Terrance Wilson didn’t need to hear how his daughter ended up stabbed at least 48 times.
As he rushed to the hospital, he knew hate had brought her there, and that when she left, hate would be waiting for her.
It had taken him years — ones that he now sees as wasted — to accept her as a transgender woman. For a long while, he couldn’t hug her in public without worrying about who was looking, but by the time she ended up in that hospital bed, he had worked past those feelings. He didn’t care who saw him pull her close. That was his child, and he wanted to keep her safe.
“I understand that you, in your heart and your soul and every fiber of your body, are a woman,” he recalls telling her after the stabbing. “I get it. But wouldn’t life be so much easier for you if you dressed as a man in public?”
Her answer is one he now describes with reverence: “She told me she would rather be ridiculed and abused than not be the person she was.”
Nona Moselle Conner recovered from that stabbing and talked about it in an article that
ran in the Washington City Paper in 2016. She said a man plunged a butcher knife into her and then dragged her into an abandoned building, where he kept stabbing her, after she rejected his request for a sexual act.
“I’m not a victim,” she said at the time. “I’m a survivor.”
Nona was a survivor, but not just of that stabbing. She survived housing insecurity. She survived sex work. She survived a life of insults and rejections and financial instability. All of those were things she talked about publicly through interviews, social media posts and a string of GoFundMe pages.
“I — like many Black Trans Women — am still struggling to do more than simply survive, and the current Pandemic has presented so many new obstacles,” reads one of those pages.
“I make ends meet but barely,” reads another. “Homelessness is a major fact in my community and I want to be one less statistic.”
The latest page for her is titled, “Support celebration of life services for Nona.” It was
created a week ago and reads: “This past Thursday we lost our beloved sister, Nona Moselle. Nona was a community leader, advocate, mother, and so much more. Nona was deeply loved by so many in the community, particularly D.C.’s Transgender community. . . . Her sudden passing has left us gutted. We are grieving.”
Wilson says the cause of death is not yet known, but foul play is not suspected. Nona was 37.
The fundraising goal of that celebration-of-life page was set at $15,000. As of Friday, it had drawn more than $24,000.
Je’Kendria Trahan, the executive director of D.C.-based Collective Action for Safe Spaces, where Nona worked as a program manager, says she has watched that amount rise with a mix of emotions. The support and love that people have been showing has been overwhelming, she says, but it comes too late to help Nona.
“It’s like . . . why couldn’t she have gotten this amount of support when she was alive?” Trahan says. If that had happened, she says, Nona would have probably looked around and given it to other people in the community in need. “I would tell her all the time, ‘You can’t pour from an empty cup.’ ”
Days after Nona’s death, Trahan wrote a
string of tweets to let people know that the organization planned to pause internally to grieve, and to ask people to do more to help Black transgender women and sex workers.
“Make no mistake: many systems failed Nona, & in some ways, our own community failed her,” she wrote. “. . . We all have a responsibility to go out of our way to make sure Black trans women and sex workers are abundantly cared for — that they have safe housing, the ability to have their material needs more than met, and the autonomy to thrive in all the ways they desire. We owe that to Nona, and to every Black trans woman in our lives.”
Nona was unique, but her struggles weren’t. Transgender women of color in D.C. have been publicly sharing their trauma for years — and then been left to endure more of it. More violence. More homelessness. More loss.
A transgender force: ‘The only thing that kept me alive was doing this work’
“We yearn for a normal life,” says a transgender woman who was living in the same house as Nona, one run by No Justice No Pride, at the time of her death. The woman, who asked to be identified only by the name Kimberlee, describes the community as losing too many people to violence and overdoses lately and says the pandemic has caused life to grow even more difficult for sex workers. It’s made the work scarcer and riskier, and alternative support harder to find.
“A lot of girls are suffering,” Kimberlee says. She is doing sex work not because she enjoys it, she says, but because she doesn’t have other options. “We got to do what we got to do. We don’t have any privilege. Y’all won’t let us work at your establishments. Y’all won’t let us live in your apartments.”
Before she died, Nona was working on a storytelling project about the experience of sex workers during the pandemic. She was excited about the project, Trahan says, and had started writing poems about her own experience.
Trahan shared a few with me. They show Nona searching in vain for a friend who died young, praying against the day her own face would appear on an RIP shirt, and feeling tired.
“Tired of being in bondage,” she wrote in one poem. “Tired of being not heard.”
Those who knew Nona say they hope people are now listening.
After the stabbing, her voice grew stronger, not weaker, says Luvenier Lawson, who was a mother figure to Nona. She took Nona in as a teenager after overhearing her talk at the hairdresser about how her mother died and other family members didn’t accept her.
“I just seen nothing but pain in her,” Lawson recalls. “I just seen she needed some love.”
Later, she saw that child grow into a woman who used her own story to try to help others. As an organizer with the DecrimNow campaign, Nona called on D.C. lawmakers to decriminalize sex work. And in a
2019 story in Truthout, a nonprofit news organization, she shared how, at 15, she stood on K Street and started selling sex to survive. In that article, she expressed hope that she wouldn’t have to do that work again but also said, “I’ll do what I have to do.”
Terrance Wilson credits his daughter’s persistence and his observations of how people treated her with changing his way of thinking.
“A lot of men who have children who are gay and transgender have a lot of issues, and if we were able to overcome our issues, I think a lot of our kids wouldn’t suffer as much or for as long as they do,” the 60-year-old says. “I know I lost a lot of years. A lot more than I should have. But I thank God she knew without a shadow of a doubt how much I loved her.”
And that she made him proud.
“She didn’t live just for herself,” he says. “She lived to make life better for everyone that was going through the same struggle and for those who are getting ready to go through the same struggle. There are kids who aren’t born yet that are going to go through this.”
On Friday, a candlelight vigil was held for Nona. Only it wasn’t just for her.
Five days after her death, the D.C. transgender community
lost another member — Gisselle Hartzog. She was 30.
