That Feminist Dyke

A transgender woman was recently sentenced to a 41-month prison term in a men’s prison for acting in what many are calling self-defense in response to a hate crime. Cece McDonald, a young, black, transgender woman was arrested in Minnesota last June for stabbing and killing a white man who was part of a group that physically attacked her while yelling racial and homophobic slurs.

McDonald accepted a plea deal and pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter last month and will be incarcerated in the Minnesota state prison as a male. The court’s decision to do so has brought to light the physical and sexual violence that transgender people experience within the prison system.

Activists around the country have taken up the case for McDonald, starting a Support CeCe campaign to draw attention to the case as well as to the large amount of violence that transgender people experience, both on the streets and in the criminal justice system. According to Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality, transgender women are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in U.S. prisons than are cisgender, or non-transgender, people.

On the night of her sentencing, outraged supporters filled the streets outside the Hennepin County Jail, where she was being held, in protest. Leslie Feinberg, transgender activist and author of Stone Butch Blues, was arrested that evening in solidarity. Marches have been held around the country in solidarity since McDonald’s arrest, and supporters say they will continue to demand justice for her and all trans people and people of color.

(Ms.— July-05-12)

Police in the Miami Beach, Fla., area are reaching out to the public to try to solve a three-month old killing of a local transgender woman. According to South Florida Gay News, Rene “Rosita” Hidalgo was found bludgeoned to death in her home March 15, after friends reported her missing to police. 

Renowned drag performer Amy Rivers — a close friend of the victim who reportedly arrived on the scene with police — told Victoria Michaels of SFGN, “Somebody had the nerve to stab her, cut her neck and put something in her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. It’s not fair what they did to her. She didn’t deserve this. I loved her and everybody loved her.”

Detectives are asking area residents for any information that might lead to finding a perpetrator, confirming Hidalgo was found with multiple stab wounds but staying mum on other details of the crime pending the ongoing investigation. The Miami Beach Police Department has come under criticism recently for a press release calling Hidalgo a “transvestite who was known to have profited from sex.” (Hidalgo was actually a transgender woman, not a cross-dresser — the definition of the archaic term ‘transvestite’ — and her friends told SFGN that she was not a  sex worker.)

Detective Oldy Ochoa, however, told SFGN that the case was top priority: “It’s the LGBT community that has allowed Miami Beach to thrive over the years and it’s our honorable duty to protect and serve them no matter if they are gay, lesbian, or transgender because they are all human beings. I want nothing more than to catch this criminal because I think the LGBT community deserves it for all that they have done for our city.”

According to SFGN, police have said the shootings of two other trans women in April are unrelated to Hidalgo’s killing.

(Diane Anderson-Minshall, Advocate — June 28 2012)

cage-veil-cunt:

Eric Fehrnstrom, a top aide and political strategist to presumptive Republican presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA), made headlines earlier this year with a gaffe comparing Romney in the primary fight to an “Etch a Sketch” that you can flip over and shake and start over with as a blank slate in the general election. Before he was an adviser to Romney, Fehrnstrom was a political columnist for the Boston Herald. According to a profile in GQ, in 1992, he outed recently-elected Massachusetts Rep. Althea Garrison (R) as a transgender woman, effectively ending her political career.

To Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, the malicious outing and the presence of Fehrnstrom on Romney’s staff is simply unacceptable.

…

As if I needed one more reason to hate this asshole.

(Source: transfeminism)

Like many of you who have been discussing the issue on Twitter and Facebook today, I was angered to learn that a new UK conference for radical feminists, RadFem2012, is not only playing host to a well-known transphobe, but is actively excluding trans women from attending.

The conference is open only to “women born women living as women”. Now, I personally support and fully appreciate the value of women-only space, but that space has to be open to all self-defining women. Excluding trans women from an event that aims to build an “anti-oppressive movement for the liberation of all women from patriarchal oppression” is bitterly ironic.

