THE MURDERS OF TRANSGENDERED WOMEN

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Transsexualism is a condition in which a person identifies himself as opposite to his birth gender. On the other hand, transgender is pertained to be the behavior of a person to think different from his or her own gender.

A transgendered person is a person who was born as a male at birth but chooses to identify and express himself as a female and the term is describing them is sometimes shortened to them being a transgendered woman. 

Transgendered women may experience gender dysphoria (a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life) .and may choose the process hormone replacement therapy and sometimes sex reassignment surgery, which can bring immense relief and even resolve gender dysphoria entirely. Trans women may be heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, asexual, or identify with other terms. The term transgender woman is not always interchangeable with transsexual woman, although the terms are commonly used.

A transgendered women’s penis is not removed when she gets vaginoplasty. The testes and some of the erectile tissue from the shaft of the penis are removed but everything else is reconfigured into the vulva and vagina which the person wants it to be.  A man who has his penis removed may have one or more problems with his personality, urination and his sex life.

I think women are more liberal and men are more conservative when they see transgendered women.  It seems that the feelings of straight persons are more or less gender vs gender, where most women prefer making things better for transgendered women. They tend to be more "accepting" because they put feelings before rationale while men abhor transgendered women and some of the men will assault them if they have the chance to do it in secret.

That being said, I believe that most men just don’t think someone should change their gender and they won't date transgendered woman either. But hate them? I don’t think so.

I for one don't care if someone is transgender or not. They are still a human being. I'm not going to treat them any more special then other people or any worse. I'll treat them with common courtesy like I would to anyone else.

In the mid-1960s, I was invited to play the piano at a gay/lesbian club in Toronto. I was given food to eat and beer to drink. I got to know many of the transgendered women and found them to be polite and very friendly.

I am a straight man and I enjoyed having sex with straight women when I was single. I am married and have two daughters and five grandchildren.

Transgendered people don't deserved to be hated. They clearly can't help it. Someone being born a man, but having the mind of a female or vice versa is not something you make fun of.

In my opinion, so many straight people are misinformed about what transgender is all about.

When a male child is born, he has a penis and XY chromosomes. Everything about him is male. But, later for one or more reasons, his mind is like that of a woman. Studies even show that transgenders have a different chemical balance in their brains  from  most people who are the same sex as them and for this reason, their minds are closer to that of the opposite sex.  This isn't someone to hate any more than hating someone who is left handed or has a double joint in each of their arms.  

Most studies say that only 8-11% of people personally know someone who is transgender, yet approximately 75% know someone who is lesbian or gay. Studies also show very strong correlations between knowing an LGBT person, and being supportive of LGBT issues. The transgender community lacks that vital component of acceptance.

It's always been easier to ridicule people who look or sound different. Look at the caricatures of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Canadian  Japanese, gays, and many others from the past. If an unpopular group of people looks different, it can and will be used to caricaturize and demean them. And some people who hate anyone that is different. they will really hate a man who pretends he is a woman.

Transgender people challenge the notion that gender and sex are more than just chromosomes or what's between your legs. That, in turn, challenges the religiously-held belief that God created just two genders, and never makes mistakes. It challenges a person's sense of sexual orientation when they find a transgender person attractive. Things which contradict a person's of set of "facts" either are rejected outright, or elicits strongly hostile thoughts.

Bigotry is rarely as simple as we’d like to believe. We say we’re not racist because we’re not burning crosses on lawns and that we’re not homophobic because we have a gay friend. Not wanting to date a woman with a penis isn’t transphobic, we say, it’s just a preference.

But every time some men make or laugh at a joke about a woman who it turns out is “really a dude,” and every time they applaud the performance of a man playing the role of a transgendered  woman and every time they look sideways at a male celebrity caught with a transgendered sex worker, the men are contributing to the idea that transgendered women are really men.

It does not help that the human brain is very finely calibrated to evaluate faces, and categorize them based on very subtle cues as male or female. We recognize, though often not consciously, when someone doesn't fit the paradigms of the gender binary. When people don't fall neatly into one of those sex groups it causes a visceral reaction ranging from discomfort to fear, disgust and even anger.

Alas, many transgendered women are being murdered by men who believe that these women don’t have the right to be alive amongst these men.

There is little that will infuriate a man more than one who sees what he believes is a well-curved woman and then hears the woman speak like a man with a gruff voice especially when he hears the transgendered woman ask the man the following question. “Do you want to have sex with me, Dearie?”

