Transgender Day of Remembrance: For The Truth About Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  For those of you who are just learning about it, this day commemorates those who met violent deaths on account of their actual or perceived gender identity and expression.  It commemorates the 1998 murder of Rita Hester in the Boston suburb of Allston.  


Like so many murders of transgenders--and that of Matthew Shepard, which preceded hers by a few weeks--it was notable for its gruesome overkill.  For all of those who think that we're trying to make our deaths, and the ways in which we are victimized, seem more important than crimes against everyone else, I want to say just a couple of things.


First of all, murders of transgender (and other gender-variant people) have some of the lowest "solve" rates.  When I wrote an article about the issue five years ago,  92 percent of such murders committed during the previous 30 years hadn't been solved, according to Interpol. That has much to do with the fact that they are not taken seriously by authorities in many places; among those in law enforcement and criminal justice, there is too often the attitude that we "had it coming" or that no one will miss us.  The latter notion is, too often, true, for many of us have been cast aside by the families into which we were born or the ones we made.  (In that sense, I am luckier than most, as my parents have been supportive even though they don't entirely approve of what I've done.)


Second, as I've mentioned, our deaths are some of the most gratuitously violent.  In those cases in which investigators actually investigate our deaths, much less take those investigations seriously, police officers and coroners as often as not say that our murders are the most horrible they'd seen.  As an example, just two weeks ago, a cross-dresser and a eunuch were tortured--Their eyes and nails were removed--and burned beyond recognition.  


You might be tempted--as I would have been, not so long ago--to say, "Well, that's Pakistan.  Things like that happen there."  Indeed it is a conservative Muslim country.  But there, as in India, there is a class of people--of which the two murder victims may have been part--called the hijra. They have been tolerated if not afforded equal status, but they have been increasingly marginalized, and even stigmatized, during the past sixty years or so.  Still, the fact that they were even tolerated--if only for their usefulness as sex workers--makes them without parallel in most of the Western world.


(Ironically, "Hijra" is also the migration of the prophet Mohamed and his followers to the city of Medina in C.E. 622.  Most Americans and Europeans know of that journey by its Latinized name, "Hegira." )




To his credit, the Police Superintendent Syed Amin Bukhari has actually formed separate investigative teams for each murder.  And while some people still seem to think that they brought it on themselves by "bringing misery to the streets," as one commentor said, others have lamented the brutality of those slayings.  


However, to find any of those attitudes expressed, or to know how brutal the murder of a gender-variant person can be, one needn't go to Pakistan.  At least, I don't need to.  All I have to do is ride my bike about half an hour from my apartment to Ridgewood, Queens, where Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar lived and died in March.  Hers is one of the (too) many names being read at Transgender Day of Remembrance events this year.   


Somehow, I don't think this will be the last time I mention her name.  I know that there are others--some of whom I saw at the vigil held in front of her apartment--who will also keep her name, and thus her memory alive, for themselves and in the minds of those who investigated her killing.  Even though they made an arrest and are to be commended for their work, I don't want them to forget, for her sake as well as that of anyone else who meets a fate as terrible as hers.  


And I want to remember, and be sure they remember, her and the others because of what Voltaire said:  On doit egards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la verite:  To the living we owe respect; to the dead, we owe nothing but the truth.

Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar: More Thoughts About About A Transgender Woman's Murder

It was utterly gorgeous yesterday: the sort of fine early spring day one envisions during the dreariest winter hours.  So, of course, I went for a bike ride in the afternoon.  Almost all I could think about was Amanda, a.k.a. Edelbuerto, Gonzalez-Andujar.


It turns out that she lived and died only two blocks from the office of the Times-Newsweekly, the local newspaper for which I wrote.   Her apartment is also only two blocks, in another direction, from where Martin lives.  So, of course, I was thinking about him when I wasn't thinking about Amanda.


Perhaps the fact that it's Passover is influencing the way I'm seeing them.  As I pedalled the serpentine roads of Randall's Island, I saw a group of men whose long black coats covered all except the collars and top buttons of their white shirts.  Their wives--at least,that is what the women in wigs and long, loose-fitting dresses seemed to be--were serving various kinds of food and selling handicrafts that, I guess, they made.  I was tempted to stop and check it out, but even if I weren't unwelcome, I would certainly garner more attention than I would've wanted.


In other words, I couldn't have "gone stealth."  They can't do that, either, in any place save perhaps their own communities.  (Even in some of those places, such as Crown Heights, they stand out among their neighbors.)  That is why Jews are always under surveillance and suspicion and, as Jacobo Timerman and Primo Levi have written, they can't help but to think that any crime or misdemeanor committed against them is motivated by their identities.


