By Jared D. Childress | OBSERVER Staff Writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: The OBSERVER is observing Pride month with “Black PRIDE,” a series telling the stories of and identifying the critical issues for Black LGBTQIA+ folk in the Sacramento area.
Ebony Ava Harper’s favorite Tina Turner song is “I Might Have Been Queen,” off the late rock legend’s 1984 solo debut, “Private Dancer.”
Turner sings in the first verse, “I’m scanning the horizon for someone recognizing that I might have been queen,” before alluding to working in cotton fields. The song slows at the bridge and Turner sings in gritty extended vocals, “I lived through it all, and my future’s no shock to me. I look down, but I see no tragedy.”
Harper also is someone whose life was derailed by abuse and discrimination before stepping into her power.
“I’ve lived many lives in my time on this planet,” Harper said. “I may not come from cotton fields like Tina, but I’ve gone from the streets of Santa Monica, to the boardrooms of the California Endowment, to the White House.”
Harper, a Black trans woman, went from living on the sidelines to being tased on the frontlines of a 2018 protest for Stephon Clark. Less than a decade into her social justice career, Harper is an award-winning advocate who has pushed the needle forward for the Black community statewide and nationally – and quite literally left her mark on Sacramento.
Her older brother Donovan Marshall witnessed Harper turn adversity into advocacy.
“Ebony’s in tune with what’s going on around her,” Marshall said. “She’s tapping into a community that has been forgotten.”
Harper is the founder and executive director of California TRANScends, a sociopolitical advocacy nonprofit for Black and Brown queer and trans folk. Before that, she made history as the first openly trans Black woman to work at the California Endowment. She also worked in the lieutenant governor’s office. In December, she was one of several thousand invited to the White House by President Joe Biden for the signing of the Respect For Marriage Act.
She is most proud of the mural at the Lavender Library. She commissioned it in 2018 as a memorial to Chyna Gibson, a well-known Black trans woman from Sacramento murdered in New Orleans.
The phrases “protect our trans daughters” and “white silence equals white violence” are painted in black to bring awareness to the epidemic of anti-transgener violence. Black trans women are one of the most murdered demographics; there are 12 known trans victims of fatal violence this year, eight are Black and seven are Black trans women, according to HRC.
Ben Hudson, Harper’s former Gender Health Center boss, spoke of Harper’s gregarious personality and infectious laugh, noting he has “been forever changed by her.”
“People need not sleep on Ebony,” Hudson said. “She’s exceeded any expectation, opportunity, or possibility that’s ever been given to her.”
When not being a visible advocate, Harper can be found in her Woodlake apartment, listening to Erykah Badu or Yolanda Adams; watching documentaries; following politics like sports; reading books by spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle; and spending time in prayer and contemplation.
“I may be recognized but I don’t live fancy at all,” Harper laughed. “But I’m grateful, it’s a world away from where I used to be.”
Reverend ‘Do Wrong’
Harper was born to Jamaican immigrants and knew she was trans at a young age, even though she didn’t yet have the words. Being a Black, trans and first-generation American caused Harper to endure a level of discrimination few have experienced.
“I didn’t feel like I belonged with the other Black kids because we were culturally different,” Harper said. “And I didn’t feel like I belonged at home because I wasn’t like my brothers. I always wanted to be with my sisters.”
Harper’s homelife was so unstable that she and her five siblings couldn’t call any one neighborhood home. They frequented all of Los Angeles’ historically low-resourced areas, such as Watts, South Central and Inglewood.
Her mother, Isoline, who passed in 2022, was a Church of God in Christ preacher with a side hustle.
“I would describe my mom as a preacher-slash-pimp – she hustled but she knew the Scripture back and forward,” Harper laughed. “She didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. We basically raised ourselves.”
Isoline’s side hustle sometimes yielded millions, allowing them to occasionally stay in Baldwin Hills, a predominantly Black neighborhood nicknamed “the Black Beverly Hills.” But their mother’s inevitable incarceration would land them back in the ’hood.
‘There’s a prototype of the ’hood preachers; they call them ‘reverend-do-wrong,’” Harper said. “They have a ring on every finger, a Cadillac – my mom was the female version of that.”
