QotD
[Today is the eleventh annual
Transgender
Day of Remembrance, to memorialize those who were killed due
to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. It's a long list.]
"In an interview with Edge News, Lt. Brett Persons, LGBT
liaison for the Metropolitan Police Department, denied that the
nation's capital has seen an increase in antitransgender violence,
but added that trans individuals 'tend to be a community at risk
for victimization all the time -- and that's a sad statement.'"
-- from
"Trans Violence Up in Nation's Capital?", The Advocate,
2009-09-17
Last night on Twitter,
Lila Kittleman
pointed out, "Every three days, someone is murdered for
being transgendered. That's a sickening statistic," and
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
vos-latina
clarified that a bit with, "actually, its more than one
murder of a trans woman every two days. that we know about. That
somebody even noticed."
"Underreporting from official statistics leaves the issue in
the hands of media outlets, which have historically been known for
problems identifying victims' genders through using incorrect
names and pronouns." -- Joseph Erbentraut,
"Violence Against the Transgendered Only Getting Worse",
2009-09-29</a> [An example: in the first case
Erbentraut mentioned, the broad-daylight murder of Ty'lia Mack
and wounding of another trans woman (not named by the police to
protect her as a witness), the victims were initially described in
news reports as "transgender men", and Ms. Mack was referred to
mostly by her (male) birth name, the opposite of what the AP Style
Guide dictates. One news outlet, after being criticized for this,
claimed that they had simply copied the wording the police had
used; the police emphatically denied that they had ever described
the victims that way.]
"As in the case of Paulina Ibarra, the lives of transgender
victims are often ignored until a more culturally sensational
aspect of the crime surfaces, as it did in the August stabbing
death of the East Los Angeles Latina transwoman when a known
parole jumper surfaced as a 'person of interest' in the
investigation. Until then, Ibarra's brutal murder was largely
neglected, even by the LGBT press, and her life has been reduced
to a string of seamy innuendoes and a few glam photos." --
De Sube,
2009-11-18
"The victims are often viewed as not worthy of the level of
attention that they deserve, and that's where activism needs to
come in." -- Michael Silverman, quoted in
"How the Gay Community Is Complicit in Trans Violence", by
Joseph Erbentraut, 2009-10-05
Taking all of this out of the abstract, statistical, legal,
sociological, and political spheres, to look at it in a more
personal way, here are
two
tweets from Allyson Robinson, 2009-11-19:
"Waiting for flight, guy chats me up. Asks me to call him.
Undeterred when I say I'm married; tells me he is too.
"...and all the while I'm thinking, 'This is how so many
anti-trans hate crimes start.'"
And finally:
"Stop killing us. Hate us if you must, ignore us, don't talk
to us--look the other way. Just stop killing us." -- Matt
Kailey, Tranifesto,
2009-11-19
