Tag: violence

Heavy Sigh.

Having not yet recovered from the murder of Diamond Williams, Philadelphia's trans community was rocked again on Tuesday night. A 26 year-old transwoman is reported to be in critical but stable condition at Hahnemann University Hospital after being pistol whipped and shot in the back of the head in her apartment in Northern Liberties. She is expected to survive.

The victim was found at the front door to the apartment building, having crawled there from her third floor apartment.  She was able to communicate with police when they arrived after being called by neighbors.  She reported that she was waiting for a family member when she heard a knock on the door.  She opened it to discover a man with a gun who she did not know.

There is video here.  That’s the CBS coverage, which describes the victim as a woman.  Early ABC coverage described the victim as a “man dressed like a woman.”  I saw video yesterday that identified the victim and had some interviews with family members, but it appears today to have been scrubbed from the internet.

Diamond Williams is described as someone who had a big personality and even bigger heart.

She was so full of life. She was funny and we used to laugh. And I remember just acting silly with her and I just miss her because we had a lot of great times.

She was a very loving, caring, and creative person. We were family. We were like sisters and she loved her sisters. No one should ever have to die the way she died.

–Rachel Rose

Williams, 31, was killed last week after having sexual relations with Charles Sargent, 43.  Sargent allegedly dismembered her in his apartment and then dumped her body parts in a field in North Philadelphia.

I don’t care if he knew or he didn’t know.  Nobody deserves to die like that.  That’s someone’s life that (you) just brutally murdered and dismembered and threw her parts in a field.

—Rose

is usually the case, I was searching for stories to cover for my columns.  I stumbled across an editorial in the Washington Blade, entitled We must protect rights of transgender people.  Well I’m all for that.  That is the theme about which I write most…especially so over the past week.

I do have to acknowledge some disappointment over the reception those stories have received.  In my world, human rights have priority #1.  Everything else comes tumbling after.

The Blade editorial focuses on two reports released earlier this month which “paint a disturbing picture of the global status of trans communities – a portrait of human rights violations, violence and marginalization.”

Well, duh.  If you haven’t gotten that much out of what I have been blogging about since 2005, then apparently we have been miscommunicating.

I’m going to cover one of those documents.  I guess I’ll save the other for a rainy day.

Let me note up front that the report covers life to the south of our own country, which concerns me because that usually means nobody will be interested.  But there is no reason to embrace American exceptionalism on this issue.  The United States suffers some of the identical problems as our Latin American neighbors when it comes to the treatment of transpeople.  Indeed some of them do much better than our country.

Yet these reports show how trans people are subject to especially extreme abuse, from many angles.  Lest anyone use these stories as reason to rejoice for not living in one of “those barbaric countries” it’s worth noting that the U.S. racks up one of the higher murder rates of trans people worldwide.  Routine police mistreatment and abuse of trans women in one neighborhood of New York City was recently documented – with stories remarkably similar to those told in Bogota, Johannesburg or New Dehli.

It is also important to note that much of the political agenda advanced in the name of LGBT rights – whether same-sex marriage or “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – have little relevance to these communities.  A marriage license won’t stop a bullet.  As noted in a statement put out on Dec. 17 by 50 organizations, the LGBT rights movement needs to better address issues of criminalization of trans people.

—Washington Blade editorial

I hope you can wade through to the end.  This is important.  And I think it is even more important to share the first three stories in order to highlight the last one.  So I’ll start in India, then proceed to Indonesia, followed by Cote d’Ivoire.

But those place names could just have easily have been Washington, DC, Indianapolis, or Charleston.  This is one area where America is much less than spectacular.

The places could be anywhere where some people are considered less than human.  For us transgender people that doesn’t exclude much of this planet.

The stories will set the background for the story from New York about UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and others speaking about Human Rights Day.

I caution the reader that there is violence in the first stories.

It was the autumn of 1998, late November.  The previous month Matthew Shepard was found, barely alive and in a coma, having been tortured and tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyoming.  The person who found the body thought at first it was a scarecrow.

Hester had just returned from entertainment engagements in Europe.  She was a statuesque (over 6 feet tall and around 225 pounds) drag performer.  She is said to have had an overwhelming stage presence.  She was also reported to be very kind and well-liked by everyone in the community.

She was always nice to everyone.  She was very, very, very liked by the whole community, so what happened to her was like a real shock.

–Charito Suarez

Around 6:15pm on November 28 Rita Hester’s neighbors heard loud banging coming from inside her Allston, MA apartment.  One neighbor later reported that someone inside had yelled for help.  Police were called and arrived around 6:30pm.  They found Rita’s lifeless body in the apartment.  It had multiple stab wounds.

This past Tuesday evening I included the following snippet in my diary, School Daze.

The average person has a 1 in 15,000 change of being murdered.  A transperson has a 1 in 13 chance of being murdered.  Additionally transpeople are eight times as likely to commit suicide.

Rightly so, cordgrass commented:

you buried the lede

a transperson has a one in thirteen chance of being MURDERED!  I had no idea!  What does that say about our society?

Do you have more links for that?

The data was taken from one of my links, but it should rightly be viewed with some skepticism.   So I went looking for the source.  I had the advantage of knowing who it was, so that made my search easier.  Back in 1999 Kay Brown (proprietress of Transgender Roadmap) shared the data  with students in her class when she was the instructor for “20th Century Transgender History and Experience” at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco, (Washington Blade, Dec. 10, 1999).

