Almost a year ago, Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old transgender woman (born with male genitalia, she lived as a girl) was brutally murdered while on a date in Greeley, Colorado. The man accused with her murder is also the man she was on a date with—Allen Andrade, whose trial began on Tuesday, April 14. He is charged with first-degree murder and is the first person to be prosecuted in Colorado, and most likely, in the United States, under a hate crime law that includes clauses for sexual orientation and gender expression.
The fight for protection of transgendered people under hate crime laws has been a staple of the LGBT movement. But the L, G, B and T of LGBT are very separate communities, and the fight for the rights and protection of transgendered people has been more difficult in many aspects than the fight for equal treatment of gays and lesbians. One reason is because so few personal stories, and so little information, about trans people reach people that have no direct contact with them and, as a result, most of the trans stories we do hear though the media are about tragedy, like the murder of Angie Zapata.
This is similar to the criticism of the No on 8 campaign in CA in that the campaign failed to make gay people’s faces and lives more public. Knowing stories, and being able to see people that are different in some aspects from you, as similar to you, is one of the most important steps in creating a harmonious and diverse community. One method of telling these stories is through the media. But while it is relatively easy to find someone to discuss his or her life as a homosexual, it is extremely difficult to find someone to discuss with a reporter what life is like as a transsexual.
The lack of stories and personal information regarding transsexuals is a product of a media that often portrays trans issues and the nature of being trans inaccurately. Adam G. Bass, a media field strategist for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, who works with the media on LGBT issues across the country, said via email that while the organization knows most reporters mean well, issues with terminology and pronouns are abundant, and there are occasionally articles that miss the point completely, such as a 2004 column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Egregious errors and op-ed pieces can propagate myths about trans people and create more prejudice.
Trans people also do not come forward with stories because it is not in the nature of being trans. “Unlike coming out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—where coming out is a statement of who one is externally attracted to, so in a sense is an ‘outward’ look that effects one’s internal sense of being—coming out transsexual is a statement of what gender one is, and really is an ‘inward’ look that effects one’s external presentation,” says Autumn Sandeen, a trans woman and blogger from San Diego who is covering the Zapata trial. “Transgender, for some, is a transitional phase on the way to becoming one’s target sex.”
Once they have transitioned, they are what they are and are no longer transgender. But it is exactly this aspect of being trans that is something people need to understand and be familiar with in order to curb the violence and misunderstanding, and to bring about the necessary government protection, such as passing some form of the Matthew Shepard Act. Sandeen is OUT with all caps. She is willing to be out and to stay out because she believes it will benefit the future of the trans community. But she is one of few.
An “End Hate” campaign with ads featuring Zapata’s family members is in full swing across most parts of Colorado, and it includes many moving details about Zapata’s tragically short life. She comes across as a beautiful person whom many people could relate to.
It’s a shame these details had been known before Angie was killed. Transgender people have a one in 12 chance of being murdered, compared to a one in 18,000 chance for an average citizen. The murder of someone that was so loved and appreciated by their family is stark reality check on the danger trans people face everyday, but for people to really understand it will take considerable work.
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Hate crime for killing your date? There are date rapes and murders all too often just to plain young women, so where is the hate crime for that? It is sad when anyone is going out for a good time and then winds up losing their lives be it a he or she gay person or straight. All lives are precious or hasn't Scoop figured that out yet? But my Swedish immigrant grandparents had taught me that we were all equal in America, and that one person's death was no greater than another. But I guess Scoop is jumping on the progressive bandwagon, reflecting its progressive education from today's faux pillars of higher education. So much for placing bets on change in the youth of tomorrow's media, eh?
So I ask Scoop now where was the hate crime for Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year old tortured by two gay adult men, duct taping him to a mattress, sodomizing him with objects, then pulling down their pants and dropping their feces all over his dead body? Is that normal to the “young” journalists at Scoop? Did you know the goddamn national mainstream media never showed up for the trial of Jesse's murderers? The police had told me only Fox News did back in 1999! Now you know why the progressives in the media hate Fox, this network not doing the goose step with the rest of the vile tea-bagging so-called unbiased journalists. What a joke on Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Franklin and the others who endangered their lives so YOU young people could have a free access the truth for your writings!
And what about ten-year old Jeffrey Curly, murdered with a rag filled with gasoline by two NAMBLA members, using materials downloaded from NAMBLA's Web site to entrap the young boy. The ACLU later actually defended NAMBLA's right of free speech against the boy's mother, who was suing NAMBLA at the time to take their Web site down.
Jeffrey had only wanted a bike. The mother had only wanted him to work for it. Yet these damn gay NAMBLA members used that to get into the young boy's pants through killing him in their car and then later play with his body back at their apartment. They then threw Jeffrey's carcass into a Rubbermaid tub, filled it and the boy's dead mouth with lime and set it adrift in a Maine river hoping to never be caught. That was also in 1999. So ten years later, where is the hate crime legislation for Jeffrey? And how is his murder less than your transgender? Will you young, educated, and progressive reporters please answer that?
Jesse's and Jeffrey's civil rights were terminated! Their sex organs were abused. And now you want a hate crime for transgenders when you haven't taken care of justice for these young boys, the press hiding their names from the public to protect gay murders?
