Despite the celebrated coming out of Caitlyn Jenner, transgender women face a harsh reality of violent assaults — and continuing mistreatment at the hands of police The Hatch Institute Follow Jan 29, 2016 · 19 min read

By Danielle Shapiro for The Contently Foundation

On the last day of her life, Zoraida Reyes had a choice: take the bus or walk to meet her blind date. Her favored method of getting around, a bright yellow bicycle that friends called the banana boat, had been stolen, and she’d never learned to drive. So she set out on foot on June 10, 2014, a mild, overcast day in southern California, from her rented bedroom in a modest ranch-­style home in Santa Ana, having arranged to meet a man she met on badoo.com, the social networking site.

Only it wasn’t really a date. Reyes, a 28­-year-­old transgender woman, planned to connect with the man because he’d agreed to pay her $10 for oral sex. Tall and slender with wavy black hair and chiseled cheekbones, she had the legs of a model and a prominent Adam’s apple, of which she was especially self-conscious. Paid sex helped her get by. Reyes, a prominent local LGBTQ activist, had worked at fast­-food restaurants until getting hurt on the job at a Jack In the Box, but she hoped to return to her studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. On most Tuesday nights, she attended meetings for transgender Latina women at the LGBT Center Orange County.

Her friends described her as funny, exuberant and fond of singing and dancing, even if she couldn’t carry a tune particularly well. But she was also dangerously naïve, they said. “She accepted anyone, regardless,” said Sandra Martinez, a co­worker at Jack In the Box –- even insensitive customers who asked, Are you a guy? “She was so nice.”

Reyes got into the back seat of Randy Lee Parkerson’s silver Honda, which he’d parked on a residential street in Santa Ana. Parkerson, 40, was having his own troubles. He’d just lost his job as a “team leader” at Target and went on a methamphetamine bender, smoking so much of the drug it kept him awake for six continuous days. Parkerson, who did not consider himself bisexual, told police that when high, he preferred male partners. He and Reyes, he claimed, went from oral to anal sex and she asked to have her airway restricted. While he choked her, he told police, wrapping his right arm around her neck and holding her hair with his left hand, Reyes would “grab his hand or she would make some noises, which would cause him to stop, but then Zoraida would say, ‘No, no, keep going, go, go.’”

When it was over 10 minutes later, Parkerson claimed, he noticed blood around Reyes’s nose and realized she was dead. He stuffed her body into the trunk of his car and drove around for a day, smoking more meth, before dumping her in an empty lot behind a Dairy Queen in Anaheim. Police found the body the next day. After being arrested four months later, Parkerson confessed, admitting that he killed her but telling police it was an accident — thus invoking the Preppie Killer defense, named after New York murderer Robert Chambers, who claimed he didn’t intend to strangle 18­-year-­old Jennifer Levin during rough sex in Central Park in 1986.

Reyes’s mother doesn’t believe it. “Since she’s not here to defend herself he could be saying it was an accident,” said Macrena Reyes. “I don’t think it was an accident.”

Parkerson is set to be tried for murder in March. Prosecutors have not charged him with a hate crime, although many of Reyes’s supporters assumed when they learned what happened that her slaying was motivated by bias. “You hear a transgender Latina’s body is found dumped in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, the first thing you think is, this woman was murdered and it was a hate crime,” said Laura Kanter, a director at the LGBT Center OC. “What else could you think, right?”