The mother of Taylor Casey, the Black Chicago woman missing in the Bahamas, says though she couldn’t withhold her daughter’s racial identity, there was another detail about her she hid from the public in fear it would throw a wrench in the search for her.
Casey was identified as a transgender woman for the first time since she went missing June 19.
“The focus was going to be taken off of finding my child, my child being missing and that they were going to put the focus on ‘Oh, Taylor’s transgender,’ which should not be the focus at all,” Colette Seymore, Casey’s mother, told NBC News. She said if her daughter were a cisgender white woman “the investigation would have been done properly, the way it should have been done.”
Is she wrong? Let’s recall the search for Gabby Petito: Authorities exhausted every resource possible in locating the YouTuber with a severe sense of urgency. Meanwhile, missing Black women are lucky if their photo makes basic internet circulation.
White women are often overrepresented in news coverage anyway when Black people make up more of the missing persons cases in the country, according to the report “Missing White Woman Syndrome: An Empirical Analysis of Race and Gender Disparities in Online News Coverage of Missing Persons.”
Additionally, a report from Transgender Europe states that 74 percent of the murders of trans people reported around the world were committed in Latin America or the Caribbean, where Casey was last seen. She was attending a yoga program at the Sivananda Asharam Yoga Retreat in the Bahamas, where legal restrictions are placed on same-sex intimacy.
Out of all of the retreat participants, Casey was the only Black woman and the only trans woman, her friends tell NBC. Authorities also haven’t found evidence of foul play in the investigation, but it’s unclear if her identity has anything to do with her disappearance.
The last piece of evidence found was her phone and a few of her belongings, per the Royal Bahamas Police Force. Her family has now sought the help of the FBI and Illinois legislators for help. Thursday was Casey’s 42nd birthday.