Robyn “Pocahontas” Crowe’s family is shrinking.

In May, her granddaughter was found dead in Far East Dallas, her body marred by a single gunshot wound. Less than two weeks later, police discovered her cousin’s body in White Rock Lake. She had been strangled and beaten.

Like Crowe, both Muhlaysia Booker and Chynal Lindsey were black transgender women. The three do not share a blood bond. But they came together through experience, forming a chosen family.

Crowe is still grieving their deaths. Then, on Sept. 20, another transgender woman of color, a Latina, was shot on a northwest Dallas street. The attacks have many trans Texans asking, why does this keep happening to us?

"I'm still traumatized from losing my grandbaby," said Crowe, who started a transgender radio show this year called Trans-Fusion. "I look at everybody who lost their life. They could just as easily have been me."

In the past five years, more transgender people have been killed in Texas than any other state, according to a list kept by the LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign. More than California, which has a higher population. More than New York, with its highly visible LGBTQ community. And more than Florida, which dealt with a spate of murders just last year.

Nearly half the deaths occurred in Dallas. As the city reels from the latest attack, many in the transgender community are pointing to politics as an underlying problem.

“Why it’s happening more in Texas now is we don’t have transgender laws that cover our rights. ... People feel like they can get away with more,” Crowe said. “There’s always been violence.

“But they’re killing us now.”

15 in five years

Domingo Ramirez-Cayente, the man charged in the Sept. 20 shooting, admitted to pulling the trigger, according to an arrest affidavit.

The affidavit says he drove up to his target and hurled homophobic and transphobic slurs at her. When she walked away, he followed, finding her alone at a bus stop and shooting her multiple times in the arms and chest.

The Dallas Police Department investigated the incident as a hate crime. Ramirez-Cayente has been charged with aggravated assault. His target survived. If she had not, she would have been the 19th transgender person killed in the U.S. this year.

The American Medical Association has called it an "epidemic of violence."

"According to available tracking, fatal anti-transgender violence in the U.S. is on the rise, and most victims were black transgender women," board member S. Bobby Mukkamala said in June. "The number of victims could be even higher due to underreporting."

"Transgender" refers to someone who identifies as a different gender than the sex assigned to them at birth. A trans woman, for example, was not assigned "female" at birth but identifies as such. Transgender people can also be "nonbinary," meaning they identify or express their gender in a way that is neither male nor female, or is somewhere in between.

1 / 2From left, Marquel Dominique, Alana Bursey, Robyn "Pocahontas" Crowe, Mieko Hicks, and LeShay Weeks pose for a photo on Friday, September 27, 2019 at Weeks' home in Dallas. The group hosts a weekly radio show called Trans-Fusion, where they talk about their experiences as black transgender women. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2From left, LeShay Weeks, Alana Bursey, Robyn "Pocahontas" Crowe, Mieko Hicks, and Marquel Dominique pose for a photo on Friday, September 27, 2019 at Weeks' home in Dallas. The group hosts a weekly radio show called Trans-Fusion, where they talk about their experiences as black transgender women. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

At least 15 transgender people have been killed in Texas since 2015, according to the Human Rights Campaign and Trans Murder Monitoring, an online site that tracks homicides of trans and gender-diverse people worldwide. Nearly half of those deaths occurred in Dallas, where four trans women of color were shot, beaten or choked to death in the past 16 months. Several more have been attacked.

Florida and Louisiana were second and third on the Human Rights Campaign’s list, with 12 and nine deaths respectively. High population states in the West and Northeast, such as California and New York, had far fewer. The attacks often seemed to come in waves. Murders are reported within days or weeks of each other, then relative silence sets in before another string of homicides.

These counts aren’t foolproof. Some killings don't make their way into headlines or onto a list, and not all homicides of trans people are motivated by anti-trans hatred. It’s also hard to know how much in the uptick in violence is due to a real increase in attacks against trans Americans or more comprehensive reporting of these attacks.

But as the best barometer for tracking anti-transgender violence at this time, these worrying numbers have the Texas LGBTQ community demanding answers: Why here? Why now? Why us?

“Stacked oppression”

"That is the million-dollar question," Carter Brown, founder of the Dallas-based Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, told The Dallas Morning News. "The Dallas area is progressive in a lot of ways. But it's still the state of Texas, and we don't have many laws to protect trans people."

Unless you live in a handful of big cities, it's legal under state law to fire, refuse service to or refuse to rent to someone because they're lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The Texas hate crimes statute covers sexual orientation but not gender identity. And, in the halls of the state Capitol, conservative legislators have knocked down every effort to protect the rights of transgender Texans.

Monica Roberts, a black transgender woman, activist and Houston-based blogger, said this sends a message: “It’s open season on transgender Texans.”

"The difference is we're run by conservative Republicans, for now, who have openly tried to pass anti-trans legislation," Roberts told The News. "It has obviously stirred up anti-trans sentiment in Texas."

