Shyyell Diamond Sanchez-McCray, an activist and performer who was shot and killed in Virginia earlier this month, is believed to be the first Black transgender woman whose death by gun violence has been reported this year.

Local news outlets, which misgendered 42-year-old Sanchez-McCray, indicate that police arrived at a home in Petersburg, Virginia, just before 2 a.m. on March 13, responding to reports of gunfire. After entering the Elm Street residence through “an unsecured door,” police found the victim, who was not named in initial media reports, with gunshot wounds. The victim reportedly died at the scene.

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Family and friends later identified Sanchez-McCray on social media, according to Them, but local outlets including WWBT, WRIC, and The Progress-Index have not updated their reporting to correctly reflect her gender identity.

No other details about her death have been made public, and it is unclear whether police are investigating Sanchez-McCray’s death as a homicide. According to PGH Lesbian Correspondents, which tracks the violent deaths of trans people in the U.S. and honors victims, her most recent social media posts described her struggle with depression, but also expressed concern about a recent stabbing in the area. Police are urging anyone with information on Sanchez-MCray’s shooting to contact the Petersburg/Dinwiddie Crime Solvers at 804-861-1212 or report anonymously via the P3tips.com app.

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Sanchez-McCray was an active figure in the drag and pageant scenes in both Virginia and North Carolina, winning Miss Mayflower EOY in 2015 and Miss Charlotte FFI-at-Large in 2020, Them reports. She also ran a catering business and started her own pageant company, according to PGH Lesbian Correspondents.

In addition to performing, she was also a community advocate, promoting events, local youth outreach, and LGBTQ+ businesses and speaking out about injustice via social media. In 2023, she was active in the boycott of a Charlotte, North Carolina, gay bar where Black patrons reported frequent discrimination. As Them notes, local outlet Q City Metro quoted Sanchez-McCray at the time, using her deadname, alleging that the bar’s owner had once called her a racial slur.

“If you’re coming from a world that’s marginalized and doesn’t want you, it does take a toll on you,” she said of the alleged discrimination at the time. “For some people, it kind of sends them on a spiral of ‘where can I go?”

Sanchez-McCray’s is the first death by violence of a transgender person in the U.S. reported by PGH Lesbian Correspondents. But the outlet notes that misgendering by police and local media often leads to such tragedies being misreported and undercounted. Virginia alone has seen the violent killings of at least five transgender people since 2021, three of them Black trans women.  

In a statement, National Black Justice Coalition director of public policy and programs Victoria Kirby York said that misgendering by local media “stripped [Sanchez-McCray] of her identity.” She described the phenomenon as “a deeply damaging and persistent failure by law enforcement and media that haunts these cases again and again,” according to the Washington Blade.

“Misgendering doesn’t just erase a person’s truth,” York said, “it can derail justice entirely, or worse, bury a case in silence as investigators chase the wrong identity, the wrong face, the wrong name.”

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