The Life and Death of Latisha King

A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479810529
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

What can the killing of a transgender teen teach us about the violence of misreading gender identity as sexual identity? The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act. Salamon offers close readings of the court transcript and the bodily gestures of the participants in the courtroom to illuminate the ways gender and race were both evoked in and expunged from the narrative of the killing. Across court documents and media coverage, Salamon sheds light on the relation between the speakable and unspeakable in the workings of the transphobic imaginary. Interdisciplinary in both scope and method, the book considers the violences visited upon gender-nonconforming bodies that are surveilled and othered, and the contemporary resonances of the Latisha King killing.

1

Comportment

I’ve always been obsessed with high heels but as a child I was not allowed to have them. Oftentimes I would sashay around on tip toes imagining that I had high heels on and I was constantly looking over my shoulders to make sure I didn’t get caught or that I wasn’t being judged. Let’s face it, when you’re a transchild you’ve got to watch your ass.

—Justin Vivian Bond, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

I. Dressing, Telling, Passing

In 2008, Latisha King was shot to death at E. O. Green Junior High School by her classmate Brandon McInerney. It was the first class of the day, Dawn Boldrin’s English comp class. Latisha was seated at a computer, and Brandon was seated behind her. Twenty minutes into class, Brandon stood up, pulled a gun from the pocket of his sweatshirt, and fired one bullet into Latisha’s head. Latisha slumped down in her seat, bleeding profusely. Ms. Boldrin screamed: “What the fuck are you doing, Brandon?!” Brandon paused and made eye contact with Ms. Boldrin before firing a second shot into the back of Latisha’s head.

***

After the shooting, before the murder trial, the local newspaper, the Ventura County Star, ran scores of articles about the murder, its prosecution in the courts, and the family backgrounds of the victim and the shooter. The victim was referred to by male pronouns and the name “Larry King” exclusively. Scant mention was made of the name “Latisha.” And nearly every story written in the paper contained this sentence: King, an eighth-grader, dressed in a feminine manner and told friends that he was gay.1 What exactly is being conveyed to the readers of the Ventura County Star through the repeated refrain of this sentence? To claim that someone dresses “in a feminine manner” is not a nonsensical claim, although it is vague, demonstrating, or perhaps generating, a lack of clarity as to what precisely is being modified by that term “feminine.” That vagueness attends the reading of Latisha’s dress—just what is a “manner” of dressing, and what counts as a “feminine” manner, exactly? Is it the clothing that is feminine, or the way that King dons and carries that clothing? Assertions about the manner of her dressing figure us in a spectatorial relation to King, privy to the privacy of her room and the particularity of her body, even as the pronouncement about that manner of dressing—feminine—throws us back into the public realm, the social context in which such distinctions between masculine and feminine in clothing and behavior are parsed and judged.

In 2009 the Ventura County Star published almost the same sentence, with the phrase “dressed in a feminine manner” morphing to the less vague but still more odd “wore female clothing”: “King wore female clothing and told classmates he was gay.”2 This locution asserts the dressing as a matter of sex rather than gender, and offers the object of that sexing as the clothing itself, rather than its wearer. In this logic, instead of clothing conferring a gender on us, it is we who must match the sex of our clothing. Even if we understand “female” to refer to the proper wearer of the clothing, there is still some attributional sleight-of-hand in describing “Larry King’s” clothing as female; the clothing bears the sex of persons not wearing it. In 2010, the Ventura County Star appeared to settle on the phrase “feminine attire”: “King, 15, dressed in feminine attire and told friends he was gay.”3 Here swapping out “attire” for “clothing” seems to make the materiality of what is worn still less concrete, and also to shift, ever so slightly, the class signification of the outfit.

These are small differences, not without significance, though perhaps minor in media we know to be all-too-normative. Nonetheless, each of these statements understands itself to be asserting, fundamentally, the same claim—a claim, however, that is not entirely clear about either Larry King’s gender or his sexuality. When it is asserted that Larry wore female clothing and told friends he was gay, is that “and” inclusive or disjunctive? If the former, then in offering two modes of action—dressing and speaking—the sentence is describing two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Larry was queer, and queerness comes out in all sorts of ways, speaking and dressing among them. If that “and” is disjunctive, however, then the sentence does not offer Larry as a queer subject who lives his queerness in various modes but rather offers him as a queer subject through his telling (“told friends he was gay”) and a trans subject in his mode of bodily presentation (“dressed in feminine attire”). The telling and the dressing are two different modes of expression that announce two different kinds of identification, the first of gender and the second of sexuality. The assertion would be that there are two poles of transgression here, dressing in feminine attire on the one hand and gay self-disclosure on the other, and the Ventura County Star is offering each as separate but equally provocative. Gender is expressed by clothing, or in this case, an external perception of that clothing’s proper gender. Sexuality, in this case, is expressed not through behavior but through disclosure, or through disclosure as behavior.