A 17-year old trans girl living in Alabama. m was found dead in Mississippi.  She was bludgeoned to death with a hammer, Joshua Vallum was tied to the crime. He originally told police that he only discovered Williamson was  a transgender woman when he put his hands down her pants and that he blacked out and didn’t remember killing her. It was only later that it came out that  the two had been dating. After their relationship ended, when a friend of Vallum’s found out that Williamson was transgendered woman that he decided to kill her. Vallum was a member of the Latin Kings, which forbids homosexual acts, and he was afraid word would get out that he was having six with a man. His motive wasn’t hatred. It was fear that his gang would learn that he had sex with a man.  If the case went to court, his lawyers could argue “transgendered  panic” which is an admissible defense in 49 states.

 Many men in society have decided that such deception justifies murder. Valum might go to jail for involuntary manslaughter—maybe—but there would be undoubtedly sympathy for him, too. “How awful to think you’re with a woman and have it turn out to be a man.” The unspoken subtext being “The faggot had it coming.”

Some men’s greatest fear is going on a date and finding out that the chick is actually a dude.” That would really infuriate them.

Joshua Vallum loved Mercedes Williamson, but was convicted of a hate crime for killing her. The tragedy is that the hate wasn’t his motive but fear of his gang members who would kill him if they found out that he was having sex with a man.

There were 23 known killings of transgender women in the United States in 2015. That number nearly doubled from the 12 reported such killings in 2014. 

One of the most disturbing, yet often easily overlooked aspects of these crimes is the gender of the killers. The  transgendered  deaths were caused by men because of their need to meet culturally held standards of male power and masculinity.

Gender alone cannot be separated from the other realities of the victims' lives. Ninety-one percent of the transgendered murders investigated were people of color. They were primarily poor in which many were engaged in sex work. Law enforcement agencies have widely failed to classify these murders as hate crimes. What the police have also failed to do was to recognize that the context in which these women lived and died is inseparable from their lives as transgender women of color.

We have seen a clear increase in media attention to transgendered people and transgendered issues, but we have also seen a backlash. It may be that the proliferating signs of greater acceptancethat  stokes those who are transphobic so that there is now a kind of war between the move to acceptance and the move to consolidate violent exclusion or debasement of transgendered people. But I think we also have to take note of the limits of media attention. We have seen, for instance, how the election of the nation's first black president coincided with a worsening economic situation for black people.

The situation of transgendered people of color is more precarious as a result. It is always possible to be an object of public fascination or a visual icon of transgendered life that transgendered people want to appear visually at the same time that the legal and economic situation for transgendered people remains bad, or worsens. There is a long history of cross-dressers, drag queens, and transgendered people as visual icons. sometimes the public wants them to stay precisely in that place, on the stage or on the film, "over there," but not part of the lives of other so-called normal people.  The visual imagery of transgendered human beings  draws on older conceits of transgendered people as both preposterous and entertaining at the same time.

The majority of these murdered transgendered women were under 25 years old. This raises an interesting question. Do you think that male youth experiences brings  more violence against trans gendered women because the young men  are expressing this forbidden part of their masculine gender for the first time while  they are living in an  inhospitable society?

 I can’t help but wonder whether the younger transgendered women are being protected, or whether they are operating outside of safety networks. 

Young people, be they males or females can be attractive to killers  precisely because of the youth’s vulnerability and they can also be exploited and murdered because of that vulnerability. It would be interesting to know whether their murderers kill because they are repelled by their own attraction to transgendered persons or whether they fear identification with those they murder so that their crimes won’t be directed to them.

Their killers were almost all men—only one identified murderer was a woman. Why would most of these killers be men? What's so threatening to some men about transgendered women?

It depends a great deal if we are talking about gay or straight men, and what kind of destructive rage they undergo in relation to someone who has stepped out as a transgendered woman.

Killing is an act of power, a way of re-asserting domination, even a way of saying, "I am the one who decides who lives and dies." So killing establishes the killer as sovereign in the moment that he kills, and that is the most toxic form that masculinity can take. Transgendered women have relinquished masculinity, showing that it can be, and that is, very threatening to a man who wants to see his power as an intrinsic feature of who he really is.

Zella Ziona, who was 21, was shot in the head shortly after she embarrassed a young male acquaintance by flirting with him in front of his friends. Mercedes Williamson was 17 when she was brutally murdered by the young man she knew.  He buried her body in the yard behind his father's home.

I think perhaps that if a transgendered woman flirts with a man who is straight, and that man feels humiliated or embarrassed  it is probably because he is identified by the transgendered woman as someone with whom flirtation is possible, who could himself be involved with a transgendered woman or might himself be one. For some straight men, it may be possible to flirt back or to say, "thanks but no thanks," and for others, they reach for a gun. 

