Monica Katrice Roberts was an African-American blogger, writer, and transgender rights advocate.
17 Facts About Monica Roberts
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Monica Roberts was the founding editor of TransGriot, a blog focusing on issues pertaining to trans women, particularly African-American and other women of color.
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Monica Roberts's mother was a schoolteacher and her father was a DJ.
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Monica Roberts graduated from Jones High School in the Houston Independent School District in 1980.
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Monica Roberts was a founding member of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, and served as its Lobby Chair from 1999 to 2002.
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In Louisville, Kentucky, Monica Roberts served on the board of the Fairness Campaign and its political action committee C-FAIR.
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Monica Roberts began writing TransGriot in 2004 as a newspaper column for The Letter, a Louisville-based LGBT newspaper; the term "griot" refers to a storyteller from West Africa.
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Monica Roberts was motivated by a lack of trans blogs focused on black people and other people of color.
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In 2006, Monica Roberts won the IFGE Trinity Award for meritorious service to the transgender community; it was the transgender community's highest meritorious service award, and she was the first African-American Texan and the third African-American openly trans person to be given the award.
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In 2015, Monica Roberts received the Virginia Prince Transgender Pioneer Award from Fantasia Fair, making her the first African-American openly trans person to be so honored.
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In 2016, Monica Roberts received a Special Recognition Award from GLAAD, and became the first openly trans person to receive Phillips Brooks House Association's Robert Coles "Call of Service" Award.
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In 2017, Monica Roberts received the HRC John Walzel Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign.
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In January 2020, Monica Roberts received the Susan J Hyde Award for Longevity in the Movement from the National LGBTQ Task Force.
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Monica Roberts had felt since she was five or six that "something was different about me", but didn't have access to black trans role models at that time ; she felt that she would have transitioned earlier if she had.
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Monica Roberts's death was announced on October 8,2020, in a Facebook post by her friend Dee Dee Watters, and was later confirmed by the Harris County Medical Examiner and local media.
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Monica Roberts' death was initially reported as a hit and run case, though the medical examiner later stated that the cause of death was a "medical emergency"; her family reported that she was feeling unwell in the days prior to her death.
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In January 2021, Dee Dee Watters, another Houston activist and friend of Monica Roberts, announced plans for a publication named TransGriot to continue the work Monica Roberts had done to cover black and trans issues on her blog of the same name.