Trans women suffer horrifying levels of violence, abuse and discrimination, fuelled not only by the fact that they are women, but by the refusal of the vast majority of the cis population to acknowledge and respect their identities. The organisers of RadFem2012 have actively chosen to align themselves with this majority, and in so doing are complicit in trans women’s oppression. Radical? Feminism? I think not.

[full post]

Lorena Escalera died in a fire at her apartment building in Brooklyn

Hundreds of people have signed a petition to the New York Times saying it ‘sexualised’ the death of a transgender woman in a report this weekend.

The petition, hosted on the Care2 petition website, said the report “sensationalised” the death of Lorena Escalera.

Ms Escalera, who was 25, was declared dead at the scene after an apartment building fire in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

The New York Times ran a piece on her death which said in its opening sentence she was “curvaceous, and she often drew admiring glances in the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood where she was known to invite men for visits to her apartment”.

Ms Escalera’s body was discovered after a fire broke out in the early hours of Saturday morning last week.

The report said that in the area, “many recalled a young and friendly woman”. While the artcile itself used female pronouns throughout, one neighbour said “For a man, he was gorgeous” and recalled her “hourglass” figure.

The petition reads: “On May 12 the New York Times ran a piece about a suspicious fire in Brooklyn where trans woman of color Lorena Escalera sadly died. Far from focusing on the facts of the case, the report included sensationalistic and sexualizing descriptions of her as “curvacious” and noted her “hourglass figure.”

“GLAAD has brought this matter to the NYT’s attention already, whereby you called it a “poor choice of words” as though that ended the matter. At a time when anti-trans sentiment is high and sexualization of trans people still means they are denied basic civil rights, this is not good enough.

“We the undersigned ask that the NYT print an apology acknowledging why the story was so deeply offensive, and that it highlight the prejudice and discrimination trans people face in all spheres of life.”

Carolyn Ryan, the New York Times Metro Editor had said: “We typically try to capture the personal stories of those whose lives are lost in a fire, and we sought to do so in this case. We certainly did not mean any disrespect to the victim or those who knew her. But, in retrospect, we should have shown more care in our choice of words.”

GLAAD criticised the article this week: “The decision by writers Al Baker and Nate Schweber to call her “curvaceous” in the first sentence was not a poor choice of words. It was a poor choice of focus. […] Saying that Lorena was “called” Lorena, even though that is exactly how police identified her, was not a poor choice of words. It was a disrespectful jab at her identity as a trans woman, by implying that she wasn’t really Lorena.”

It added that it was clear that the kind of personal information mentioned in the article “was included in order to “spice up” the story by exploiting Lorena’s status as a transgender woman – not to actually inform readers about her life”.

Currently, [almost 1,000] people have signed the petition.

A black transgender woman faces prison for killing her attacker. Her supporters call that a crime.

“I never thought I would make it past my 16th birthday. To grow up and have that thought at a young age is unsettling — the thought or feeling of knowing or expecting that today could be my last day on Earth, only because someone hates me for being the person I felt would make my life happiest.” —CeCe McDonald

In a matter of moments, on a warm summer night last June in St. Paul, Minn., what started out as an innocent trip to a grocery store for Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald and her friends quickly turned into a street brawl that would result in someone being killed. McDonald, a 23-year-old black transgender woman and college student, and a few of her friends (black people who variously identify as LGBT and straight) passed a local bar, where they encountered two white women and one white man. The man, Dean Schmitz, hurled racist, homophobic and transphobic epithets at the young group of color as they walked by.

“F—gots!”

“N—gers!”

“Chicks with d—ks!”

And then it got violent.

One of the two white women with Schmitz smashed a beer glass on McDonald’s face. People from the bar spilled out into the streets to help the white trio fight the black youths. Somewhere in between fists and insults being thrown, McDonald took out a pair of scissors from her purse and stabbed Schmitz, who died at the scene.

Despite claiming self-defense, that same night McDonald, after being treated for injuries, was interrogated and ultimately charged with second-degree murder. She was also kept in jail for two months.

It’s incredibly hard to ignore the similarities and the hypocrisy between the killing of Trayvon Martin and McDonald’s attack. Both were young and black and walking down the street minding their own business. Both were harassed and attacked for being different. But both had very different outcomes.