And, of course, such is the case for any transgender who's the victim of any sort of violence, or who receives any kind of negative treatment other people aren't getting.  As an example, when I had a false accusation made against me at work, I couldn't help but to think that it had something to do with my gender identity--and, specifically, that I recently had my surgery.  


When you raise the probability of such motivations as a possibility, you're accused of being paranoid, if you're lucky, and psychotic if you aren't.  Some will even tell you that the fact that you entertain such thoughts--or that you are what you are and express it as you do--brings the ill treatment upon you. The latter, in other words, is a way of "blaming the victim" and of excusing the perpetrators of any responsibility for their own behavior.


I was reminded of what I've just described when I saw and heard some of the comments and reactions to the news accounts of Amanda's murder.  To be fair, there were a number of commenters who pointed out that no one deserves to die the way she did, or by the motivations of her killer.  A few said that the killing shouldn't be treated as a hate crime or even that hate crime laws are unnecessary because the authorities should treat the case as the brutal killing that it is.  My inner libertarian agrees with that position, but as a transgender woman, I cannot support it wholeheartedly.  Still, it is better than some of the other comments I read.  The more polite ones said that she "deceived" some man or, as one put it, "He was expecting a taco and found a sausage instead."  (Aside from the imagery, it is somewhat amusing in that it may be the first time I've read a bigoted comment that was pro-Mexican, however obliquely.)


Worse still were the ones who referred to Amanda as male, but worst of all were the ones were the ones that would have made "Dude looks like a lady" seem enlightened.  Such remarks reek of the sort of violence that was committed against Amanda, and too many other trans women.  They sound like they came from the sorts of guys who show what a dangerous combination alcohol and testosterone can be. (I'm not man-bashing:  My body has been filled with that caustic concoction, and under its influence, I did things I'm not proud of!)  Plus, they reveal the insecurities such people have about their own sexuality, if not their gender identity.


And that is what I and every other transgender woman fear.  In addition to the ostracism and suspicion we incur and the prospect of violence that underlies so much in our lives, we know that we are prone to some of the most particularly gruesome sorts of attacks.  It seems that every murdered transgender woman of whom I am aware was killed in a way that left grizzled police officers, detectives and coroners saying that it was the most grisly, or one of the most grisly, crimes they'd ever seen. Amanda was strangled and stabbed.  Gwen Araujo was strangled, beaten, hog-tied and buried in a shallow grave.  (I still can't read about it without crying.) Eda Yildirm's head and sexual organs were chopped off and thrown in a dumpster.  I could go on--but you get the picture.  All you have to do is type "transgender murder" in Google, click on to just about any link you find, and you will see some of the most horrendous kinds of killing you've ever heard of.


The standard explanation for such brutality is that nothing makes people more insecure than having their notions about their sexuality challenged--or, at least, to feel that their notions about their identities and proclivities have been questioned.  It makes sense:  After all, the most phobic people are the ones who know, deep down, that they are what they hate.  Are we shocked when we learn that some homophobic preacher was patronizing teenaged boys or when some segregationist reveals, on his deathbed, that he was the "love child" of his father and housemaid? How surprised would you be to know that, as a teenager, I committed a gay-bashing?


But I think that the challenge to one's notions of one's identity and sexuality are the nucleus, so to speak.  The atom is one's place in the social and economic hierarchies.  Why is it that gay-bashings and murders of trans people are so often committed by young men who seem to have few prospect in life?  They are the ones who have no chance of going to college or getting the kinds of jobs their fathers (if, indeed, their fathers are in the picture) have or had.  They feel that others--immigrants, queers or others whom they might see only at a distance--are getting all the breaks and resentment.  If alcohol and testosterone is a combustible mixture, almost nothing will ignite it more quickly or reliably than the resentment and rage such young men feel. 


That spark can also come from the friction between the pressure a young man feels to fit into one role or another and his feelings of inadequacy or unsuitability for that role. That is how I would explain the way I was as a teenager, anyway.


And, when rage and insecurities seek a target, what's better than someone who "won't be missed?"  That is to say:  who would make a better punching bag than someone who's despised more than anyone else--by society at large as well as by the ones who actually deliver the blows, the shots, the slashes?


While every human being is responsible for his or her actions, the terrible thing  is that most of those young men don't realize just how duped, how "had," they are.  The fact that they are committing such terrible violence shows that they have never had the opportunity to think through their own assumptions, most of which were passed on to them.  The night I kicked a gay man in the stomach while he was writhing on the ground, I was trying to redeem myself as a "real man" in the eyes of my co-conspirators.  And we were all, wittingly or not, acting out of assumptions about ourselves and our genders that were so inculcated within us that we didn't even know that it was possible, much less permissible or sustainable, to question such notions.


