TS/TV/CD Love Blog - Because Of Your Uniqueness

The year 2003 was the most deadly on record for transgender people, with more victims of anti-transgender killings reported this year than in any year prior.

Thirty-eight transgender people have been reported killed so far this year, twice the number reported just two years ago, according to experts who monitor anti-transgender violence. Last year, 27 such killings were reported.

“It’s brutal and it’s gut-wrenching,” said Shawna Virago, a transgender activist at Community United Against Violence, a San Francisco agency that provides support to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender victims of hate and domestic violence.

Virago and other experts attribute the increasing killings to a number of factors, including diligence on the part of the transgendered community to track the crimes, increased media interest, and, in some parts of the country, better relationships between law enforcement and the transgender community.

“Then there’s the intense hatred,” said Jennifer Rakowski, a board member of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects, an alliance of 26 organizations that tracks hate violence in the United States.

Rakowski believes that some people who assault transgender people do not see their victims as fully human. “The killers view them as ‘it’ as opposed to seeing them as people,” Rakowski told the Gay.com Network. “That leads to their expectation of societal permission to go through with the killing.”

Other experts attribute the increased violence to the growing visibility of transgendered people in the United States and around the world.

“As transgender people are becoming more visible, we’re becoming a bigger target,” Gwen Smith told the Gay.com Network. Smith has been tracking transgender killings for the past six years on her Web site, Remembering Our Dead.

“As trans and LGBT rights become a bigger issue in society, these killings are part of that backlash to it,” Smith said.

Smith believes transgender people are often the main targets of a backlash in part because they are the most visible, sometimes clearly challenging stereotypical notions of “appropriate” male and female attire or gender expression.

“It’s especially true for M-to-F’s (male-to-female transgender people),” Smith said. Many of the 38 people killed in 2003 are low-income, transgender women of color, who, in large part because of anti-transgender discrimination,” Smith said, “end up in situations that might be dangerous.”
Many transgender people, for instance, face employment discrimination. As a result, some move to poorer neighborhoods where there are higher levels of crime, and, as such, may end up the targets of hate violence.

“This is not a cut-and-dry pattern,” Smith said, “but by and large, if you end up on the street in a poor neighborhood as a transgender woman, you may end up a target.”

Virago said that domestic violence is also a factor in many anti-transgender killings that is rarely discussed. “That also has to do with transphobia: the belief that trans people don’t have legitimate relationships,” she said. “Because we are only often seen as sex workers, the domestic violence piece is far too often left out.”

Technorati Tags: transgender, anti-transgender, violence, gay, hate, domestic violence, transgendered, male-to-female, transphobia

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