An NFL Player Tackled By Transgender Panic

Transgender=Predator.

To some people,  this equation is as ironclad as 2+2=4.  Yet when you ask those same people to name a specific case of a trans person who accosted, harassed, or assaulted anyone, or made anyone do anything against his or her will, they can't.  

It's one thing for people to believe stereotypes or myths out of fear or ignorance.  But it's absolutely vile and reprehensible when someone uses a myth or stereotype to escape responsibility for his or her actions, or to slander someone else.

I know:  Dominick did those things to me when I ended my relationship with him.  He spread rumors that traded in those stereotypes and tried to bully me with threats that he would continue to spread them and cause even more damage than he already had.

And I ended my relationship with him because he simply refused to take responsibility for the consequences of his words and actions.  Instead, he would portray himself as the victim whenever he was called to account.

The memory of those awful things he did came back when I saw this story about a football star who cheated on his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time--and Hugh Hefner's ex-girlfriend.

Oh, but it gets even better.  Hank Baskett claims that when he went to a grocery store, he saw a couple smoking pot in a parking lot and approached them in the hope they--random strangers--would sell him some weed. They gave him a phone number to call; when he called, he was given an address where he showed up.  

Are you with me so far?  

So he arrived at the house, he says, and went to the bathroom.  (Hmm...So that's the first thing you do at a drug dealer's house!)  When he emerged from the loo, he says, he saw two trans women--one of them naked--making out. 

Then, he claims, one of them walked up to him and sampled the merchandise in his gym shorts.

"I didn't engage in anything," he says.  "It was like a bank robbery...I don't know if it was a couple of seconds or fifteen seconds, because all I was saying was 'get out, get out, get out."  

According to a magazine who published his story, he was so "distraught" and "humiliated" he couldn't tell his wife--Kendra Wilkinson--about it.  

Ah, yes,  the "transgender panic" defense.   He went to cop some blow and ended up getting a blow job from a stranger.  When he realized what a divorce would cost him, he got scared.  

Now, to be fair, a transgender model claimed to have an affair with Baskett while Wilkinson was pregnant and sold her story to a magazine.  If that model was lying, Baskett could have ignored or denied her story. But if the story about the affair is true, his "explanation" does nothing to make him seem less culpable.

Or more credible.  Does he really think anyone is stupid enough to believe his story?  Oh wait...Wilkinson claims she does. "He messed up," she says, "He was naive and gullible."  

Really....You can't make this stuff up!

  

Where's The Justice?

An old joke says that examples of "oxymorons" include "dietetic candy", "business ethics" and "military intelligence".

To that list I would add "military justice", at least in matters of domestic and sexual violence, and in hate crimes.

Perhaps you think I'm embittered by my experience of having been sexually assaulted during a college ROTC training weekend.  It took me 33 years to talk about it for the first time, as I did last summer.  To be fair, at that time, very few people went public with accounts of sexual violence committed against them in any arena. Still, I think it says something about the culture of the military that I knew, even then, that if I said anything about what had been done to me, I'd probably be in more trouble than the perpetrators.  In fact, I even knew somehow that they'd get off scot-free because they were my superiors.


It is from such experience, and with the knowledge of other incidents of rape and other sexual (and domestic) violence that I lament the US Marines' retaining custody of one of their own, Joseph Scott Pemberton.  He is accused of killing transgender woman Jennifer Laude Sueselbeck in the Phillipines, where he was stationed.  

Filipino activists want him turned over to their criminal justice system.  I can't blame them:  The US occupation of their islands includes countless cases of abuse against ordinary Filipinos and, especially, Filipinas.  And they know that their overlords (i.e., the top of the American military command chain) have a way of covering up crimes and abuses committed by their cronies as well as those who serve them.   And Pemberton, if he's charged, will probably claim "transgender panic" or some such thing (which, by the way, is what Dominick tried to do when I filed for a restraining order against him).

You might say that such is an emotional response to the crime.  All right, I'll stick to pure-and-simple jurisprudence (at least, as I understand it:  I am not a lawyer).  If a civilian, or anyone in a non-combat situation, kills someone in a country other than his own, he would (and should) be tried by the local authorities.  So, why shouldn't Mr. Pemberton, if he is guilty of the crime.  He was in uniform but, to my knowledge, we're not at war with the Phillipines.

I say:  Hand him over!