George Zimmerman, who stalked and killed 17-year-old Trayvon, cited self-defense, although he showed no real signs of having been in a life-threatening struggle. And even though the lead detective on the case believed that Trayvon’s death was a homicide, Zimmerman was set free. Granted, he was arrested seven weeks later, but that would have never happened without a national outcry sparked by social media, determined journalists and Trayvon’s heartbroken parents.

Meanwhile, McDonald survived her attack; her attacker didn’t. And despite the fact that she had deep lacerations on her face and the police never found the murder weapon, she was still charged with second-degree murder and thrown in jail for months. Even worse, the judge wouldn’t let her lawyer bring up in court that her attacker had swastikas tattooed on his body and had a history of assault.

Her trial, which began the first week of May, ended quickly when McDonald pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: second-degree manslaughter. I’m not sure why she agreed to a plea deal, but given that the judge referred to her account of what happened as “unreliable” and openly chastised her for having scissors in her purse, perhaps McDonald believed that the jury would react to her in the same biased and unsympathetic manner and hand down a conviction.

In a way, like her actions in front of the bar that night, this plea deal might have been another act of survival. Most likely, she will spend only 20 of the likely 40-month sentence in jail for time served, but she will be held in a men’s prison and will possibly be subjected to severe harassment and sexual assault.

Her sentencing will take place on June 4.

Clearly, the ordeals of McDonald and Trayvon Martin (and Marissa Alexander, who received 20 years in prison for shooting a gun near an abusive husband) are clear examples of how flawed our justice system is and how difficult it is for black people (heterosexual and LGBT) to claim victimhood in this country. And while hate crimes and the threat of violence have always been black people’s reality, it’s important to understand that transgender women and gender-nonconforming individuals of color are especially vulnerable to these types of attacks.

Just in the past two months, it’s been reported that Paige Clay of Chicago, Coko Williams of Detroit and Brandy Martell of Oakland — all of them black transgender women — were shot and found dead. All of these cases are being investigated as possible hate crimes.

And the existing data paint an even more disheartening story.

According to a 2011 study (pdf) conducted by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, people who were both transgender and of color were almost 2.5 times more likely to experience discrimination and nearly two times as likely to experience intimidation as non-transgender white individuals. Also, half of those who experienced hate violence did not contact the police after their attack. A 2009 report conducted by the same group found that of the 22 people who were murdered in 2009 because of their sexual orientation, about 80 percent were people of color and half were transgender women; the other half were overwhelmingly men who defied gender stereotypes.  

It’s also important to note that the trans community’s relationship with law enforcement is just as grim. In 2011 a National Center for Transgender Equality and National Lesbian and Gay Task Force survey of 381 black transgender men and women (pdf) found that 38 percent of those surveyed who had interacted with the police reported harassment by officials, 14 percent reported physical assault and 6 percent reported sexual assault. Another 35 percent of black transgender people said that they had been arrested or held in a cell because of bias at some point in their lives, and 51 percent reported discomfort seeking police assistance.

Given that systems continue to fail the ones who need it the most, what are transgender people of color supposed to do? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Some might offer: Do nothing, because the crime isn’t the violence committed against you. The crime is your very existence, being out in the open and not being ashamed of who you are.

McDonald, the Newark 4 or Darnell “Dynasty” Young (the gay student who brought a stun gun to school to fight off his bullies) would most likely tell you: You fight back; you fight for your life, because no one else has your back.

As long as our society continues to co-sign on the former sentiment, black transgender people like CeCe McDonald will continue to look over their shoulders, scared as hell, knowing that when danger lurks, if they have the audacity to fight back and not allow themselves to be killed, there’s a good chance that they are the ones who will be punished. The message is crystal clear: Transgender people have very little value in this world, dead or alive.

Kellee Terrell is an award-winning Brooklyn, N.Y.-based freelance writer who writes about race, gender, health and pop culture. Terrell is also the news editor for thebody.com, a website about HIV/AIDS. She blogs about health for BET.com. Follow her on Twitter.