I presume that the straight man who shoots the transgendered woman does it because he feels like he has been "morally attacked" by the flirtation. That is very crazy reasoning, but there sre lots of craziness out there when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.

The violence these women endured is extreme. They are stabbed and shot. Tamara Dominguez was killed by a man after he ordered her out of his car. He then  drove his car her over, and ran over her body again and again. What does this extreme violence indicate?

It indicates that we are all living in a society in which such hideous and horrible things happen and that there is nowhere near enough media attention paid to such matters. In fact, the popular media deflects from this aspect of transgendered women really  existing when it should be raising public awareness and helping decent citizens to organize a systematic resistance to such violence. Perhaps the man who drives over the trans woman time and again cannot quite make her dead enough. At a certain point. she was already dead, but in his mind,  he was not finished killing her.

Why? It is because he wanted to obliterate any trace of his own relationship to that living person. In his mind, he was obliterating a part of himself and the living person at the same time. But also he was establishing his absolute power and his own masculinity as evidence of that power.  Perhaps he is rebuilding his own gender as he continues to try to take apart and efface that trans woman who never deserved to die. He is seeking as well to establish a world in which no one like her exists.

In many cases, police have been quick to announce that these murders are specifically not being investigated as hate crimes. Keisha Jenkins was 22 and killed in a well-known transgendered sex work area by a group of men. Police immediately announced that this was a a robbery and not a hate crime, but statements from other poor, black transgendered sex workers in the area indicated otherwise. One woman said that Pedro Redding, the man being charged with Keisha's murder, was also a client. Is it possible to separate these murders from the context of the victims' lives as transgender women of color?

It is not possible to separate such murders from those contexts. The police are in this are part of the this very problem by refusing to name the crime as a hate crime and so refusing to prosecute the killers with that crime. In cases like this one. we have to wonder whether desire and hatred are mixed together that creates  truly toxic relationships.

The lives of transgender women of color are not accorded the same value as white women who are tansgendered. But what is really needed is an anti-racist, anti-transphobic movement that draws from the feminism of women of color and its trenchant critique of racism and police powers.

Hate crime law identifies isolated criminal acts as part of a broader trend of prejudice-driven violence against groups of people with perceived shared characteristics. If one person is the victim of a hate crime, the rest of that group is at risk, too

I think that hate crime law is important. For it to work, we have to be able to establish evidence that it works in courts of law,and we are aware that some judges and some juries do not acknowledge the evidence that is right in front of their faces.  

Even if a prosecutor has the best possible legal argument backed up by evidence, he or she also has to change the way that people hear and see the evidence—both the visual and audible evidence.  

Unfortunately. many of the police investigators  structured such some crimes as robberies and refused to acknowledged that the murders are the direct results of hate crimes  against minorities.

What I am attempting to point out is a very important issue about the group character of hate crimes. If a transgendered woman is killed, it is a sign to other transgendered women that they too can be killed as well by hate mongers.

The harassment, rape, and/or murder of butches and trans gendered women is problem that many groups are addressing in South Africa. Every time one transgendered person is killed, the message goes out to every trans person—“You are not safe.  This dead body could be yours.”

So the murder operates as a violent crime and as a threat that more violent crimes will happen. So when the crime is not named as a hate crime, or when the crime is dismissed because the murderer was somehow " as prompted," the police are sending the same message as the murderer did to the victims of hate crimes  that the murderer  and others like him hate.

Fortunately, decent  people are now getting angry and they see how class differences are intensifying, how their future horizons are shutting down, how there is no protection from police (they are neither protected by the police nor protected from police violence). They also see that major powers are thwarting the realization of equality and dignity, whether it is the right-wing assault on Planned Parenthood, the killing of unarmed black men and women in the streets by police who are then exonerated, or the radical lack of publicity given to the killing of transgendered people; their deaths are not noticed, their lives are considered non-entities. All of these are lives that do matter, who deserve to flourish, to exercise their freedom and to be entitled to equality before the law, who deserve a legal system in which equality and freedom are actually realizable.

I do think that we are also seeing the emergence of people who understand that everyone’s lives are precarious under all conditions, and who understand that basic rights are radically undermined by some police forces and that safeguards must protect all of the people irrespective of their beliefs and standards of living.

I also believe that the transgendered movement encompasses issues beyond changing one's sex.  It challenges the fundamental building blocks of social identity and the power structures of our world. To those who are living the lives of being transgenders,  they have the right to live the way they wish to live. Anyone who doesn’t choose to accept their rights and harms them in any manner deserves to be convicted of hate crimes and punished accordingly as per the law.