All of those notions govern what we, as transgenders, fear--and what we all have to live with.  Some of the people who knew Amanda are, I'm sure, saying that she's "in a better place now."  I hope that's true.

Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar: A Transgender Woman Murdered In Queens

Yesterday afternoon Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, a transgender woman whose given name is Edelbuerto, was found naked and strangled in her ransacked apartment.


It's hard not to think it's a murder, although (at the time I'm writing this) the police and city officials can't yet label it as such, for legal reasons.  It's equally difficult not to think that her death had something to do with her gender identity and expression.  I mean, why else would her Marilyn Monroe photos have been destroyed? And why would she have been stabbed in the neck and chest several times in addition to having been strangled?


She lived and died in Ridgewood, a section of the New York City borough of Queens that's only a couple of neighborhoods away from mine.  For two years, I wrote for the Times Newsweekly, the community's local newspaper. I felt as safe in Ridgewood as I have felt in any urban neighborhood in the United States.  I had no fear of walking even the more remote streets of the industrial areas of the neighborhood's periphery after dark.  I even left my bicycle--admittedly, my "beater"--unlocked while I covered school board meetings and other events.  My wheels were as untouched as they would have been had I parked in Bhutan.  I brought Tammy there once; after that, we talked about buying one of the stone or brick houses that line the neighborhood streets.  I really thought I'd introduced her to an urban oasis, if not a paradise.


Then again, I was living as a man in those days, and my waist was sculpted by thirty to fifty miles of daily cycling and my shoulders from the weights I lifted every day.  And my clothes, hairstyle and other markers of gender identity were completely congruent with those of other  men of that neighborhood, and American culture generally.  Plus--I never thought of this until now, at least not in reference to the time I spent in Ridgewood--I'm about as white as one can be.


Also, at that time, I didn't know Martin.  He has lived in the neighborhood all of his life.  (Technically, his place is in neighboring Glendale, which is a very similar kind of neighborhood.)  And he's gay.  While he seems never to have worried about meeting a fate like Amanda's, he has recounted incidents of harassment that stopped just short of physical violence.  Among those with and around whom he's spent his life, he seems to have lived, and to be living, by a variation of "don't ask, don't tell."  It seems that everyone knows about his sexual orientation, but he cannot talk to anyone about, say, his boyfriend(s), the way straight people can talk about their dates, lovers or spouses.  He seems to find the arrangement no more bizarre than his neighbors and friends think it is.


In an environment like that, you get along by going along.  The highest compliment someone can pay a neighbor is that he or she "doesn't bother anybody."  And that is what someone said about Amanda yesterday.


It's not a hard sentiment to understand, especially once you've cycled the neighborhood streets and talked to local residents, most of whom are blue-collar workers and their families.  People move to the fortress-like (though still very atttractive) stone and brick houses that line many of the neighborhood streets after working for years to save for the down payment.  Those houses look almost exactly as they did when they were first built between 100 and 80 years ago by German immigrants.  They are investments, shrines, heirlooms and fortresses, all at once, and their owners don't want them defaced.  (Nowhere is graffiti more detested than it is in that part of Queens.)  They help to make the neighborhood all but irresistible to those who want peace, stability and security above all else.


Those qualities make such a neighborhood attractive to transgenders, too.  After Tammy and I split up and I started to live as Justine, I nearly moved there myself.  It's never been known as an LGBT enclave, as parts of Jackson Heights and Astoria (where I now live) are.  However, in addition to Martin, I know of a few other gays and transgenders who live there.  I won't tell you who they are, as the only person I'll ever "out" is myself!  Any LGBT person I mention on this blog has made his or her identity public or has been cloaked with a pseudonym.


Anyway...I never knew Amanda, so whatever I say of her thoughts or motivations is speculation on my part.  Still, I am confident in saying that she probably felt some level of safety and security in living there.  I'm guessing that she also lived "under cover":  From the photos I saw of her, I'd say that she "passed" well enough to go "stealth."  And, because most people in the neighborhood don't want to upset its serenity, they probably left her alone, even if they knew her identity.


Of course, the scenario I've just described has its own perils.  One is isolation.  Most people in the neighborhood are polite; some are cordial.  But the extent of people's interaction with their neighbors is dictated by the amount of time they spend outside those stone and brick walls.  This may have been one of the reasons why it took several days for anyone to realize that Amanda had gone missing, or that some other terrible fate had befallen her.


Now they are mourning her.  So, in my own way, am I.  If we--that is to say, our souls--go anywhere after this life, I hope Amanda finds love and acceptance there.