In each case, Latisha’s dressing and her telling, her gender and her sexuality are almost entirely removed from the bodily realm. As an epistemological claim, “Larry told friends he was gay” asserts that Larry’s gayness both consists of and is revealed by his own utterance. That utterance then reenters the public realm of the Ventura County Star through circuitous travels through “friends,” which figures the proper domain of queer self-disclosure as the private realm, and by implication circulating more widely only though gossip, hearsay, or rumor. The framing of this disclosure places us already in the realms of the feminine and of that which is shameful. According to newspaper reports, the direct object of Larry’s self-disclosure shifts from 2008 to 2009. Whereas the earlier sentence has King telling friends he was gay, the sentence from 2009 asserts that he “told classmates he was gay.” The last seems to offer a hysterical subject, inappropriately disclosing all over the place, provocatively disseminating his sexuality throughout the classroom and the school. It appears, however, that Larry’s “gay behavior” consisted entirely of disclosing to a few people that he was gay; it is not clear that his “gay behavior” was anything other than the speech act of that disclosure. In other words, it may be that the declaration of gayness was itself the only queer behavior that he engaged in, as is sometimes true for queer youth. It is worth noting that Latisha had gone to another school before E. O. Green and that she changed schools because she had been harassed for being gay for well over a year at the prior school. It is a particular irony that the “gay lifestyle,” in this case, refers almost exclusively to being bullied and tormented by other students, chased from school to school, and rejected at home, rather than actually naming any variety of sexual expression.

The national media attention the story received in the weeks and months and years after the shooting for the most part followed the local press and read Larry King as a gay teenager rather than a trans teenager, but also retained attention to Larry’s transgressive gender expression. In this it would appear that the media wants to have its trans spectacle and its gay identity both, and in asserting them simultaneously in the same sentence these articles seem, in a rather transparent act of projection, to diagnose the confusion as Larry’s. It seems that the logic at work in this kind of reportage is an instance of trans erasure, that what we are seeing when “Larry” is described as “gay” is the all-too-familiar subsuming of a trans identity into a more easily assimilable gay identity—a distressingly common way of both denying and appropriating the trans community, which differentially bears violence that the more easily assimilated do not.

Sexual identity and gender identity are lived simultaneously, are mutually constituting, are wrapped thoroughly around one another. Why, then, belabor the parsing of gender and sexual identity in this instance, if the two always accompany one another and are so thoroughly imbricated? I want to suggest that homophobic and transphobic conflations of gender expression and sexual identity can have a very specific and real effect. Consider, for example, the characterization of Latisha’s gender expression offered by one of the administrators at E. O. Green Junior High, who stated that “we have a student expressing his sexuality through makeup.” At one level it is a simple muddle, a swapping out of gender for sexuality: what the administrator labels “sexual expression” should more accurately be described as “gender expression.” The implication of this simple swap, though, turns out to be not so simple. Conceiving of gender expression and sexual identity as fungible encourages people to look at gender expression as an act, and often as an aggressive act, akin to a sexual advance or even a sexual assault. This may be one way of understanding the otherwise mystifyingly disproportionate response to non-normative gender expression. Readings of Latisha’s gender presentation imply that her assertion of identity was a social event, asking something of others in asserting something about herself. Whereas normative gender identity, in this logic, asks nothing and demands nothing of others—it is, in effect, non-social—trans gender is understood as a provocation to the extent that is a shared social project. Some of the legal maneuvers related to the case would later reflect this logic: in suggesting that Latisha’s gender expression provoked Brandon McInerney to violence, they suggested in essence that by expressing her gender identity, Latisha authored her own murder.

II. In Full Swing

The shooting took place after a long campaign of harassment targeting Latisha’s gender presentation and perceived sexual orientation, in which her classmates bullied her for dressing, sounding, and walking “like a fag” and “like a girl.” The defense in the murder trial attempted to rebut the accusations of bullying by suggesting that Latisha was the perpetrator, rather than the victim, of bullying and harassment. Brandon McInerney and his lawyers claimed that “Larry’s” dressing, sounding, and walking “like a girl” constituted harassment of those around him. Here we see one of the dangers of conflating gender identity and sexual identity; in this case, gender presentation becomes interpreted as a form of sexual behavior, and that “behavior” is marked and read as aggressive in order to legitimate the violence that is visited upon the gender-transgressive person, violence with disciplinary and normativizing aims. The legal defense proceeded by way of reversal, a turning back against the trans child, so that the one who was murdered became the one who was judged and found guilty of aggression.

