The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project

After enjoying a night of dancing at a Jackson Heights nightclub, Carmen, a Latina transgender woman living in Queens, began making her way home.

At 3 a.m., she started walking down Roosevelt Avenue at 90th Street when a man in a black car approached her.

“He told me, ‘I can take you wherever you want’ and kept insisting ‘get in mami, don’t be afraid,’” Carmen said, in Spanish.

Since she was tired and needed a ride home, Carmen said she proceeded to enter the vehicle and told the man to take her to 77th and Roosevelt Avenue.

But, instead, the man sped in another direction and parked the car on 32nd Avenue.

“He told me that I had to do oral sex on him, but I told him no,” Carmen said. “He said ‘if I pay you or don’t pay you, you should still do it’ and took a police badge out of his pocket.”

Afraid that she would be arrested, Carmen did as the man asked.

“When I finished, he told me to get out of the car,” Carmen said. “The place was dark and deserted. He gave me $20 and told me to take a cab back to Jackson Heights and left me stranded. I felt really powerless, humiliated and used.”

While Carmen had withheld her story from police in fear of retaliation, on Oct. 23, she stood at the Make The Road New York offices in Jackson Heights to make her tale known.

In conjunction with her testimony, the nonprofit organization released a new report that surveyed more than 300 Jackson Heights residents about their experiences with police in the neighborhood.

Findings from the report, titled “Transgressive Policing: Police Abuse of LGTBQ Communities of Color in Jackson Heights,” detailed that of the two precincts governing Jackson Heights, the 110th and 115th, 90 percent of stop-and-frisks conducted last year were made on people of color.

Researchers contend that within the communities of color impacted, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bi-Sexual or Queer people of color were particularly targeted.

According to the report, out of all the people who said they had experienced a police stop, 33 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said that they had been harassed by police in some manner.

By comparison, 51 percent of LGBTQ respondents who had been stopped by police indicated that they had experienced police harassment.

In addition to the stop-and-frisk statistics, the report also asserts that many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood.

“Many of the people living in this neighborhood who are transgender come from another country where they consistently are harassed,” said MRNY spokeswoman Nicole Duyuca. “They should not have to live in fear.”

Like many of the survey’s respondents, Duyuca said that she too is a transgender woman who has experienced harassment by the police.

At the age of 16, Duyuca migrated to New York from Mexico. Seeking to make income in her new city, Duyuca said she began working as a sex worker in Jackson Heights.

Although she no longer engages in prostitution, she recalled one night in 1998 when she had been assaulted by police.

“Two police men picked me up,” Duyuca said. “I thought they were going to take me to jail, but instead they took me to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and forced me to have a threesome.”

Seeking to help others who may be experiencing similar issues, Duyuca said she began working with MRNY.

“We want the policemen to identify themselves and call us by our chosen name,” Duyuca said. “They still call me ‘Mister.’ I am not a ‘Mister;’ I am a woman. All we want is to be respected like everyone else.”

Supported by openly gay Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), the report’s list of recommendations urge the City Council to pass the Community Safety Act, which includes a ban from profiling and requires officers to announce to stopped individuals they have a right to refuse a search, in addition to providing their rank and reason for a stop-and-frisk.

“The testimonies I have heard are not new to me, unfortunately. Sometimes we in the LGBTQ community think things are getting better, but they are actually getting worse,” Dromm said. “The police have conducted 18,000 incidents of stop-and-frisk in this neighborhood alone between Shea and 69th Street. To me, it is an issue of racial profiling and LGBTQ profiling with a particular emphasis on the transgender community.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.

(After enjoying a night of dancing at a Jackson Heights nightclub, Carmen, a Latina transgender woman living in Queens, began making her way home.

At 3 a.m., she started walking down Roosevelt Avenue at 90th Street when a man in a black car approached her.

“He told me, ‘I can take you wherever you want’ and kept insisting ‘get in mami, don’t be afraid,’” Carmen said, in Spanish.

