The Martyrdom of Chanelle Pickett and the Birth of Transgender Day of Remembrance
Nov. 20 marks annual recognition of trans lives lost to violence
Editor's Note: The author is using a pseudonym for safety.
Martyrdom is a dying business. That is why nobody becomes a martyr willingly. At least, no reasonable person. It involves pain and suffering, and it never ends well.
Surely, Chanelle Pickett had no desire to become a martyr. But then again, she had no say in the matter.
Chanelle and her identical twin sister Gabrielle were born in New York City on Aug. 6, 1972. Much of what is known about the early life of the Pickett girls comes from an appearance they made on "The Jenny Jones Show” on April 5, 1993. In a segment titled “Twin Boys Living As Girls,” Chanelle and Gabrielle completed one another’s sentences as they alternated telling Jones and her rapt audience about their childhood.
As with many twins, they were inseparable and, although assigned male at birth, they began wearing lipstick and their mother’s clothing around the age of 7. At age 12, their mother found out they identified as girls, and they became estranged. Soon after, she put them into foster care. Eventually, they were outed in high school by teachers who had been entrusted with their secret by their foster parents.
In 1993, the sisters moved to the Boston area, where they found jobs at NYNEX, a regional telephone company in the suburb of Brookline. That job only lasted six weeks after a supervisor discovered they were transgender and harassed them until they quit in February of 1995. Chanelle, who was saving for her gender-affirming surgery, was unable to find employment. So, like many other trans women in her situation, she drifted into sex work.
On Nov. 21, 1995, the first report of Chanelle’s slaying appeared in the Boston Herald. Beneath the headline “‘Preppy’ Allegedly Kills Date In Drag,” the article’s writers made no attempt to hide their disdain for the victim.
"A ‘preppy’ Watertown computer worker searching for sex in the Combat Zone strangled his one-night stand after discovering a man’s body underneath a woman’s tight jeans and lacy purple top,” the story read.
The accused man was William C. Palmer, who met Chanelle and Gabrielle at the Playland Café. At the time, it was the oldest gay bar in Boston. It was located near the "Combat Zone," the red-light district of the city, where its citizenry could find the strip clubs, X-rated movie houses, sex workers and drugs.
The details of their meeting differed. Palmer claimed he was unaware of Chanelle’s gender as he bought the twins drinks shared cocaine with them. Gabrielle denied this claim and said Palmer definitely knew Chanelle was transgender. Other regular Playland patrons backed up her account.
The Pickett sisters and Palmer left together, stopping first at the girls’ home. Gabrielle stayed behind while Chanelle went with Palmer to his apartment in nearby Watertown.
What happened next was not clear. But even the police seemed to buy Palmer’s use of the “gay panic defense,” which asserts that the perpetrator reacted violently out of shock after finding out that their sexual partner is gay or transgender. It was a considered a valid legal defense tactic that only this year was banned in Michigan.
While the article contained no personal information about Chanelle, the reporters devoted several paragraphs to Palmer’s neighbors’ perception of him. He was remembered for his wearing of sports coats and khakis and being “clean-cut” and “preppy.” One called him “very outgoing and polite and nice.” Yet another added that Palmer was “the nicest guy you’d ever want to know.”
None of the earliest articles went into much detail about the actual murder. That would come out two years later when Palmer went to trial. During his testimony, Palmer said, “We were getting romantic and I reached down and discovered Chanelle Pickett was a man. I jumped up and I said 'You're out of here.’"
According to Palmer, at that point Chanelle attacked him, shouting and hitting him in the chest.
In Palmer’s words, the two scuffled and “Maybe she fell down and hit her head on the humidifier.” He claimed they then fell asleep. When he awoke in the morning, he discovered Chanelle was dead.
Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith, who covered the trial and heard all the testimony including the medical examiner’s report, saw it far differently. Her impassioned, graphic description in the paper’s May 19, 1997, issue, revealed what she had heard.
“He said he hit Chanelle during the struggle, maybe once, and sat on her until she settled down, still breathing. Then Palmer, who'd had one helluva long night smoking crack and all, decided to catch a few winks. When he woke up, alas, his date for the evening was dead."
Smith did not try to hide her disbelief and revulsion as she reported Pickett's murder in horrific detail.
"Then how to explain away the contusions and abrasions on Chanelle's face, the hemorrhages in the whites of her eyes, that scrape over her left cheekbone, lips bruised purple and swollen, those multiple superficial abrasions with fluid and congested as if all the blood had been forced into her head during strangulation?" she wrote.
Charged with first-degree murder, and despite the forensic evidence, the jury only found William Palmer guilty of assault and battery. He was subsequently sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for the murder of Chanelle Pickett.
Understandably, Gabrielle and the Boston trans community as a whole were devastated by the light sentence Palmer received.
"I've seen people get more jail time for abusing animals than he's getting for what he did to her,” Smith quoted one transgender observer. “If they wanted to send a message, I guess that's it. We've been judged expendable."
Compounding the tragedy of Chanelle’s murder, on March 24, 2003, her sister Gabrielle died of a drug overdose. She is buried in the Potter’s Field on Hart Island in the Bronx.
But Chanelle Pickett has not been forgotten. Her murder, and the 1998 murder of Rita Hester, another Massachusetts trans woman, led to the creation of the Transgender Day of Remembrance each Nov. 20. The month was chosen in memory of the shared month of their deaths, and the day, to memorialize the evening that Pickett was murdered.
Since January, at least 27 transgender or gender-expansive individuals have been murdered, according to Human Rights Campaign data. On Transgender Day of Remembrance, and always, Pride Source recognizes and celebrates the lives of Michigan victims, including Ashia "Charm" Davis and Jean Butchart (both murdered in 2023), Kelly Stough (murdered in 2018), Paris Cameron (murdered in 2019), and DeDe Ricks, Naomi Skinner, Hayden Davis and Ray Muscat (all murdered in 2022).
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