Toxic Silence: Race, Black Gender Identity, and Addressing the Violence Against Black Transgender Women in Houston

Toxic Silence: Race, Black Gender Identity, and Addressing the Violence Against Black Transgender Women in Houston (2018) is a non-fiction book by American professor and author William T. Hoston. The book seeks to examine transphobic violence through the lens of black masculinity, questioning why anti-violence movements such as Black Lives Matter have not adequately addressed the deaths of black transgender women. For Toxic Silence, Hoston received the 2019 LAMBDA Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies.

In researching the book, Hoston interviewed nine black transgender women living in or around Houston, Texas: Bobbie Golden, Arianna Gray, Venue Love, Naomi Mars, Jae Palmer, Sophie Rush, Mia Ryan, Jessica Sugar, and Alexandra Sweet. Aside from being his home city, Hoston chose Houston as his research grounds for a number of reasons. The city's Democratic mayor, from 2010 until 2016, Annise D. Parker, was an openly gay woman who strongly advocated for anti-discrimination initiatives. The most high profile of these initiatives was 2015's Proposition 1, also known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance or HERO. While the language of the ordinance was fairly boilerplate in its prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the bill was misrepresented by its opponents and many in the media as a "Bathroom Bill" designed to permit men to enter women's restrooms. The bill failed by a count of 61 percent to 39 percent. Hoston also deemed Houston a suitable venue for his research because it ranks sixth on the list of U.S. cities with the highest LGBTQIA populations.

In 2015, the year Hoston decided to write the book, there were twenty-two deaths of transgender women due to transphobic violence. Of that twenty-two, seventeen of the victims were black. These numbers would appear to be on the rise; in the middle of 2018, when Hoston published the book, there were already nineteen deaths of transgender women, fourteen of whom were black.



Hoston identifies two major factors concerning what he views as the black community's failure to adequately address black transgender deaths. The first is the standing of the church as a towering institution in the lives of black families. He cites research by the prominent political scientist Cathy Cohen who found that black members of the clergy were often reluctant to commit energy and resources to the HIV/AIDS epidemic because they associated it with homosexuality, intravenous drug use, and other behaviors considered by the church to be immoral. These attitudes, Hoston writes, carry over to the issue of transgender violence. In addition to the moral conundrum, Hoston argues that the church's motivation to address this issue is limited because it is what Cohen referred to as a "cross-cutting" issue. This means that rather than directly affecting most or all members of the black community, transgender violence only affects a relatively small sub-section of the community, therefore meriting less attention. Hoston refers to this concept as "secondary marginalization."

The second factor, Hoston argues, is that most of the transphobic violence against black transgender women is perpetrated by black cisgender males. Though these crimes are often committed out of sheer transphobic hatred, Hoston asserts they are commonly perpetrated by cisgender men after engaging in sexual activity with the victim, sometimes as a paid transaction involving a sex worker and sometimes not. While these activities are usually embarked upon with full knowledge of the victim's transgender identity, the acts themselves frequently cause the cisgender male participant to question his masculinity. In order to reclaim that sense of his own masculinity, the male will engage in acts of control and dominance that usually manifest themselves through violence. The male thus regains what Hoston characterizes as "a psychological sense of wholeness" at the sacrifice of a transgender woman's humanity and often her very life. Hoston emphasizes that, just because there may be strong factors related to patriarchal and heteronormative societal frameworks behind these actions, it does not excuse the violent behavior.

To help correct what he views as the dismissal of transgender deaths in the black community, Hoston looks to prominent modern civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter. He argues passionately that if Black Lives Matter is truly committed to equal rights, it must extend these protections to the transgender community, particularly considering its unique susceptibility to acts of violence. He also argues that the only way forward for the broader black community is through a movement that is inclusive of all black voices that contribute to what it means to be black in America. In this way, he writes, paying closer attention to the deaths of black transgender women will contribute to greater solidarity within the black community, thus strengthening its efforts to enact social change across the board.



Toxic Silence is an eye-opening look at transgender violence that relies on rigorous research to make its point.