Since she was tired and needed a ride home, Carmen said she proceeded to enter the vehicle and told the man to take her to 77th and Roosevelt Avenue.

But, instead, the man sped in another direction and parked the car on 32nd Avenue.

“He told me that I had to do oral sex on him, but I told him no,” Carmen said. “He said ‘if I pay you or don’t pay you, you should still do it’ and took a police badge out of his pocket.”

Afraid that she would be arrested, Carmen did as the man asked.

“When I finished, he told me to get out of the car,” Carmen said. “The place was dark and deserted. He gave me $20 and told me to take a cab back to Jackson Heights and left me stranded. I felt really powerless, humiliated and used.”

While Carmen had withheld her story from police in fear of retaliation, on Oct. 23, she stood at the Make The Road New York offices in Jackson Heights to make her tale known.

In conjunction with her testimony, the nonprofit organization released a new report that surveyed more than 300 Jackson Heights residents about their experiences with police in the neighborhood.

Findings from the report, titled “Transgressive Policing: Police Abuse of LGTBQ Communities of Color in Jackson Heights,” detailed that of the two precincts governing Jackson Heights, the 110th and 115th, 90 percent of stop-and-frisks conducted last year were made on people of color.

Researchers contend that within the communities of color impacted, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bi-Sexual or Queer people of color were particularly targeted.

According to the report, out of all the people who said they had experienced a police stop, 33 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said that they had been harassed by police in some manner.

By comparison, 51 percent of LGBTQ respondents who had been stopped by police indicated that they had experienced police harassment.

In addition to the stop-and-frisk statistics, the report also asserts that many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood.

“Many of the people living in this neighborhood who are transgender come from another country where they consistently are harassed,” said MRNY spokeswoman Nicole Duyuca. “They should not have to live in fear.”

Like many of the survey’s respondents, Duyuca said that she too is a transgender woman who has experienced harassment by the police.

At the age of 16, Duyuca migrated to New York from Mexico. Seeking to make income in her new city, Duyuca said she began working as a sex worker in Jackson Heights.

Although she no longer engages in prostitution, she recalled one night in 1998 when she had been assaulted by police.

“Two police men picked me up,” Duyuca said. “I thought they were going to take me to jail, but instead they took me to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and forced me to have a threesome.”

Seeking to help others who may be experiencing similar issues, Duyuca said she began working with MRNY.

“We want the policemen to identify themselves and call us by our chosen name,” Duyuca said. “They still call me ‘Mister.’ I am not a ‘Mister;’ I am a woman. All we want is to be respected like everyone else.”

Supported by openly gay Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), the report’s list of recommendations urge the City Council to pass the Community Safety Act, which includes a ban from profiling and requires officers to announce to stopped individuals they have a right to refuse a search, in addition to providing their rank and reason for a stop-and-frisk.

“The testimonies I have heard are not new to me, unfortunately. Sometimes we in the LGBTQ community think things are getting better, but they are actually getting worse,” Dromm said. “The police have conducted 18,000 incidents of stop-and-frisk in this neighborhood alone between Shea and 69th Street. To me, it is an issue of racial profiling and LGBTQ profiling with a particular emphasis on the transgender community.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.

(Megan Montalvo, Queens Tribune)

active-rva:

The Flying Brick’s explanation on why they are not hosting Deep Green Resistance, an environmental group recently interviewed on Weekly Sedition.

TW: The explanation quotes a transphobic rant from Lierre Keith.

Sisters and brothers, friends and lovers; I think we are experiencing an important moment in the evolution of the placement of our community in relation to wider society. In the last few years in particular I think trans people have begun to take on larger and more visible roles that society had previously denied us. Simultaneous with that however has come a backlash, which has taken many different forms, both explicitly and implicitly violent.

In my home country of the United States we saw a wave of violence against trans women of color in the last few months. While this phenomenon is unfortunately nothing new, it is a stark reminder that violence is very real, and if often acts as the final act of silencing.

