05:25 am - 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){kind=small}
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