A few years ago in New York City, a 17-year-old black transgender girl named Trina was walking down the street when she was stopped by police officers and frisked. When a warrant check came up clean, the officer looked in her purse, found condoms and then arrested her for loitering with the purposes of prostitution—the type of arrest that would be unthinkable had she been a cisgender, heterosexual boy.
Yet it’s the type of arrest that happens to gay men and women of color—as well as transgender women of color and homeless LGBT youths of color—on an all-too-frequent basis during encounters with police, and it represents a hidden but devastating form of profiling.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Root.
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