Furthermore, it calls attention to the often-overlooked fact that not all of us in the trans community are equally vulnerable.

Indeed, it is a sad state of affairs that the fact that trans women, and particularly trans women of color, sex workers, and those living in poverty, are most vulnerable often passes without comment, even by those who stand up, generically speaking, for “trans rights.”

That has to stop, and we all should commit ourselves to trying to build a trans community with more representative leadership of the community as a whole.

Further, there is the critical issue of prison justice here in North America that is often overlooked. Perhaps these issues are best exemplified by the case of CeCe McDonald, a black American trans woman who was attacked along with a few friends by a group of anti-trans white supremacists one year ago in Minneapolis.

When this gang of thugs hurled racist and trans-misogynistic epithets at her, CeCe stood her ground… (full post)

It is enough to make the blood boil. Opened up the 5/9 City Pages to photos of Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald and was torn in two directions. To the left, she wore a bright, heartwarming smile, grinning wrist to wrist with nothing short of captivating radiance. To the right, she looked like hell, her face savaged, bleeding. Hell of a contrast. How’d it come about?

Well, CeCe and a few friends, minding their business as they went on a food-run to the local supermarket, were set upon in South Minneapolis by patrons of a bar, Schooner Tavern, who’d stepped onto the sidewalk to have a smoke and, presumably, shoot the accustomed sugar, honey, iced tea. And, when they spotted CeCe and company going down the street, promptly began fouling with them.

Being White in these Twin Cities so renowned for supposed social progress, Dean Schmitz and company felt absolutely entitled to assail Cece McDonald, who is Black, with racial and homophobic epithets. On a drawing board, the ideal thing would’ve been for CeCe (she’s transsexual) and her friends to ignore these ignorant fools and go on about their business.

Fact is, we don’t live on a drawing board. And it is understandable that they talked mess right back. Which led to throwing down in the parking lot.

A woman crashed her glass into CeCe’s face, leaving a gash it took 20-odd stitches to close. Whereupon CeCe, it’s reported, turned to get the hell out of there only to be pursued, persistently hounded and harassed by Schmitz. Whom she stabbed. In what can — never mind reasonably — what can only be construed as self-defense. He died at the scene.

Dean Schmitz brought his death on himself, never having the first idea a
“faggot” would fight back. This one did. And, taking a plea bargain instead of serving 25 years or more, she will spend the next three years locked up. For a crime she did not commit.

She didn’t murder him in the second degree, as the charge read. Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald killed Dean Schmitz to keep him from killing her. And now she won’t see daylight for a long time.

None of this is the worst of it. The real thing is that Black people in Minneapolis and St. Paul have given piss-poor support to one of ours in desperate need. Where is that knee-jerk Mau-Mau Northside posse when there’s no photo-op to advance vested agendas?

It’s a sad day when White kids at, of all elitist institutions, the University of Minnesota have a Black person’s back better than Black people do — last month, there was a conference hall there packed with supporters. It’s a cryin’ shame.

And, for all we are great at Bible-thumping, calling on the Holy Ghost and all the rest of it, this is not about whether God created Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve. It is about one of our children — McDonald isn’t but 20-something — being as close to lynched as possible. (Had Schmidt and them other Neanderthals who’d just come out of a bar had their hands on a rope, what do you think would have happened?)

And then being railroaded through the criminal justice system! (Richard Pryor summed that up perfectly with his quip on justice: “Come down to the jail and that’s what you’ll find — just us.”)

You have to ask why on earth CeCe McDonald would cop to a bogus plea instead of fighting for her right to be freed. Then you have to look at what she was facing at a trial, a jury of her peers. Right. More than likely 12 White suburbanites, born and bred to a credo that, out of hand, considers same-sex marriages an inherent abomination and looks on transsexuals as some sort of freakish miscarriage of mankind.

Tragic as it is, in the same place, you or I might well have, in this let’s-make-a-deal excuse for true justice, taken the same lesser of available evils. Still, that doesn’t make it right.

Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, odds are, will have one hell of a book deal in the offing when the prison bars open back up. Meanwhile, she is jacked up. And hunting season is open on the next one.

(By Dwight Hobbes, MN Spokeman-Recorder)

Around midnight on June 5, 2011, a 23-year-old African American transgender woman named Crishaun “CeCe” McDonald was walking with four friends past Schooner Tavern in Minneapolis. A group of at least four white people outside the bar began harassing McDonald and her friends, calling the group, all of whom were African American, “niggers” and “faggots.” One of the men in the group, who would later be identified as Dean Schmitz, said “look at that boy dressed like a girl tucking her dick in.” As McDonald and her friends tried to walk away, Schmitz’s ex-girlfriend Molly Flaherty hit McDonald in the face with a glass of alcohol and sliced open her cheek, causing an injury that would later require stitches. The groups began fighting, and when McDonald attempted to leave the scene, Schmitz followed. McDonald took a pair of scissors out of her purse and turned around to face Schmitz; he was stabbed in the chest and died from the wound. Though she was injured in the scuffle with Flaherty and claimed the wound inflicted on Schmitz was in self-defense, McDonald was arrested that night and then charged with second-degree intentional murder.

Since her arrest last June, support for McDonald’s case and her self-defense argument has been steadily growing. According to Katie Burgess, executive director of the Trans Youth Support Network, a Minneapolis organization that McDonald was also involved with, this is because many believe McDonald was “on trial for surviving a hate crime.”

On October 7, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that McDonald refused to accept a plea deal of first-degree manslaughter. That’s when prosecutors charged her with second-degree intentional murder, a charge that can carry a 40-year sentence. But as the jury was being selected for the trial on May 2, McDonald accepted a plea offer of second-degree manslaughter, which is likely to result in a 41-month prison sentence. In accepting the plea, McDonald had to give up her claim that she’d killed Schmitz in self-defense or by accident and had to forego a jury trial. At the plea hearing, Judge Daniel C. Moreno told McDonald that because she had a weapon and Schmitz was unarmed, “the law requires that you have a duty to handle that weapon in such a way as to avoid…anyone being harmed.”

Schmitz’s family expressed grief at his death in a news report by the local Fox affiliate. Jeremy Williams, his son, said, “He always used to go out of his way to help people…He would give the shirt off his back to help people. He was, overall, a great person.” However, the victim’s brother, Charles Pelfrey, told the Star-Tribune he wasn’t surprised at the allegation that Schmitz had used racist language. “At times he can be like that, yes…It depends on his mood, unfortunately,” Pelfrey said.

During the process of jury selection, Judge Moreno denied several motions from the defense to submit details about the victim and his past as evidence, including a photo from the autopsy report showing Schmitz’s swastika tattoo and his criminal record. According to Andy Birkey in the American Independent, “The judge ruled that his criminal history was sufficiently different from his actions on June 5 and therefore could not be shown to the jury.”

The judge also ruled that the defense could not call an expert witness who would testify to transgender people’s experiences of violence in their everyday lives. For supporters like Burgess and Lex Horan, the reports that Schmitz and his friends initiated the fight that night, shouted racist and transphobic slurs, and injured McDonald bring to mind other cases of violence against transgender people—a violence that’s endemic and likely underreported, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a DC-based nonprofit that analyzes data on demographics.

On April 27, McDonald’s friend Rai’vyn Cross spoke on Democracy Now about the threats and harassment she and McDonald regularly encountered, saying, “We experience this on a day-to-day basis.” Recent research and reports on violence against transgender women have found that, in 2010, 44 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and HIV-affected hate-crime murder victims were trans women. In 2009, trans women accounted for 50 percent of LGBTQH hate-crime murder victims. A transgender woman named Brandy Martell was shot in her car in Oakland, California, on April 29, in what is being called a possible hate crime, and on April 16, a Chicago transgender woman named Paige Clay was found murdered in an alley.