She mentioned the so-called bathroom bill, the 2017 effort to require Texans to use the restroom that matched the sex on their birth certificate or ID, and planks in the Texas GOP platform opposing expanded recognition for trans people. Add racial prejudice with increased trans visibility in high-population centers like Dallas, where violent crime is on the rise.

Leslie McMurray calls it “stacked oppression.”

“They have to survive, they have to live,” said McMurray, the transgender education and advocacy coordinator at the Resource Center, a Dallas-based organization that provides support for the LGBTQ community. “They have virtually no rights in a society that doesn’t value their lives and then we’re surprised there’s violence?”

According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 30% of trans Americans have been homeless at some point in their lives and nearly half had been sexually assaulted, 10% in the previous year. For trans people of color, these numbers go up. Black trans Americans reported homelessness at a rate of 42%, and 13% had been sexually assaulted in the past year.

Of the total respondents, 57% said they would feel uncomfortable calling the police if they needed help. This number rose to 59% and 67% among Latinx and black respondents, respectively. Trans women of color reported they turned to sex work at higher rates than their white peers. Nearly 7% of black trans Americans are living with HIV, which is 20 times the rate among non-transgender Americans.

In Texas, some of these numbers are worse: 34% of trans Texans were living in poverty, compared to 29% nationwide. Two-thirds of trans Americans did not have identity documents that reflect their preferred name or pronouns; this jumped to 77% in Texas.

Violence against trans people of color is a complicated problem, one that intersects with issues of poverty, policing, homelessness, racism, misogyny, intimate partner violence and more. Addressing the problem won’t be simple, McMurray said, but it starts with education — and experience.

“It’s worse across the South. There’s no question about that. But what needs to happen is for people to just encounter a transgender person,” McMurray said. “We laugh. We cry. We have families.”

It's like a pastor at Booker's funeral said, McMurray added: "Prejudice rarely survives experience."

“Celebrate every moment”

1 / 2From left, LeShay Weeks, Alana Bursey, Robyn "Pocahontas" Crowe, Mieko Hicks, and Marquel Dominique pose for a photo on Friday, September 27, 2019 at Weeks' home in Dallas. The group hosts a weekly radio show called Trans-Fusion, where they talk about their experiences as black transgender women. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2From left, Marquel Dominique, Alana Bursey, Robyn "Pocahontas" Crowe, Mieko Hicks, and LeShay Weeks pose for a photo on Friday, September 27, 2019 at Weeks' home in Dallas. The group hosts a weekly radio show called Trans-Fusion, where they talk about their experiences as black transgender women. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Every Friday, the women of Trans-Fusion Radio open up the mics. They're calling on the people of Dallas, especially the non-transgender folks, to get to know them.

"We want to end confusion about 'transgender,'" said Mieko Hicks, who co-hosts the show with a few other black trans women. "The less education out there, the more ignorance there is."

LeShay Weeks, a massage therapist and vegan chef, and Crowe also co-host. Booker, Crowe's "grandbaby," was their first guest on the show less than six months before she was killed by a man implicated in two other recent murders.

All three women said they dreamed of three things: greater acceptance from the black community, normalization and humanization of their experiences, and a state hate crimes law that covers gender identity. Currently, someone who is motivated by anti-transgender hate can be charged with a hate crime only if federal officials give the OK.

"Because of the way that the laws are set up, it's easy for those trans-attracted men to attack us and get away with it," Hicks said. “There’s this culture of down-low men because the men are scared to come out and be who they are."

Police have made arrests in 12 of the 15 Texas murder cases since 2015. Eight were in a sexual relationship with their killer.

"To save face, they’ll kill us first.”

The violence has made some trans women in Dallas go underground. In the meantime, Hicks said, she and the women of Trans-Fusion radio can help lift their voices.

“On the front line of any civil rights movement, there are going to be casualties. So those who put themselves on the front lines are possibly sacrificing themselves, possibly martyring themselves,” Hicks said. “All we can do is be more visible.”

Dallas politicians and police have responded to the violence, holding self-defense classes for the LGBTQ community and ensuring liaisons are in place. The city expanded its equal rights ordinance in 2015 to protect trans people from discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, Organización Latina de Trans en Texas and transgender activists Stacey Monroe and Ana Andrea Molina plan a rally at 1400 S. Lamar St., the address for police headquarters, for the latest victim in Dallas. "We must do better to protect trans women, especially trans women of color, from discrimination and violence," Monroe said in a Facebook post. "We are calling on the Dallas Police Department to charge Ramirez-Cayente with a hate crime."

Meanwhile, transgender Dallasites continue to provide for their own community. Brown's group holds an annual conference that brings black trans men and women from across the country to Dallas. In addition to hosting the radio show, Crowe and others are planning to open the House of Rebirth, a transitional home and resource center, to give trans women a place to live and to help the entire community find information about accessing health care, changing the gender on their identifying documents and more.

Despite the violence, these strides give the women of Trans-Fusion radio some hope.

“This life is rough,” said Weeks. “I realized that I have to celebrate every moment.”

“You never know. This could be your last.”