her research, conversation, feedback, and personal interest in my education and thriving, Blaze Heru for helping jump start the process of these mid-pandemic reflections, and Spirit McIntyre for the original call to action to do this work last year at their Spiritwerks event. My hope is that other Black people and all people, in particular cisgender men, see these reflections and are mobilized to do their own work to this end. It is far overdue. I have begun reaching out to other Black men to hold conversations around these issues in our community, if you are interested in that work, please reach out using the contact tab. If you are looking for an immediate and material way to support Black trans women, please visit https://houseoftulip.org/ and consider becoming a sustaining donor to help create permanent housing solutions for transgender New Orleanians.