For those who believe McDonald has survived a transphobic attack, the fact that she’s now facing a felony sentence and prison time is particularly upsetting. Transgender people are arrested and incarcerated at a significantly greater rate than the general population. In a 2011 report by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force on discrimination and harassment facing transgender people, 16 percent of respondents reported they’d been sent to jail at some point in their lives. The numbers are higher for transgender women—21 percent—and black respondents, 47 percent of whom reported being sent to jail. As a point of reference, a 2003 report of the Department of Justice shows that 2.7 percent of the general American population is imprisoned at some point in life.

In a statement released after the plea hearing, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office acknowledged that it had “received some criticism from the LGBTQ community regarding this case,” but it defended the decision to charge McDonald, saying, “Gender, race, sexual orientation and class are not part of the decision-making process. The charges filed took into account the evidence in this case; this outcome is an example of the criminal justice responding proportionately to a tragic situation.”

Still, Michael Friedman, the executive director of the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, which represented McDonald, says that while it’s not uncommon for murder charges to get reduced to manslaughter, the offer of a plea that could carry a much lower prison sentence is “perhaps a reflection that [the prosecutors] know there’s a lot of culpability on the part of the victims and companions of the victim in the case.” He also clarified that one-third of the sentence will be eliminated for “presumed good time” and the sentence will include the time she’s already spent in jail since her arrest. After sentencing, this could mean McDonald serves around 18 months in prison. “We have a few people in our office with 20 years of experience, no one can think of any charge of murder where [the prosecution] agreed to an 18-month additional sentence.”

The focus for McDonald’s supporters and legal team is now on her June 4 sentencing.

Which raises the question: As a trans woman, where will McDonald serve the rest of her sentence? Prison is a particularly dangerous place for transgender women. If not in protective custody or solitary confinement, they often serve time in the general male population, leaving them vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse. While awaiting trial, McDonald was held in segregated custody in jail and spent some time under house arrest wearing a monitoring bracelet. McDonald identifies and lives as a woman; however, Friedman says, “there’s no way she’s going to be sent to a women’s prison.” Solitary confinement, usually used as a form of punishment within prison, is far from ideal for trans prisoners, but Friedman says, “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to ask for yet. It’s all brand new.”

Though very little about the context of McDonald’s life as a transgender woman would have been admissible during the jury trial, this case has become a rallying point for local leaders and national activists. On the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC in April, during a segment on social and economic challenges facing transgender people, author and performer Kate Bornstein talked about the case. Comparing McDonald’s actions to those of George Zimmerman, who wasn’t arrested for shooting Trayvon Martin until nearly six weeks after the incident, Harris-Perry said, “In a certain way it feels like she stood her ground.”

Over 18,000 people signed a Change.org petition, asking that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman “honor his committment [sic], in his words ‘to serve all of our citizens with understanding, dignity, and respect’ by dropping the charges against CeCe McDonald.”

Several local elected officials also commented on the case. Minneapolis City Council Member Cam Gordon wrote on his blog: “Here is another example [of a] transgender women of color being targeted for hate- and bias-related violence. It is unfortunate that in this case, as in so many, the hate crime itself appears to have been ignored.” According to Minneapolis Public Radio, Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Susan Allen wrote to Freeman, “urging him to remember the ‘extenuating circumstances’ of McDonald’s race and transgender, which she said ‘have cast unique question marks’ over the case.”

Lex Horan, a member of the “CeCe Support Committee,” says that approximately 30 supporters had been present in the court room each day. The judge prohibited supporters from wearing T-shirts and buttons that say “Free CeCe” and “Free Honee Bea,” McDonald’s nickname, so instead they wore purple. According to Katie Burgess, on the night after McDonald took the plea, there was a noise demonstration in which “hundreds of people marched around the jail and made a ridiculous amount of noise. CeCe said she heard us singing.” Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, who attended the first day of the trial, told press that, “People are being killed out there, and CeCe is being punished for not being killed.”

