Let's talk about education, let's talk about good, real data and how to get it, let's talk about calling trans and gender nonconforming people --  dead or alive -- by their proper names. If there's one thing my mom refusing to open her bills has taught me, it's that ignoring something doesn't make it go away.

Trans bodies are not costumes. Our identities are not masks we can take on and off freely. Whether we express this outwardly or only on the inside, it does not change the people we've always known we are.

It's hard to write about these tragedies without falling into sadness or anger, or without inadvertently raising the visibility of the victim's deaths over their lives. It's also hard to write about it without knowing exactly how, as a cis-gendered ally, to make it better. But we don't have the luxury of time.

Connecting community violence to the movement for accountability for police brutality would help call attention to the disproportionate violence experienced by all kinds of black women, and girls and it would also create a space to more closely interrogate the detrimental aspects of police abdication on black communities.

TS Madison has become really popular over the past year. She is a YouTube sensation who recently got her own show on YouTube via World of Wonder. Madison just dropped her first album, so I thought it would be a perfect time for her to be asked "15 Questions."

My heart belongs to the ladies on 14th Street who stood with me night after night, trying to survive and just be their authentic selves. I cry today for those ladies who are no longer here with us in 2014, but my heart remembers them.