Monica Roberts was a Black trans woman journalist who highlighted the importance of correctly gendering transgender people in the media as well as spoke out about the intersections of anti-Black violence, anti-trans violence and anti-sex worker violence in the mid 1990s.

Her blog was titled TransGriot and focused on the stories of transgender people, especially of Black Trans Women, who were and are rarely accurately reported about in the media. Griot is a word from West African culture which means, an oral historian who can tell the stories of centuries of their cultures’ people and history. Her wishes were that the lives of transgender people would be honored and remembered, not just their deaths.

She was a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, and frequently was heard correcting colleagues as they discussed events concerning transgender people, which was welcomed as helpful correction. Monica worked disseminating information via her website and highlighted transgender victims of murder whilst correcting gendering them and accurately telling their respective stories. Misgendering transgender people was unfortunately a practice commonly observed in the 1990s mainstream media especially when reporting on someone’s murder. Monica took special (and obvious) offense to this and is credited for holding mainstream media outlets and government officials to correctly refer to transgender people, alive and dead.

She also made special effort to include everyday types of hobbies and interests on her blog, wishing to highlight normalcy of trans lives. Her last blog post was her NFL picks for the season, she died of natural causes in her own home.