The Elusiveness of Self-Defense for the Black Transgender Community

Abstract

This Essay was written as a part of the Nevada Law Journal's symposium on Race and Gender and Policing. It explores the need for but elusiveness of self-defense as a viable affirmative defense for Black transgender victims of crime. The Black transgender community suffers disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence, discriminatory harassment, and sexual violence from both strangers and acquaintances. Yet members of this community also report disproportionate rates of ambivalence, discriminatory treatment, and physical violence from law enforcement investigating these crimes. Black transgender individuals experience under-policing driven by stereotyped attitudes that transgender individuals are inherently deceitful or that transgender women are actually men and can handle themselves. And they experience over-policing for while trans, a widely reported phenomenon wherein transgender individuals walking in public are repeatedly targeted for suspected prostitution. Within this reality of violence and under protection, many members of the Black transgender community report resorting to self-defense tactics to protect themselves, including carrying firearms in public. Unfortunately, recent high profile cases of Black transgender self-defense illustrate that viable affirmative self-defense claims prove elusive for this community. Racist biases about the inherent criminality of Black individuals infect every step of the criminal justice process, negating otherwise viable self-defense claims. Moreover, many of the same trans-phobic attitudes affecting the criminal investigative process similarly impact the viability of self-defense claims for transgender individuals using self-defensive measures as a necessary last resort.