On TransGriot, she celebrated Breanna Sinclairé, a transgender opera singer who performed the national anthem at baseball games, and wrote about Raquel Willis, the former executive editor of Out magazine. She covered issues surrounding transgender rights and, in a blog post one month before her death, expressed support for Mia Mason, a transgender woman who is running for Congress in Maryland’s First District against Andy Harris, the incumbent. In that article, Ms. Roberts offered a capsule history of the transgender community and the world of politics, compiling a list of every transgender person worldwide ever elected to serve in a national legislatures.
On other occasions, Ms. Roberts, a sports fan, gave her N.F.L. picks.
“Her blog was important because she was chronicling the transgender experience deeply in a way that many outlets just weren’t in the mid-2000s,” said Ms. Willis, herself a Black transgender activist, in a phone interview. “Often, she was the only one who noticed and sang our praises.”
Angelica Ross, an actress and the founder of TransTech Social Enterprises, an organization that works to give L.G.B.T.Q. people career opportunities in tech, said that transgender readers trusted Ms. Roberts to tell their stories in a way they didn’t trust journalists from mainstream outlets.
“Monica wrote about things when no one else would, and she wrote about them with care,” Ms. Ross said. “She showed attention to the details, such as pronouns or naming us how we were known.”
Ms. Roberts became especially admired for her tireless work to identify transgender murder victims, who are often described by the police and in local media by their birth names. She found that such misgendering known as deadnaming, can make it harder to solve the crime, in part because friends of the deceased often don’t know their given names and may not learn of a death for days or longer.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/us/monica-roberts-dead.html
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