A body of a transwoman  found on Labor Day in the Frankford neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia with a gunshot wound to the head has been identified as Kyra Cordova, 27, who also used the name Kyra Kruz on social media.  Her body was found in a wooded area near a Wawa where she was last seen purchasing food and drinks.

Kyra was a volunteer and former employee at the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALLAEI).  According to Facebook, Kyra graduated from North Penn Senior High School in Lansdale, PA in 2003 and was attending college, majoring in biology, with “aspirations of opening her own transgender medical facility”.

Cordova began volunteering at GALLAEI in 2010 and was soon hired as an HIV tester.

Adapted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Rachel Maddow reports on Mitt Romney’s confused attacks against President Obama at Friday’s NRA Conference in St. Louis. Rachel also talked with Pittsburgh councilman Ricky Burgess about the conversation the country should be having about gun violence and the need for tighter gun control laws

Andrew Rosenthal: Keep, Bear and Use

The modern drive against gun control started with an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment as bestowing an absolute, individual right to “keep” and “bear” arms, rather than a societal right based on the need for a “well-regulated militia.”

But we are now in a new and dangerous phase of the gun movement, in which extremists led by the National Rifle Association are pushing beyond “keep” and “bear” to “use.” They are pressing state and federal lawmakers to make it easier for people to shoot other people. [..]

They certainly will not discuss these statistics, compiled by the Violence Policy Center, on the homicide rate for African Americans, which is more than three times the overall homicide rate. The overwhelming majority of victims are killed by guns, and the majority of those are killed by handguns. Missouri leads the nation in this appalling statistic.

Washington, DC–Missouri leads the nation in the rate of black homicide victimization for the second year in a row according to a new analysis of unpublished Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data released today by the Violence Policy Center (VPC).

The annual study, “Black Homicide Victimization in the United States: An Analysis of 2009 Homicide Data,” (http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide12.pdf) uses 2009 data–the most recent data available from the FBI–and ranks the 50 states according to their black homicide victimization rates. The study found overwhelmingly that firearms, usually handguns, were the weapon of choice in the homicides.

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund: What a Difference a Gun Makes

On April 16, 2007, our nation suffered its deadliest shooting incident ever by a single gunman when a student killed 32 people and wounded 25 others at Virginia Tech before committing suicide. Five years later, have we learned anything about controlling our national gun and gun violence epidemic? A look at just a few of the sad headlines across the country so far this year suggests we haven’t learned much or anything at all. [..]

As a nation we can’t afford to keep waiting for common-sense gun control laws that would protect our children and all of us from indefensible gun violence. It’s time to repeal senseless gun laws like the “Stand Your Ground” laws enacted by 21 states that have grabbed so much attention in Trayvon’s case and allow people in Florida to defend themselves with deadly force anytime and anywhere if they feel threatened. More than two million people have signed online petitions saying they want to repeal these laws. It’s time to require consumer safety standards and childproof safety features for all guns and strengthen child access prevention laws that ensure guns are stored safely and securely to prevent unnecessary tragedies like those in Washington state. And in a political environment where the too-secretive and powerful advocacy group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pushed “Stand Your Ground” laws in other states along with other “model bills” that benefit some corporate bottom lines or special interests like the NRA, it’s time for all of ALEC’s corporate sponsors to walk away from enabling or acquiescing in destructive laws that protect guns, not children.

It’s a tragedy that five years after Virginia Tech so little has changed. How many years must we wait until tragic headlines about school shootings, children dying, and people using the “shoot first and ask questions later” defense to take the law into their own hands go away? When will we finally get the courage to stand up as a nation and say enough to the deadly proliferation of guns and gun violence that endanger children’s and public safety?

When?

I don’t normally cover stories about transpeople committing crimes.  I hope that is understandable.  I write so that maybe someday we’ll get equal rights.  I personally don’t think transpeople committing crimes advances that cause.  I don’t write about those incidences unless something else is involved in the story, like maltreatment by the police or while incarcerated.

This past week I took another look at one of those stories.  I think it warrants some commentary.

Crishaun (Cece) McDonald is a 23-year-old transwoman from Minneapolis.  She has been charged with second-degree murder in the June 5 stabbing death of Dean Schmitz, 47, of Richfield, outside of the Schooner Tavern in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis.

McDonald remains in jail in lieu of $150,000 bail. Because of his gender transition status, McDonald is being held in isolation for his own safety, said Tony Dulski, who looks after McDonald’s finances as a trustee and has visited him in jail.

Dulski said that McDonald is a man who is “in the process of becoming female,” receiving hormone treatment while living as a woman.

As a trustee and counselor, Dulski said, he helps McDonald handle his finances. McDonald, who attended Minneapolis Community and Technical College this past spring semester, receives Social Security disability payments because of emotional and mental difficulties tied to gender identity, Dulski added.

Don’t think we didn’t notice the use of the male pronouns.

So this 21-year-old transwoman with a learning disability was walking down the street in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle on August 16.  A woman with a baseball bat and a man started following her.

The woman with the bat accosted the soon-to-be victim and said, according to the police report, “I don’t want to see you around the skate bowl anymore.”  The skate bowl referred to is at the Ballard Commons Park.

Then the woman bashed the transwoman on the side of her head with the bat.

On this Easter Sunday, I reflect that among the followers of Jesus were sex workers.  In the Gospel of Matthew, an particularly telling exchange takes place between Chief Priests and Elders who have questioned Jesus’ very authority.  In response, he tells a parable, which concludes, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”  Though much has changed between now and then, this statement still has the power to shock and offend.