Transgender Remembrance Day

Today is Transgender Remembrance Day.

I missed the rally that was held at the LGBT Community Center of New York. However, on Sunday, I plan to attend a memorial service to be held in a church near the Center.

On one hand, I am glad that we observe this day, which is the anniversary of Rita Hester's murder in Boston in 1998. She was stabbed in the chest at least twenty times just a few weeks after Matthew Shepard was beaten, kidnapped, tied to a fence and left to die in a bitterly cold Wyoming desert night.

If people pay any attention at all to murders or other crimes against people who are (or perceived to be) gay or simply not conforming to prescribed gender roles, Shepard's and Hester's murders are two of the major reasons why.

Yet something makes me uneasy about Transgender Remembrance Day. It's not that it reminds me of the fact that we are twelve times as likely to be murdered as anyone else; rather, the observances make me realize that, too often, the dangers we face are recognized--if indeed they are recognized--only after one of us is killed. Or so it seems.

Also, when I read the names and stories of those of us--or those who were perceived as one of us--who were killed, I am distrubed to see how much more brutal and grisly our murders are than most others. The way Rita Hester was killed was not unusual at all, at least for a trans woman: It seems that when trans women are attacked, the attackers not only want to kill us; they also use as as punching bags, voodoo dolls and bonfires for their rage. Lisa Black was stabbed in the eye and beaten twenty times with a hammer; Christiaan D'Arcy was strangled, bound and locked in the trunk of a car that was set on fire and Michelle Byrne was tortured with a hot electric iron to her breasts before her killers cut off her hands and feet and finally beheaded her.

I learned about Lisa, Christiaan and Michelle from this site. None of their stories received any media attention outside the victims' local LGBT newspapers. Nor, at first, did the murder of Gwen Araujo seven years ago in California.

Araujo was killed in October of 2002, just a few weeks before Laci Peterson. Of course, that was a brutal crime, and it deserved all of the media attention it received. However, it's hard not to think that her murder got all that press because she was a pretty white cis-gender woman from an All-American family in an upscale Bay Area suburb. On the other hand, Gwen came from the "wrong" side of the Bay: Newark, a poor-to-working-class town in which a large percentage of the residents are Hispanic, as Gwen was. And, of course, she was trans.

At least her case was solved. The same can't be said for 92 percent of the other murders of transgender people that have been reported since 1975. I learned of this terrible statistic while researching an article I wrote four years ago.

Why are so few of our murders solved? Probably for the same reasons those same homicides committed against us receive so little attention. When one of us is killed, too many people see it as "just" the death of a deviant or a social misfit. Also, too many of us die alone: We have been disowned by families, friends and former co-workers--if, indeed, we ever had them in the first place. A corollary to that is that so many of us are poor: A study done in 2006, a prosperous year for the economy, indicated that 35 percent of all transgenders in San Francisco were unemployed and 59 percent were earning $15,300 a year or less. Plus--and this is one of the few stereotypes about us that has any truth--too many of us are sex workers. It's not that we have any more desire or inclination to such a job than anyone else has; it's that too many of us don't have other options. After all, what else can a teenager do if she's dropped out of school because she's been beat up too many times and her family has kicked her out--or she's run from the abuse she was facing for being who she is?

Finally, there is pure and simple misogyny. Crimes against women still aren't taken seriously by too may law enforcement officials and society generally; a "man" who "becmes" a "woman" is seen as bringing trouble on herself.

So, knowing these things, why am I against the "Hate Crimes Law? I think it has the opposite effect from what's intended: By saying that a murder or beating is worse when it's committed against members of one group, one is setting up a class system of justice. A crime is a crime, no matter who commits it against whom. If someone stabs someone, shoots that person, then douses him or her with gasoline and lights a match, it's a horrible crime, no matter who the victim is, and should be treated as such. That's how it has to be seen if we're to have policies that are actually equitable.

Besides, someone can argue or decide that the murder of a trans or gay person, or a member of any stigmatized group is not a hate crime. The defense tried to argue that Matthew Shepard's murder was a robbery gone wrong. Then they tried to invoke the "gay panic" defense. If such tactics work, as they do in many cases we never hear about, the victim becomes, to those who are adjudicating his or her case, simply another sexual deviant who won't be missed.

And, of course, people like me have to educate both in the sense most people think of that word and through example.

Finally, in the meantime, we need to remember Gwen. And Rita. And all of the others.

Transgender Remembrance Day

Last night I went with Dominick to a Transgender Remembrance Day service on Long Island. Someone he calls "Dad" was one of the guest speakers. As it turned out, I'd met him before, at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.