(By Nicole Pasulka, Mother Jones)

CeCe McDonald is not just the victim of a hate crime: she is, moreover, the victim of a racist and transphobic criminal punishment system. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Website, in a post about McDonald’s sentencing, stated, “Gender, race, sexual orientation and class are not part of the decision-making process.” The post went on to call the plea of second-degree manslaughter “a just resolution.” For the Hennepin County Attorney, who has played such an integral role in incarcerating McDonald, to state that the situation is “just,” is an insult to McDonald’s suffering.

The racism and transphobia that McDonald is experiencing is by no means unique. Trans women are up to 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than the general population. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 47% of black trans people surveyed had been incarcerated. 38% of black trans people had been harassed or assaulted by the police because of bias. A video (warning: contains graphic discussions of physical and sexual assault and transphobic slurs) from the Transgender and Intersex Project, which interviewed trans women, who have been victims of the prison-industrial complex, included telling statements about the horrors of the system. One woman stated, “prison is the worst thing anyone can go through.” Another said, “I wouldn’t be able to get my hormones and medications that I need.”

[Full Article]

Community members and chosen family members gathered April 30 at Taskforce Community and Prevention Services to remember murdered transgender woman Paige Clay and to create a community forum on violence against transgender women, particularly those of color.

Clay, 23, was found shot in the head April 12 in an alley on the 4500 block of West Jackson Boulevard in the West Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago. Clay’s chosen family members feel like the case is being ignored by Chicago Police, who were invited to the forum to answer questions regarding the case, but did not attend.

“It saddens me that Paige was brutally murdered and no one cares,” said Chayntell Jones, an outreach worker at Taskforce Community and Prevention Services, an HIV prevention and education agency serving the Westside.

Employees of Taskforce Community and Prevention Services opened the event by welcoming attendees. Many people associated with the organization knew Clay because she attended a weekly transgender women’s group at the agency.

“If life is about pursuit of happiness, what opportunities do transgender people have to actualize?” said Wanda Oziera, agency coordinator at Taskforce Community and Prevention Services. “We are coming together as a community and making today an event that creates change, a catalyst for change.”

In solidarity with the gathering for Clay, the National Center For Transgender Equality (NCTE) cancelled a reception scheduled for the same time at the Center on Halsted, with NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling speaking at the forum instead.

“It’s been a really tough month for transgender people around the country. We know of four murders across the country this spring,” said Keisling. “We’re really trying to prop up Paige and draw attention to this tragedy. We need to figure out how to stop it.”

The murders Keisling mentioned included Clay, Coko Williams of Detroit, Brandy Martell of Oakland, Calif., and Deoni Jones of Washington, D.C.

Aides at the White House reached out to NCTE about these murders, Keisling said.

“Everyone from all over the country is hearing about Paige and Paige’s life from the great work here,” Keisling said. “Just know that NCTE really wants to help in anyway we can … Please contact us for anything at all.”

Attendees took a moment of silence to reflect on Clay’s life, which led to individuals sharing memories of Clay and what she meant to them and the community.

Brian Turner, an outreach coordinator at Taskforce Community and Prevention Services, knew Clay since 2004 when she was doing runway in balls, underground competitions in which different houses battle for prizes and trophies with a fusion of cat walking, dancing, voguing and drag. The ball houses, composed primarily of transgender women and same-gender-loving Black men, are similar to families or fraternities, each one cheering on its members as they compete.

“She wasn’t a person out on the street. She was trying to do something with her life. She wasn’t a nobody,” said Turner. “I didn’t want her life to go unnoticed. I’m crying because people came out to show support.”

The gathering then turned to a forum for discussing violence against transgender women, including the issues of gender identity and race.

In 2010, 44 percent of LGBT murder victims were transgender women, and 70 percent of LGBT murder victims were people of color, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Transgender people, as a whole, are only about 1 percent of the LGBT population.

“Being transgender should not be a death sentence,” said Precious Davis, youth outreach coordinator at the Center on Halsted. “We’ve seen enough as a community. It’s time to start making demands.”

