Calls for boycott against Breakfast Club mount after trans murder

As the calls for a boycott of The Breakfast Club morning radio program continue to mount, in the wake of Lil Duval’s anti-transgender hate speech during his appearance on the program last week, media in Georgia — and now across the country — are reporting news of the 16th transgender person murdered so far this year.
According to The Georgia Voice, Atlanta resident TeeTee Dangerfield, 32, was shot to death outside of her vehicle at the South Hampton Estates apartment complex on Monday, July 31 at about 4:30 a.m.
Police said there are no suspects yet in Daingerfield’s murder and that it is “unclear” whether her murder had anything to do with her gender identity. But the Voice notes that her death came “just two days after a Midtown rally and march in support of the transgender community following President Trump’s July 26 tweets effectively barring trans service members from serving in the U.S. military.”
According to The National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 Transgender Survey Report, “46 percent of respondents were verbally harassed and 9 percent were physically attacked because of being transgender.” The survey also found that 10 percent of respondents reported being sexually assaulted during the prior year, and 47 percent said they were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime.”
The calls to boycott The Breakfast Club — an iHeart radio-produced program that features cohosts DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne tha God and that bills itself as “the world’s most dangerous morning show” — began after comedian Lil Duval said that if he ever found out a woman he had sex with was transgender, he would kill her.
The controversy actually started earlier in the week with journalist and best-selling author Janet Mock — who also happens to be transgender — went on the show to promote her new book, Surpassing Certainty, and used the opportunity to advocate for transgender issues.
A few days later, Duval was the morning show’s guest, and when asked about Trump’s then-recent tweet saying transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the military, he responded with, ““Shout out to all the trannies out there.”
Then when he was asked how he would respond if he found out that woman he was dating was transgender, he answered, “This might sound messed up, but I don’t care, she dying.” The show’s hosts then went on to ask about Mock, using her book as a prop, and Duval declared, “Nope. That nigga doing his thing….ain’t finna get me.”
Houston trans activist Monica Roberts, author of TransGriot blog, did not hesitate in linking hate speech like Duval’s — and the hesitancy of others to call out the hatred — to the murders of transgender women: “One of the things I’m really getting sick of along with the Black trans community and the parents of Black trans kids is the ongoing pattern in the Black community of our Black oriented media outlets, be they radio, television or on social media, spouting hate speech aimed at the transgender community. It is anti-trans hate speech like this that results in Black trans women getting beat up or murdered.”