And as far as Shepard goes, it was finally reported eight years later Matthew went to the same parties with one of his killers, their using drugs, his murderer on Meth the night he beat up Shepard for drugs leaving him on that fence to die. These guys were out for drugs, not sex, Shepard not sexually abused like Jeffrey and Jesse were, they’re under the ground, too, with Matthew.
Except while the media threw dirt in the faces of Jesse and Jeffrey a second time to keep the truth buried with their bodies, GLAAD and the same media used Shepard as their poster boy, raising him from the dead, Ted Kennedy demanding justice. Demanding justice?! Did you know good old Ted was from Massachusetts, the same state Jeffrey was murder in, my not reading one single news story Ted had lifted one single Catholic finger to help Jeffrey's mother in her suit against NAMBLA?
And did you know it was reported Shepard was raped and beat up on a high school trip overseas earlier? I have always taught my kids, now grown, to avoid people who were into bad stuff and places that were frequented by people into bad stuff, Shepard obviously continuing to walk on the wild side until it killed him. You can't stop people if they want to make dangerous decisions about their lives, so many Americans doing it today as Mexico can't send enough drugs north across the border to satisfy the lust of drugs for too many wealthy Americans absorption with self gratification.
So how about Scoop protecting children like Jesse and Jeffrey first with hate crimes against gays, newspapers at the time passing on the stories because the press rooms were run, as they are today, by supporters of orgs like the ACLU and GLAAD, who tossed these boy's stories into the trash to protect their own “progressive” agendas?
At 67-years old, I'm just tired of the double standards in American journalism since the 1960s. As far as I scan see, Scoops is on its way to evolving into the same old, same old crap we read today in our nation's so called “news” papers. You can stop padding yourselves on the back and masturbating how wonderful Scoops is.
I just want my right to know as an American to be respected, and I'm not convinced Scoop is up to the job of doing that simple task assigned to every American journalist since 1775, the year of the Declaration of Arms, which started it all.
April 18, 2009 at 1:57 pmAccording to HHS, women and children (the two classes of people you argue are not given special protection) are in fact listed as “protected subjects” http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/irb/irb_chapter6.htm. Neither women nor children have specific hate crimes legislation, but since everyone started as a child and over 50% of the population grows up to be a woman, I would suspect that you might have a difficult time arguing that these individuals should have a special distinction. Yes every death should be equivalent. It is not the death of Angie Zapata that makes her case special. It is the life she lead prior to her death that calls for the distinction.
I also notice that you failed to mention the very-much-in-the-news story of Sandra Cantu/Melissa Huckaby (where a woman was the alleged perpetrator). Why only single out gay men? Especially interesting choice since this article is about transgendered individuals who, as Zapata seems to have been, are often straight.
That people of every walk of life commit crimes is an unfortunate reality. While it is unfortunate that violence committed by LGBT individuals is not as widely publicized as violence against individuals who fall into those letter-categories, we must consider that LGBT individuals are disproportionately attacked. It is difficult to honestly analyze numbers of individuals because census data describing just how many LGBT individuals there are in the US does not exist. The best estimate I can find is about 8.8 million – not many, only about 2% of the US population – according to an HHS estimate described in a UCLA Law press release in 2006 (http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/press...). A number of, admittedly limited, studies have found that as many as 52% of LGBT people have experienced sexual violence (yes the study's from Harvard – forgive it http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~osapr/PDFs/lgbt-sex...) vs about 1% of the total US population (extrapolating these http://www.rainn.org/statistics statistics with the CIA data for US population). It is clear that LGBT individuals experience violence in much greater proportion than the overall population. As more documentation becomes available, I think it will become more clear that LGBT people are targeted. If that does not become clear, then maybe we've all been barking up the wrong tree for nearly 50 years. Without federal census data the numbers will remain fuzzy, and even with federal census data there will be a lot of gray because of the social stigma still associated with identifying as LGBT which discourages people from so labeling themselves.
There is another side to hate crimes legislation that is also going under reported. When any group is protected, the opposite side of that group is also given special protection. Looking at table 2.32 from the FBI's database of “bias motivated offenses” http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reporte..., we can see that the “sexual orientation” categorization applies not only to homosexuals claiming to have been unfairly targeted because of their orientation, but also heterosexuals making the same claim. The “Racism” category similarly shows that white people have made claims of discriminatory incidences because of their race over 30% as often as black people. When we think of protecting gender identity we must also recognize that by adding protection to transgendered people we are also adding protection to biological men and women. Is this necessarily a bad thing? I'm not convinced it is. But when you're arguing against hate crimes legislation keep in mind that you already have at least five protected statuses – race (regardless of what it is), religion (even if you ascribe to none), sexual orientation (even if you're straight), ethnicity (go swedes) and age (you're admittedly over 40).
There is a lot of unfortunate under-reporting on a number of issues – including gun crimes, things that make people smile and geography. I have heard few complaints about these oversights. Please enlighten me.
April 22, 2009 at 12:19 pm“You can stop padding yourselves on the back and masturbating how wonderful Scoops is.” -Ouch
July 23, 2009 at 9:55 amHave something to add?