The discussion turned to racism and transphobia within the LGBT community, particularly in Boystown, with several speakers pointing out the Take Back Boystown movement and the Tumblr blog, When in Boystown.

“We just need to stop being close-minded to things. It starts in out community it starts with us,” said Turner.

Many speakers noted the sizeable turnout, approximately 75 people, and expressed sentiments of hope and change for the future.

“It’s amazing that we all came together, but it’s sad that it has to be on an occasion such as this,” said Davis.

“I hope you’re inspired. I hope you’re inspired to leave here with a plan. Change won’t happen if we sit on our hands and wait for someone else to do it,” said Oziera.

A funeral service for Clay was held May 4 at Acklin Funeral Home.

“I feel like the question is necessary, how is trans* discourse and political activism helping ladyboys? Is it addressing the ills of the neo-colonialist system of capital and culture? Is it advocating for global resource redistribution? Is it dealing with the religious imperialism that so changed the role of bakla from spiritual assistants to sex workers or beauty parlor workers?

“Because until these conversations are regular in the white trans* community, it is hard for me to see how or why the community would be relevant to me or the things I care about.”

[Full Post]

Monday marked the beginning of Crishaun “CeCe” McDonald’s murder trial. For those who haven’t been following this case, McDonald is a 23-year-old, black, transgender woman who was harassed and attacked outside of a Minneapolis bar almost a year ago — her attempts to defend herself ended in the death of one of her attackers, Dean Schmitz.

Some of the details of what happened that night are fuzzy, but there is no doubt that McDonald and her friends were subjected to a slurry of homophobic, transphobic and racist taunts followed by a thrown bottle that sliced open McDonald’s cheek and caused a fight to break out. What happened after that will be officially decided in court, but McDonald would tell you that she pulled out a pair of scissors to defend herself from a hate crime. She maintains that when her middle-aged, white attacker (with a Swastika tattooed on his chest, no less) followed her away from the scuffle, he ended up running into her scissors and incurring a fatal wound.

Minnesota Public Radio’s recent coverage of the case focused on a debate that has become central to McDonald’s case: Should the hate crimes committed and attempted against McDonald be a consideration in her trial?

Both Minneapolis City Council member Cam Gordon and Rep. Susan Allen, DFL-Minneapolis, have weighed in, urging Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman, the prosecutor in this case, to mind the hate crimes committed. Freeman, however, has stated that McDonald’s “gender, race, sexual orientation and class” will not be considerations in his case against her. Then of course there were the story’s comments, many of which made the claim that hate crimes don’t actually exist.

Hate crimes don’t exist? I don’t think a claim like that can be made without a whole lot of privilege and an abysmally low amount of empathy. If your head is that deep in a hole, get a clue — there is a difference between an average crime and a hate crime and they should be punished differently. And in a case like this, where one man’s hate-driven actions led to his death, the fact that he was committing a hate crime on the basis of McDonald’s race, gender and orientation should absolutely be taken into account.

Schmitz’s attack, like any hate crime, wasn’t random, but it also wasn’t driven by a personal vendetta. McDonald hadn’t done anything to him. She was singled out for her identity and self-expression, less tangible and far more personal assets than a body alone, and that identity is one that many other people hold. His attack, therefore, was not just a random attack on one person’s body, but an attack on an entire race and entire gender. An entire population of living, breathing, feeling people are hurting with McDonald, perhaps not physically but in the core of who they are.

It’s precisely because hate crimes are targeted attacks on entire minority groups that they are prosecuted differently. If it was a hate crime, or even an attempted hate crime, that led to this man’s death, then the case should be handled with the same consideration.

The queer and transgender communities as well as communities of color have organized around this case, demanding that Hennepin County drop the charges, and I stand with them. After all, every last one of them was an indirect victim of this man’s hate — a fact that Freeman would like to ignore. It’s their opinions and their wounds, as well as McDonald’s, that we should consider.