Trans Journalists Raquel Willis, Sue Kerr Do Monica Roberts Proud
When Monica Roberts died unexpectedly in 2021, the Black trans journalist behind TransGriot left a gap in the world wider than most and it takes more than one person to fill it.
As a longtime Texas LGBTQ+ activist, Roberts was a force both in media and politics, speaking and organizing nationwide, leading and agitating for change (and inclusion of BIPOC, trans women in particular).
What Roberts did exceptionally well others didn’t was to document the violence against trans and nonbinary people. If our reporters saw a Facebook or Reddit post about a trans person’s death, instead of calling that city’s police or coroner, The Advocate often called Monica Roberts first.
Even during the pandemic, she was almost always “first on the scene” (albeit virtually at times) when a trans person was attacked.
