Roberts grew up in segregated Houston to a schoolteacher mother and DJ father, and graduated from the Houston Independent School District in 1980. Roberts began her gender transition in 1993-94. She was working in Houston as an airline gate agent at that time. She 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.
Activism
Roberts was a founding member of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, and served as its Lobby Chair from 1999-2002. In Louisville, Kentucky, Roberts served on the board of the Fairness Campaign and its political action committee, C-FAIR. In 2005 and 2006, she organized the Transsistahs-Transbrothas Conference that took place in that city. She began writing TransGriot in 2004 as a newspaper column for The Letter, a Louisville-based LGBT paper. Roberts founded the TransGriot blog in 2006. Roberts was motivated by a lack of trans blogs focused on black people and other people of color. One of the missions of her blog is to "chronicle the history of Black transpeople". The blog allowed her to address community issues in a more timely manner and allowed greater control than the column after it was taken away due to a conflict with an advertiser over her writing. Through TransGriot, Roberts also identifies murder victims who are transgender in order to show respect to victims and address the frequent misgendering that takes place in police reports and media coverage. As a black trans woman, Roberts has explored the intersections of cissexism and racism in her writing. In a 2009 column, she stated that people who have a problem with the wordcisgender "are wailing in unacknowledged cisgender privilege", and compared this criticism to white people that "call me 'racist' anytime I criticize the underlying structural assumptions that buttress whiteness".
Awards and recognition
In 2006, 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. In 2015, Roberts received the Virginia Prince Transgender Pioneer Award from Fantasia Fair, making her the first African-American openly trans person to be so honored. In 2016, Roberts received a Special Recognition Award from GLAAD in San Francisco. Also in 2016, Roberts became the first openly trans person to receive Phillips Brooks House Association's Robert Coles "Call of Service" Award; it was the 10th annual such award. In 2017, Roberts received the HRC John Walzel Equality Award. In 2018, she was named one of "8 Houston Women to Watch on Social Media" by Houstonia. Also in 2018, she won Outstanding Blog at the GLAAD Media Awards. In January 2020, Roberts received the Susan J Hyde Award for Longevity in the Movement from the National LGBTQ Task Force. In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named her among the fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people”.
