Posts

Transgender Death and Violence

The first thing you should know: data collection about violent crimes against transgender people is incomplete and unreliable. The deaths of trans victims often goes unreported or misreported. Of the 32 known transgender homicide victims of 2024, 38% of them were deadnamed and misgendered by authorities and press. Victims are commonly not identified as transgender initially, and victims are in varying levels of coming out. Some are out socially and legally out, some are socially out but haven’t changed their documents, some are only out in private, etc. This means the number of trans people who have been murdered in the United States is undercounted.  The second thing you should know: This isn’t something we can understand if we just talk about being transgender. 61% of transgender victims of fatal violence since 2013 are Black transgender women, so we must consider the intersection between race and gender when understanding the violence we face. We also need to understand how race...

The Love Flow Station

The year is 2019. I’m delivering pizzas while trying to freestyle over lofi hip-hop beats (to relax/study to) because I was trying to improve my flow so I could better fit in at this music studio I was spending time at. I did not fit in. I went down the same road I had gone a thousand times in the year or so I had been delivering pizzas. Nothing unusual. That’s where I found The Love Flow Station. Going down that same road I had gone down a million times before. For the first time in my whole life, I was actually present, actually able to see the sign right in front of me. Lovelaceville Florence Station Road West is far too long of a street name for a road sign, so the road sign is abbreviated to “Lov-Flo-Stat Rd west”. However, up until this one fateful day, this road was not love flow station to me yet. It was just lovelaceville, that’s how we would shorten the name at the place I was delivering from so that’s how it existed in my mind. I’m taking a right onto lovelaceville road. Unt...