He was Dominick's Spanish teacher in high school. Dominick's parents divorced when he was a small child, so his father really wasn't part of his life. That teacher, therefore, became the nearest person Dominick would have to a male parent.

Anyway, that service took place in a Unitarian church. I had been to Unitarian churches maybe once or twice before: when I was searching or had all but given up, I'm not sure of which. Dominick liked what he saw of that church; the people were indeed friendly, as he remarked. Also, he noticed, they seemed to accept everyone. I pointed out that it's one of the reasons the Unitarians were founded, and they were, along with the Quakers, spiritual leaders of the Abolition movement.

I, too, liked the people very much. But I also remarked on the homogeneity of the people there. "For me, it's cultural shock to be in a room full of white, mostly middle-class people."

"I know how you feel," Dominick said.

"We work in multicultural environments. I'm in a college where 80 percent of the students are black. Being around people who are different from me is normal now."

He laughed with a twinge of recognition. "I never feel like I'm around my own people."

"That's exactly what all those transgender people said tonight. That's how I felt through most of my life."

"But you know, while I think it's great to be in New York with all these different kinds of people, I'm not so sure that it teaches people how to live with people who are different from themselves."

"Well, if a person's not ready, nothing and no one can teach them."

"It's what you learn at home."

He's right, at least to a point. For most people, chances are that if they don't learn tolerance from their families, they won't learn it from anyone else, anywhere else. But the operative phrase is "chances are." I wondered, "Are you really bound by that?"

"Well, pretty much...I see it in kids."

"I know what you mean. But just because your family did something, it doesn't mean you have to do it, too."

I was thinking of the murdered transgendered people whose names we read at the service. I was one of the few people who also had the name of the victim's killer: Antonio Williams. Where did he learn to hate a man in woman's clothes enough to shoot him in the head with a semi-automatic rifle? Even if his parents (if he had them) or any other adult in his childhood taught him to hate cross-dressers, how could they intensify that hatred enough to kill in such a brutal way? How did any of those who killed those people whose names we read learn to hate a transgender, drag queen or king, or anyone else who deviates from proscribed gender roles, enough to stab her multiple times in the torso, head and groin or to plug her with ten, fifteen or twenty bullets. Those are some of the stories I remember from last night.

"My" victim, Brian Mc Glothlin, was only 25 years old when Antonio Williams killed him on 23 December of last year. The 23rd: the day after Corey, a friend of mine, committed suicide in 1982. I spent the last night of his life with him: He'd called me, and I just knew he couldn't wait. He didn't talk about ending his life; rather, he alluded to its futility and pointless pain. "Why do I have to live a life in a man's body but feel like a woman?"

That was exactly the question I asked myself nearly every day for forty years. I didn't tell him that; rather, I said some things that now seem vague about feeling out of place and misunderstood. Back then, I was nowhere near acknowledging my own truth; I wasn't even near admitting that I had problems with drugs and alcohol. I held him; he actually fell asleep in my arms. I'd hoped somehow that he could sleep it off, or I could hug all of that self-hatred out of him. How could I, when I was so filled with hatred of myself?

Somehow Corey's death has always seemed as violent--like a murder, at least in a spiritual sense--as those of any of those whose names we read last night. Which is why after I pronounced my last sentence-- "For his deed, the gunman is now serving a six-year prison sentence"--I could not stop crying as I stepped off the altar and walked back to the pew where Dominick and I had been sitting.

I never met Brian Mc Glothlin. I've never been to Cincinnati, where he was killed. Yet I felt, at that moment, as if I'd lost a member of my family, or at least my community. Intellectually, I know that I couldn't've prevented Brian's or Corey's death. But sometimes I still find myself echoing Camus's character who believes his failure to say "hello" to someone contributed to that person's suicide. Maybe, just maybe, if I'd more openly acknowledged how I felt--that I, a woman, loved Corey, whatever her gender--if I'd only shared that,,,,Could I have started a chain of love, or short-circuited a chain of hatred that would have prevented the horrible deaths of Corey, Brian and any number of people who, whether they were killed by their own or someone else's hand?

Of course the "sensible" answer is "no." But does the fact that I was not, at that time in my life, capable of being anything like an agent of peace and understanding (and maybe I'm still not) absolve me from blame for what I didn't do--or, more important, its consequences?

If for no other reason, going to that memorial was good for me because I most likely wasn't the only person there who'd asked herself such questions. Or who'd come to remember people they'd never met but with whom they felt a spiritual kinship. Isn't that the purpose of a remembrance (as opposed to a mere memorial), after all?