Isoline actually preferred a Mercedes-Benz, according to Harper’s older brother Marshall. He said their mother dressed in sequins with a fedora tilted to the side. She’d sometimes keep in the house hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
“She had no sense of conservation,” Marshall said. “Everything was ‘risk and reward’ – even with her kids.”
Marshall was one of few who showed Harper affection; they would cuddle while watching cartoons.
“We had a lot of things in common and it was nice to just laugh with her,” said Marshall, who is 15 years older. He protected Harper because she was “such a special person with a positive personality.”
Harper was bullied in school, so she tried her best to win friends.
“Sometimes she’d resort to buying friends,” Marshall said, explaining she would steal money from their mother’s purse. “But no amount of money worked so she just had to just be herself.”
Harper’s “only protector” left when she was 5 to follow his own dreams. For years, Marshall lied about his upbringing, not wanting to be judged. Today, he is a married father of two with a career in real estate.
At 6, Harper’s mother held her hand as they crossed the street. But there was something in the way she walked that triggered Isoline.
“I must’ve made some gesture crossing the street,” Harper said. “My mom looked down at me and said ‘Boy, I hope you don’t grow up to be a f****t.”
Decades later, Harper would financially support Isoline in the months before her passing in Spring 2022. In one of their last phone calls, Isoline acknowledged she hadn’t been supportive of Harper.
“I don’t want to demonize my mom,” Harper said. “She was her own person.”
Hollywood
Harper didn’t stay in one school longer than a year. That made succeeding difficult, but the propensity was there. She was an inquisitive kid who listened to National Public Radio. The station mentioned a place with the most runaways: Hollywood.
There was no going back to get anything when she ran away in 1992. When school let out, 13-year-old Harper – dressed in her school uniform – took the bus to Hollywood.
“That bus led to another world,” Harper said.
She quickly learned to survive in the streets. She found a youth homeless shelter, the Los Angeles Youth Network, that gave her food and gender-affirming clothing. She engaged in survival sex work on Santa Monica Boulevard and landed in the foster care and juvenile detention systems.
Harper said sex work was her escape route from foster care.
“There were a lot of things that happened in foster care that I don’t want to talk about,” Harper said. “A lot of traumatized and sexually abused kids.”
More than 391,000 youth are in foster care in the U.S. and 30% of them identify as LGBTQ+, according to the Human Rights Campaign. LGBTQIA+ youth are more likely than their non-LGBTQIA+ peers to use alcohol and are about three times more likely to engage in cocaine use and injection drug use, according to another HRC report.
Drugs began to play an important role in Harper’s life, as it did for a lot of Blacks in the 1990s, the height of the crack epidemic. Drugs were her coping mechanism. “Using drugs was strictly to make it to the next day,” Harper said. “I didn’t like my reality and drugs provided an escape.”
She developed a mile-long rap sheet with multiple arrests for sex work, drugs, loitering, and trespassing. A couple times a year Marshall would “rescue her from Santa Monica,” give her cash and a place to shower. But by the time he came home from work, Harper was gone.
Marshall showed up for his sister, but was concerned. In the late 1990s, he had a conversation with Harper that she still remembers. Marshall was fed up with her behavior and said he “didn’t like the person she’d become.”
“She was going through a lot,” Marshall said. “But that conversation was very real and may have come off really harsh.”
Nowhere To Go But Up
Harper always had been a seeker and in 2001 had a spiritual experience that changed her life’s trajectory. After nearly 10 years, the streets had caught up with her; she dropped to her knees in prayer and screamed out “God help me!” on a West Hollywood street corner.
“I felt really empty at that point,” Harper said. “I didn’t feel love anymore.”
Her eyes were still closed when a church bus slowed to a stop in front of her. The doors opened and a woman invited her to church.
“It was like the universe just stopped,” Harper remembered. “I cried out 22 years of hurt and pain.”
She got on the bus, got off the streets and worked with the church for several years. She made some concessions in her gender expression to be in the Christian space.
“I was always trans regardless of what I was wearing,” Harper said. “Being trans isn’t about appearance, it’s about the spirit.”
