Brenda Walker: Remembering Martine

Brenda Walker shares about the life of her sister and support for the transgender community.

Six years ago, I sat in a sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, holding the ashes of my transgender sister. Thirty-seven years earlier, her body was found in a hotel, now within the Historic Transgender District. She was 29.

When Martine was 19, she packed a green duffelbag, placed an envelope on the kitchen counter before dawn and slipped out of our home in Huntsville, Alabama.

In her own words, she was “looking for a place for myself.” She headed to San Francisco. It was the summer of 1972.
I idolized her. When I came home from high school to find her wearing one of my dresses, I did not understand that borrowing clothes can be a moment of affirmation for a trans woman. Our parents dismissed her actions as a sign of mental illness.

After Mom and Dad died, I began sorting through their papers and piecing together the truth: Martine sought gender-affirming care and hormone therapy. She legally changed her name just four months before she died.

November 20 was Transgender Day of Remembrance. The same patterns that harmed Martine are harming trans people today. The same dismissal, the same pathologizing, the same refusal to see transgender people as fully human.

If only places like the Transgender District, a resource for housing, legal support, wellness, and gender-affirming care, had existed when Martine sought refuge and community. She died alone. We did not even know she had died until four months later, when our Granny hired a private detective to come to San Francisco. In many ways, the District is the home she was searching for.

What happened to Martine is what happens when trans lives are not valued: mysteries unsolved, families without answers, cases uninvestigated. San Francisco’s trans history calls us to do better. It is a legacy to be lived and a promise to be kept by ensuring safety and healing for trans people today.

I imagine Martine standing on the beach at sunset, gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge, at the place she so loved.
With a Perspective, I’m Brenda Walker.

Rev. Dr. Brenda Walker is an advocate for transgender people and their loved ones.