A few drivers slow down and give Tanekea a second look; some shake their heads, look disgusted. Life as a prostitute is not easy. Life as a transgender prostitute is harder still, activists in the transgender community say.  This week has been an especially difficult one, with three shootings in the District of transgenders - two of them fatal and at least one, police say, the result of a male customer angered to learn the prostitute was transgender.

"They're looking more and more realistic the younger they get," says Mauna Horad, 32, gazing toward the younger crowd Monday night. Horad is a veteran of these streets; she's lived in Northwest Washington for almost 10 years. "A lot of them are starting out young. You got some girls that are 18, 19, 20. They look very much like females."  Which poses a quandary in the community: When do you tell a man that you're really a man, at least down there?
"Sometimes I don't tell - I'm not gonna lie," says Tanekea, who will offer only her first name. She has been taking hormone pills since the age of 14 and has the C cups to prove it. "When I date them, I tell them. If it's just for this or that, I don't. . . . But no one ever does anything to me. Some boys say they're gonna kill me or something, but nothing happens." K Street is a world of their own, far enough from the bourgeoise queens who hang out at Ziegfeld's in Southeast Washington, several blocks away from Dupont Circle's testosterone-driven, gay male-centric 17th Street. 

Here, the queens congregate, the younger ones looking every bit like young women, the older ones looking, for the most part, like older transgender women. Trina Lovelace is less ambivalent than Tanekea about whether to tell. "They should already know," says the 24-year-old. (And "Yes, Lovelace is my last name," she says, smiling.) Lovelace, of Vienna, is decked out in a J.Lo-inspired blue-and-white ensemble that shows off her flat stomach. Lovelace has been dressing as a woman and coming to K Street for five months, just to see what it's like.
Tuesdays are the slowest, she says, Fridays the busiest. She is a man, who is a woman, pronouns be damned. "I feel that I don't need to tell him a thing. Not a thing." She pauses for a long while. "Why should I?" Miss Tina of Dale City has an answer, one honed by experience. Tina is older, maybe in her forties, "but a true woman never tells her age." "You've got to think for a man. If you don't, it's 'Oops, baby,'" Tina says, a cigarette dangling from her lips. "You're dead." She's talking about 25-year-old Elvys Perez, better known as Bella Evangelista, who was fatally shot Saturday, allegedly by Antoine Jacobs, 22. Police say Jacobs paid Perez for a sex act and then discovered Perez was born a man.

On Wednesday night two transgenders were also shot. Aaryn Marshall, who went by Emonie Kiera Spaulding, 25, was found dead in Southeast Washington. The other victim, a 24-year-old whose name has not been released by police, was shot in the torso just a couple of blocks from where Tanekea was standing. They were most likely victims of a hate crime, activists say. Bella's death Saturday was unknown to many in the streets here Monday and Wednesday nights. But Miss Tina and Horad, among the older and more cautious transgenders, knew the story well. Some have endured violence, or have heard the stories: Hit in the face. Robbed. Chased by cars.
Yes, working the streets is risky - not to mention illegal - but the transgenders on K Street mostly shrug off the worry. Others can't afford to.

"I believe wholeheartedly that it is our responsibility to tell men that, hey, I'm not everything that I appear to be, whether you're on K Street or not," says Earline Budd, a transgender activist who works with younger transgenders at Us Helping Us, an organization primarily for black bisexual and gay men in Southeast Washington. Budd once worked as a prostitute in the late 1980s and early 1990s - it was how she contracted HIV, she says. The issue of whether to tell is a familiar generational divide among transgender women, she says. "The younger women don't feel it's a necessity to divulge that they're transgender. They either say, 'They already know about it,' or they say, 'I'm not sleeping with him at this exact moment,'" Budd says. "I discuss this issue with them all the time, and I tell them we owe it to ourselves to let people know." Still, "No one, absolutely no one, deserves to be murdered because he or she is transgender," she continues.

"There is no excuse for that." They are females in mind, in mannerisms, in carriage, in heart. Appearances matter only to a certain extent, Horad says, but that extent matters more to people outside their close-knit group than to them. "These women are in such a difficult position. Nobody would want to be in their shoes," says Katherine Rachlin, a clinical psychologist and gender specialist in Greenwich Village. She's been working with transgenders for 15 years, and transgender prostitutes - there are many in Manhattan's meatpacking district, she says - in the last few years. "At any stage, they can be beaten up by customers, by lovers, by family members," says Rachlin. "And some of them don't feel the need to disclose because they have a sense of rightness: They are female regardless of their body and regardless of what anyone else says. I'm overgeneralizing here, but for a transgender woman to tell a man that she is a male goes against everything in yourself. So they use their own moral compass, they decide how to handle the situation. There's not a right or wrong answer here." 

Write comment
Name:
Email:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."