Last week, U.S. District Judge Sherri A. Lydon sentenced Daqua Lameek Ritter to life in federal prison for the 2019 murder of Pebbles LaDime Doe, a transgender Black woman he had an intimate relationship with. Ritter’s sentence comes eight months after a federal jury convicted him of obstructing justice, using a firearm to commit a crime and killing Doe because of her gender identity. The guilty verdict was obtained under the federal hate crime law that prohibits gender identity-based violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people.
“The jury’s verdict sends a clear message: Black trans lives matter, bias-motivated violence will not be tolerated, and perpetrators of hate crimes will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement in February. “We want the Black trans community to know that you are seen and heard, that we stand with the LGBTQI+ community, and that we will use every tool available to seek justice for victims and their families.”
On Aug. 4, 2019, the 24-year-old Doe was found dead inside a car parked in a driveway in Allendale County, South Carolina. Prosecutors used evidence, including text and social media messages, to prove that Ritter, who was in a relationship with another woman and worried about his sexual relationship with Doe being revealed, lured Doe to a remote area and shot her in the head three times.
Though initial news reports misgendered and misnamed Doe, her friends and family contacted the Alliance for Full Acceptance (AFFA) and South Carolina Equality for help getting justice. “We are in an absolute state of emergency for black transgender women,” AFFA’s executive director, Chase Glenn, said then. “Black trans women live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, are too often treated as disposable, and are experiencing epidemic levels of violence. We are at a crisis point that demands the nation’s attention.”
For once, it seems, the Department of Justice heeded that call. Though the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed in 2009 for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, Ritter’s conviction was the first by the federal government for a victim murdered solely because of their gender identity. The DOJ’s decision to prosecute Doe’s murderer is a step in the right direction and will hopefully deter others from targeting trans people with violence.
Since 2013, the Human Rights Campaign has been tracking fatal transgender violence, and those numbers — 32 in 2023, 41 in 2022, 59 in 2021 — are alarming. But outside a community that includes LGBTQ people and those advocating for this protected class, this violence has barely been mentioned. That silence sends a clear message to trans people — and those of us who love them — that people can commit violence against them with impunity and others will respond with a turned shoulder.
Since 2013, the Human Rights Campaign has been tracking fatal transgender violence, and those numbers are alarming.
It’s a message affirmed time and again by politicians on both sides of the aisle. While conservative legislatures, including those in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, have banned or attempted to ban transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care, some Democrats have helped perpetuate the anti-trans bias that fuels those bills. Rep. Colin Allred, who is running to unseat GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, says in a recent television ad that he doesn’t “want boys playing girls sports,” which, assuming he’s referring to transgender girls, perpetuates the unequivocally false notion that transgirls aren’t authentically who they say they are.
The argument that trans people aren’t who they say they are has turned the population into a political scapegoat, with conservatives pouring millions of dollars into anti-trans advertisements that aren’t even moving the political needle. While anti-trans sentiment might not be the issue driving people to the polls, it does marginalize gender-nonconforming and trans people, exiling them to the outskirts of society and making them more vulnerable to discrimination and violence that often proves fatal. Imagine a world where Ritter wouldn’t have worried about being “outed” for having a relationship with Doe because a relationship with a trans woman wouldn’t be treated as something to hide or be ashamed of. Doe would likely still be alive.
“Dime Doe was a brave woman,” U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina Adair Ford Boroughs told reporters after Ritter’s sentencing. “She lived and she loved as herself, and no one deserves to lose their life for that.”
While the DOJ’s prosecution of Ritter serves as a statement that trans people are equal under the law and deserving of legal protection, we’re now less than two weeks out from a presidential election that could undo what little progress has been made. If elected for a second time, Republican Donald Trump would likely use the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 guidance to deny the existence of trans people altogether.
Equating what it calls “transgender ideology” to pornography, Project 2025 seeks to outlaw that “ideology’s” existence. The conservative proposal would also ban gender-affirming care for children and adults, direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop collecting data about gender identity and undo federal laws that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ workers in federal workplaces. In this dystopian world, there would be no room for the DOJ to use that hate crime law to hold perpetrators of anti-trans crime accountable. One could argue that such violence would be encouraged in that it would support the assertion that trans people have never existed. We will not go back because we know trans people have and always will exist. We will not go back because we know trans people have and always will exist. Amid escalating hatred that could result in the Supreme Court outlawing access to life-affirming care for transgender minors, that needs to be repeated time and time again. Trans people, including my beloved husband, are deserving of all the love, care and protections that everybody is entitled to. Dee Elder, a transgender woman from Aiken, South Carolina, was one of the 12 jurors who convicted Ritter in February. She told The Associated Press: “We are everywhere. If one of us goes down, there’ll be another one of us on the jury. And we’ve always been here. We’re just now letting ourselves be known.” That’s the world we should all wish to live in, a world where trans people don’t live in fear of being murdered — because their lovers aren’t embarrassed to acknowledge their desires for them — but are instead free to be themselves, to date whom they please and to confidently walk through this world. Or, as Clarke, of the Civil Rights Division, perfectly captured in her statement: “In America, trans and gender non-conforming people deserve to live their lives free from violence based on who they are and who they love.” Ritter’s sentence helps convey that message, and may the next presidential administration, whichever it may be, continue using the federal government to reinforce that message by protecting every transgender child and adult.
