Allies Speak Out (Part 1)

When we speak up about our rights we seen as biased but when an ally speaks up they are speaking from the heart.

NBA's Reggie Bullock Opens Up About Losing His Transgender Sister to Murder
A new documentary from Vice Sports follows Bullock's journey into LGBTQ activism after his sister Mia Henderson 2014 murder in Baltimore.
Broadly
By Diana Tourjée
January 16 2019

Reggie Bullock is a small forward and shooting guard for the Detroit Pistons, currently finishing his sixth season in the NBA, marking the end of a two-year contract worth $5 million. The 27-year-old is about to become a free agent, building hype for the future of his career as, he recently told The Detroit News, "the best shooter in the league."

Bullock's success in sports began in high school and elevated him to new heights. But his professional life has more recently become entwined with social justice activism after his older sister, Mia Henderson, a transgender woman, was killed in July 2014. Henderson was stabbed to death in Baltimore, a violent fate that follows a disproportionate number of transgender women to their end. Mic's 2016 project to count and analyze the deaths of transgender women, Unerased, found that one in 2,600 transgender women of color between 14 and 34-years-old, is murdered, compared to one in 12,000 in the general population.

In 2015, a man named Shawn Oliver was charged in Henderson's murder, but was later acquitted on all counts. Though Bullock and his family had been supportive of Henderson, her death shocked her brother into action. Today, he serves as an ally to LGBT people, and has appeared at events like NYC Pride, the GLAAD Media Awards, and the NBA Voices event for LGBT Youth and Allies. Bullock views his position in sports with great responsibility and power; because sports is such a widely consumed form of entertainment in the US, he can use his platform in the NBA to help make society more hospitable toward LGBT people. It's something he can do for his late sister, whose name he writes on his shoes before games, and whose face is tattooed on his body.

My heart goes to him and his family, it is hard when you lose a family member but it is some much harder when you lose someone to violence.

Much of the violence against us is the result of “toxic masculinity” that promotes transphobia and homophobia in which the perpetrator fears that he will be labels gay by his friends or guilt of having sex with a trans woman.

Some of the killers dates the trans woman for a while and it was when their friends find out that the relationship turns violence.

We see many of the perpetrators also use “Trans Panic” defense to get acquitted the juries think we are deceitful if we don’t announce to the world that we are trans and deserve what we got. Of course we can’t tell our side of the story because we’re dead.

I don’t know why Shawn Oliver got off of murdering her but I would bet that a part of the reason was trans panic defense.