From the article Black and Transgender: A Double Burden by Kellee Terrell at The Root
Members of the African-American transgender community face severe discrimination, according to the recent study: Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. The survey is the first of its kind, and was a collaboration between the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Black Justice Coalition.
It collected data from more than 6,500 transgender Americans and found that all transgender people face severe bias ranging from housing and health care to education and employment. But when researchers took a deeper look at the discrimination that the black respondents faced– all 381 of them — the data jumped out at them. “What was really poignant were these stark differences. In every case, black respondents fared worse than the non-black respondents in the national survey,” says Darlene Nipper, deputy executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “This is because black transgender people face anti-transgender bias coupled with structural and institutionalized racism.”
32% of black transgender respondents have lost a job because of bias; 48% were not hired because of bias; 34% were living in extreme poverty, reporting a household income of less than $10,000 a year; and almost 50% admitted to selling drugs or performing sex work in order to earn money to survive.
Read the full article.
Read the Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.