Tracing the History of Gender Variant People’s Relationship to Law Enforcement
Examining the Past for a Better Future
Digging into the past can reveal truths that get lost when the focus is solely on the current state of affairs, but so much wisdom can be gleaned from those who came before us. Noticing harmful patterns and the steps that have been taken to break them will help inform how we pave the way to a brighter future.
Violent crime against gender-variant people continues to be a concern in modern society. One suggestion to address this issue involves educating law enforcement on the role they can play in solving cases with gender-variant victims and working within this community. This research was conducted to trace the history of this relationship, with the goal of including aspects of it in a training module that is currently being developed, on this topic, for law enforcement.
Key Terminology:
•Gender-variant refers to any individuals that present themselves in a way that is not traditional to the gender binary. This term works to include the varying identities that exist within the gender spectrum.
•Trans or Transgender are slightly more restrictive terms that imply that an individual identifies as a gender different from that they were assigned at birth. (Much of the source material used for this research included the term “transsexual” but this is no longer the accepted nomenclature.)
•Queer is used to encompass the broader LGBTQ+ community, grouping people with non-traditional sexual orientation and/or non-traditional gender expressions into one category.
Key Locations
The first act of mass resistance by gender-variant people against police
The corrupt system that kept the Mafia rich and the queer community vulnerable
The police officer who created the first police liaison for transgender people
A significant riot against police in San Francisco's Tenderloin Disctrict
The most significant set of riots against police for the rights of the queer community
The jail experience for gender-variant people
A law allowing officers to arrest gender-variant people for standing on the street
The first transgender woman on a US Police Force
The tragic murder of a transgender man that could have been prevented by police
The first federal step towards educating police officers on gender-variant issues
Current State of Affairs
-
Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia all have set internal policies, within their departments, to decrease harm against the gender-variant community. These policies work to establish standards for use of preferred pronouns, housing people based on gender identity, and parameters for when personal searches be conducted. Some of these cities have set the standard that physical searches should never be conducted in order to establish gender identity.
-
As of 2022, only 22 states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands have issued laws that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
-
Independent organization lead the fight in investigating violence against gender-variant individuals. The Trans Doe Task Force, a non-profit organization that works to investigate the murders of trans and queer victims, educates the public, the media, and forensic professionals on this topic. They have developed a database known as LAMMP that is used to match unidentified bodies to missing queer people, something that the FBI database NAMUS fails to do.
“Lammp – LGBT+ Accountability for Missing and Murdered Persons.” LAMMP LGBT Accountability for Missing and Murdered Persons. https://lammp.transdoetaskforce.org/. ​
Mallory, Christy, Amira Hasenbush, and Brad Sears. “Discrimination and Harassment by Law Enforcement Officers in the LGBT Community.” The Williams Institute , March 2015.
“Non-Discrimination Laws.” LGBTQ+ Resources, October 21, 2014. https://www.wisconsin.edu/lgbtq-resources/employment-non-discrimination-laws/. ​
As the transgender community grows and becomes more visible throughout our culture, police officers must adapt. Required training modules are becoming increasingly necessary as the transgender community becomes more vulnerable, but this is only the first step that will need to be taken to ensure the safety of gender-variant people. Going forward, police departments should examine their relationship with the community as a whole and attempt to understand the ways in which they alienate themselves from the people. Some of the most significant progress in the transgender community was made possible because of the work of a police officer who took a community-based policing approach in his city. Community-based approaches should be integrated into every police department across America in order to bridge the gap between the needs of the people and the role that police officers have in society.