The spiritual experience paved the way for the proud trans woman she is today. Today, she advocates for the freedom of gender expression and gender-affirming healthcare.
“Love came into my heart and my cup got refilled,” Harper said. “I had a lot of struggles from that moment on. But it always felt like everything was going to be all right.”
The Front Lines
Harper moved to Sacramento in 2008 and caught the attention of Ben Hudson, co-founder of the Gender Health Center. He saw Harper on social media posting positive messages and being transparent about her struggles.
Harper battled imposter syndrome in her first months at GHC. She used words such as “stupid,” and “I can’t do this” to describe her internal dialogue. She’d threaten to quit daily.
“Ben gave me a pep talk each time,” Harper said. “That gave me strength to go on to the next day.”
The pep talks continued for months, but became few and far between. One day, she went into his office for her usual pep talk. Hudson called her bluff.
“He already knew what I was coming to say,” Harper laughed. “He just gave me a look and we both started laughing. That was my ‘out the nest’ moment.”
Hudson said Harper still was making peace with a lifetime of trauma. “When those negative things have been reinforced throughout your life, that type of messaging is incredibly difficult to overcome,” Hudson said. “People spend their lives trying to rewrite those messages.”
Her position at GHC gave her purpose, curbed the behaviors that no longer served her, and was her entrée into advocacy.
She went on to co-organize the 2017 Black Womxn’s March, catching the attention of the California Endowment, a nonprofit focused on health equity. While there, she organized a “Unity Ball” that brought together the Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ community with cisgender, heterosexual people of color, making a concerted effort to include Black men. She then worked at the office of Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and helped form the California Transgender Advisory Council.
“The story of Ebony is remarkable in a million ways,” Hudson said. “I think she has a real chance to make a difference in the political arena.”
Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates
Harper has no immediate plans to run for office, but all options are on the table. She is currently working on trans advocacy at the national level to fight the onslaught of anti-trans legislation. She is also co-chair of Mirror Memoirs, a nonprofit supporting LGBTQIA+ folks of color who survived child sexual abuse.
Harper takes pride in helping the upcoming trans generation. But she’s also protective, she declined to have a young person speak in the article.
“As someone is stepping into trans eldership, being able to support trans youth is important to me,” Harper said. “It’s the little things, like going with them to their gender-affirming medical care.”
Today, Harper’s run-ins with law enforcement come by way of political activism – and also racial, trans-antagonistic profiling.
“The other day I was stopped by the police because they thought I was a sex worker,” Harper said. “They assumed that because I hit a couple of social markers: Black, trans and in a low-income neighborhood.”
Harper advocates for the decriminalization of sex work and for the equitable treatment of the underclass, citing formerly incarcerated folks and Black queer and trans youth.
“The system oppresses certain groups,” Harper said. “Even historical family trauma makes it so a person doesn’t have the tools to get out of their situation.”
Time and attention healed Harper’s relationship with her siblings and she is on speaking terms with all of them.
Marshall in 2018 told her she makes him both proud and a better person.
“Ebony’s in tune with a philosophy she didn’t know she had back then,” Marshall said. “When you have a philosophy you can live, that’s when it becomes real.”
Harper is a diplomatic advocate but is quick to note the ’hood is still in her. Her life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get.
“My life is like the trans Forrest Gump,” Harper laughed. “It’s a comedy, it’s a drama – it’s a superhero movie. I just feel like I was running and doing things that were close to my heart until I found my passion.”
Glossary
Terms as defined by PFLAG, an organization supporting the loved ones of LGBTQIA+ folk. For more information visit pflag.org.
Cisgender (pronounced sis-gender): A term used to refer to an individual whose gender identity aligns with the sex assigned to them at birth. The prefix cis- comes from the Latin word for “on the same side as.”
Transgender: Often shortened to trans, from the Latin prefix for “on a different side as.” A term describing a person’s gender identity that does not necessarily match their assigned sex at birth.
Queer: A term used by some LGBTQ+ people to describe themselves and/or their community. Reclaimed from its earlier negative use – and valued by some for its defiance – the term is also considered by some to be inclusive of the entire community.