Latisha’s femininity made her stand out. In the seventh grade, when Larry still seemed to his classmates and teachers to be a boy, though perhaps a feminine one, few people could recall who he was. Later, however, he was seen as overwhelmingly, distressingly feminine. The heightening of Latisha’s femininity was read and described throughout the murder trial as a “turning point” in her behavior. We might pause to consider that turning. Gender here is understood as behavior, and as a volitional behavior, a matter of choosing, willing, deciding. Indeed, Dr. Donald Hoagland, the psychologist called as an expert witness by the defense team during the trial, asserted that Larry’s behavior, by which he meant Latisha’s femininity, was difficult for the other children to deal with and made them uncomfortable. This discomfort, he explained, arose because at that point in adolescence the students are coming to a sense of their own sexuality. The heteronormative scope of the developmental narrative invoked by Dr. Hoagland was not understood to include Latisha; rather, it pertained only to the presumptively heterosexual boys and girls whom she might have “confused” through her “behavior.” In contrast, then, with the cisgendered boys and girls against whom she was compared, Latisha’s gender was seen as a choice, as a behavior over which she had control, and also construed as something over which she refused to exert control. Latisha’s gender was characterized simultaneously as the product of her will and as the result of her failure to exert that will. An additional difficulty with this characterization was its failure to recognize that Latisha was coming into a surer and firmer sense of her gender as she approached adolescence. Just as the rest of the boys were, just as the rest of the girls were.

One of the primary ways that Latisha’s gender was read was through her way of walking. Walk and gender are both real and materially expressed, though neither can be reduced to the materiality that does the expressing. Gender and walk are situated between material body and immaterial inhabitation of the body. The walk resides in the hinge between the volitional (where my feet take me) and the nonvolitional (my walk as unintentionally disclosing my gender or sexuality). The walk has a style that changes over time as it develops, even as its temporal dislocation points backward. Walking is an act that we perform with our habit-body. We build up this habit-body over time, slowly, starting with our first few toddling steps. The style that any walk will eventually develop is unavoidably inflected with gendered meanings, as well as racial and class markers, which strengthen and deepen and become more pronounced in adolescence, developing like other characteristics of gender. That Latisha’s walk was read as a manifestation of her gender, and as evidence of her improper inhabitation of gender, was demonstrated by Dawn Boldrin, the teacher in whose classroom the shooting occurred. When asked about Larry and what made him stand out from the other children, she suggests that it was something about gender. The queerness of Larry’s gender was visible yet not easy to describe, and Boldrin ends up locating gender in Larry’s gestures. She is asked during the trial about the first time that she met Larry, the year before the shooting. “In terms of masculinity or femininity,” asks prosecutor Maeve Fox, “where you would you put him on the scale?” “He was obviously feminine,” Boldrin responds. “How so?” asks Fox. “Um . . .”4

Boldrin pauses. At that time, when Larry was in seventh grade, she perceived him to be feminine in a way that was easy to see but difficult to locate. This was before the cross-gender accessories that Latisha donned in the ten days before her death—makeup, earrings, high-heeled boots—the “behavior” that would attract so much attention, and so much anger, in her eighth-grade year. Struggling to articulate this attribute of Larry’s that was at once so discernible and so diffuse, so bodily and so not-quite-material, she offers: “I guess his size, his petiteness, by the way, his mannerisms, the way he carried himself, he had more of the qualities of a girl than a boy. Especially at that age, it’s pretty distinct the boys versus the girls at that age.” There is a distinct difference between the comportment of the boys and the comportment of the girls, says Boldrin, and Larry falls on the girls’ side of that line. But the “versus” in that “boys vs girls” does more work than just indicating difference. “Boys vs girls” is a distinction that is oppositional and incompossible. Latisha’s girlishness is attributable to some things over which she has no control—“his size, his petiteness”—and other things that she is thought to be able to control, “his mannerisms, the way he carried himself.” Referring to this girlishness, Maeve Fox asks, “Did that seem apparent to the other students?” Boldrin responds: “Oh yes. I don’t think he was throwing it at people, but it was more his personality. You walk down the street and you see two men, I think you can distinguish which one is masculine and which one is feminine and that’s just the way it is.”

Gender is figured as a potential projectile, something that Latisha could be “throwing at people,” but did not, at least not in the seventh grade. Ms. Boldrin seems to suggest that gender-as-thrown describes gender as the province of the surface, of bodily appearance, of material aspects of the body that are more concrete than a walk or comportment. Those last are understood to be something more akin to “personality,” to a way that one inhabits the body, an individuated style. Throwing it at people, she intimates, is what happened later, with the makeup, the earrings, and the boots. Boldrin here offers a reformulation of Freud’s assertion that the first thing you notice about someone walking down the street is whether that person is a man or a woman. Freud conjures a solitary figure walking down the street, surrounded by people who discern and judge, singly and collectively forming an audience for his or her gender expression. In place of this solitary figure Boldrin offers a pair, a couple, walking down the street, but rather than a heterosexual pairing of a man and a woman in which we would immediately know which was which, Boldrin substitut...