As the title suggests, everything on this blog concerns violence against trans women.
The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project is a trans feminist project addressing issues of systematic, institutional and interpersonal violence and oppression experienced by trans women (those who were coercively assigned male at birth and identify or are identified as women/female) across multiple identities (e.g., race, class, dis/ability, citizen-status, nationality, sexuality, age, HIV status, and form, status, or age of transition, etc.)
Ida Hammer is a writer and social justice communicator. She organizes the Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project. She presents workshops and trainings on cis privilege and being a trans ally. She's also involved in organizing against sexualized violence. She's a proud dyke-identified trans woman and an organizer of the New York City Dyke March.
Xion Lopez came out as a transgender woman in August. Since then, the 20-year-old Northeast resident said, she has feared for her life.
“Every morning before I walk out of the house, I pray for safety,” she said at a Thursday rally outside the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Washington, where she and about 35 other activists demanded that the District do more to protect transgender people from what they call a recent surge in violence and police bias against them.
Since July, at least 20 transgender women have been assaulted in the city, said Jason Terry, a volunteer from the DC Trans Coalition who testified Nov. 2 before the D.C. Council about police response to hate crimes.
Lopez’s friend Lashay Mclean, 23, who also identified as a woman, was fatally shot in the city’s Northeast in July. Police said two people walked up to Mclean … and another person, and one pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot McLean.
In September, Gaurav Gopalan, 35, an aeronautical engineer and theater director, was found dead in Columbia Heights while dressed in women’s clothing, although some of his close friends did not identify him as transgender. The death was later ruled a homicide by the D.C. medical examiner’s office, which cited “blunt-impact head trauma.” Neither slaying has been solved.
In their demands presented Thursday to the D.C. police department, the U.S Attorney’s Office and officials including Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), activists sought better ways of tracking crimes against transgender people. They also want police to receive mandatory training on legislation, including the D.C. Human Rights Law, and more efforts to investigate crimes targeting the transgender community.
The District has some of the country’s most extensive laws aimed at protecting the rights of gender-minority groups, Terry said. “It’s just not being implemented.”
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