IDENTITY

On Tuesday, a transgender woman who went by the name Amanda was found naked and strangled inside her Queens, NY apartment. The police have finally ruled her death a homicide. Her body was discovered Tuesday after a relative said that she hadn’t heard from Amanda in a few days. Initially, I wasn’t very outraged by the story, realizing that people are murdered every day. I thought, just because she happened to be trans doesn’t necessarily mean that her murder had anything to do with that fact.

However, after I kept reading more and more about her murder, I started picking up subtleties in each article: That she had also been stabbed in the neck, that she had been beaten and stabbed in the chest, and that her apartment had been ransacked, and her Marilyn Monroe photos had been destroyed.  After reading these things, and realizing that somebody had purposely mutilated her chest, a symbol of her femininity, and also had destroyed her Marilyn Monroe photos, an iconic woman inspiration, I started to feel strongly that her death was definitely linked to her gender identity and expression. Sources say that her killer was most likely a man that she had been dating at the time, if so, then this story becomes even more sick to me. She let somebody into her life, trusted somebody to respect her identity, and then he not only murdered her, but defiled her gender expression. If this is the case, then I am truly disgusted. Nobody deserves to be treated like that, nobody deserves to die like that.

I think that attention needs to be brought to the issue of discrimination in the trans community, somehow. I feel that most people will quickly read over this story and think the same things that I did, that this woman was murdered, and just happened to be transgender. People will probably not dig deeper and examine all the evidence to make their own conclusions, especially not the conclusion that this murder was directly linked to her gender expression. We can’t allow this hateful discrimination to continue, not with so many trans people already feeling unsafe in the communities they live in. So I think we should do what we can to educate ourselves about the physical and emotional violence in the trans community, and through our awareness, join together to put an end to it.

Joe

Check Out:

National Transgender Advocacy Coalition - http://www.ntac.org

Trans*topia - http://youthresource.com/living/trans.htm (for trans-youth)

Gender Law and Policy - http://www.transgenderlaw.org

Gender Education & Advocacy - http://www.gender.org/