Guilty Of Being Trans

When you are black you are guilty until proving innocent. Two black women found that out when they checked in a hotel.

A black transgender woman is in jail because police were called on her for being transgender
RAW Story
By Bethania Palma Markus
July 18, 2015

A black transgender woman is currently in solitary confinement in an Iowa jail because she is transgender.

Meagan Taylor, 22, was arrested Monday by Des Moines police after staff at the hotel she was staying with another transgender friend called police. According to the police report, officers were called by the hotel about “two males dressed as females who checked into the Drury Inn,” and that “staff was worried about possible prostitution activity,” according to the Des Moines Register.

She is currently being held at Polk County Jail in isolation, because jail officials don’t know whether to place her with men or women.
[…]
“There is… no good reason for a 22-year-old nonviolent person like Taylor to be locked up indefinitely,” the Register’s Rekha Basu writes. “Maybe the real offense is a private business calling police on paying guests because they didn’t conform to gender stereotypes.”

But there is… she is black and transgender. What more do the police need?

This is wrong on so many levels where to begin? The police said they found “found pills in an unmarked bottle in her purse and arrested her for possessing prescription drugs without a prescription” which she claims are her hormone pills. How many of us carry our medications in a seven-day pill box? Did you know you could be arrested for that? If you are white middle class do you think that you would be arrested for that? I doubt it, but if you are black and the police are looking for something to charge you with you’re now fair game.

The Advocate reported,

This is a form of gender identity-based profiling that the Register writer calls "arrested while trans" — a reference to the common assertion by trans women of color that they are profiled and arrested for "walking while trans." Black trans activist Monica Jones, who was arrested on an Arizona street in May 2013 for allegedly "manifesting prostitution," explained to the ACLU when she was convicted in April 2014 how trans women of color are disproportionately targeted nationwide simply for being themselves in public.

"'Walking while trans' is a saying we use in the trans community to refer to the excessive harassment and targeting that we as trans people experience on a daily basis," Jones said. "'Walking while trans' is a way to talk about the overlapping biases against trans people — trans women specifically — and against sex workers. It's a known experience in our community of being routinely and regularly harassed and facing the threat of violence or arrest because we are trans and therefore often assumed to be sex workers."

To make matters worse she has being temporarily placed her in a medical unit without a cellmate in a men’s prison. There are protests beheld in front of the hotel and there is a fundraising campaign to raise her bail and get a lawyer for her.