From TDOR to Tony McDade: Black Transgender Mourning in the Wake of the Murder of George Floyd

That morning I graduated from therapy. It was a Tuesday and the first week of summer, and my therapist and I felt confident that I could spend the summer without her and just digging into the toolbox I'd built during our time together. I slid onto social media and prepared for my first glorious free day after grading final papers. My friends in the Twin Cities all seemed to be posting the same story, most of them with videos that played automatically. My elation at my own personal growth was quickly dashed by the harsher realities of being Black in a country that does not want me to grow or thrive, let alone survive.

Alton, Philando, Eric, and now George Floyd were men that looked like me and my family that I watched executed by the police state from the comfort of my home. Shot through car windows on Facebook live, strangled on the sidewalk selling cigarettes, and now a knee to the neck on hot asphalt. Well-meaning white liberals share these doubly moving images in an attempt to jostle their sleeping or "unwoke" white siblings from their postracial slumber. "See? It's real! It's happening before your very eyes! Racism is real!"

I do not need to watch someone like me die to know it is and has been our reality.

These images do not shock me to consciousness, they retraumatize me at a time when I am already hurting. I can't help but think about the glee white folks had in lynching Black bodies, having picnics beneath them, and then sharing the postcards bearing the burnt Black bodies' images as tokens. I can't help but think about all of the Black postal workers during the Reconstruction period charged with carrying these images across the country from eager white eyes to eager white eyes. How these postal workers were often themselves the targets of these lynchings.

Images of Black suffering only bolster white supremacy. If someone needs to see my dead body to believe I deserve to live, that ain't an allyship but spectatorship.

I remember driving with my dad and always wondering why he kept his wallet on the dashboard. It wasn't until I was in the car with him and he got pulled over that I learned one of the many ways we try to keep ourselves safe against the descendants of slave catchers as the children of the enslaved. I watched the strongest man I know turn small, hands raised, as he pointed to his wallet on the dash and told the officer he was clearly just reaching for his wallet. His eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror. I hadn't seen my dad scared before.

When I began my medical transition, my dad had two concerns. His first was a fear that I didn't know what was in the vials the doctor would give me—that the testosterone I felt I needed to make my body a home was probably some new experimental drug they were trying out on the Black public first. His fear is validated by centuries of experimentation on Black bodies in the name of science, and it took weeks to assure him that I needed this to live. His second fear was that I wasn't strong enough to be read as a Black man in this country. I assured him that decades of being a gender nonconforming BIPOC in the Midwest provided more character building than I cared for. I knew the testosterone was working when I began to register the new genre of fear I generated by merely existing—"passing" has more layers and legacies for Black trans people than our white siblings.

I was still reeling from George Floyd's public execution when a new tale of police brutality started to percolate on my social media accounts. The first reports admonished people for not talking about a Black woman that was murdered in Tallahassee—how the classic script of Black Lives Matter protests only taking the...