Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Sadly We Broke A Record

It is a record that we do not want to break; we have a record number of trans persons who were murdered this year.
Trans Woman Murdered in Alabama in Deadliest Year on Record
Her death brings the total of trans people murdered this year to 22, surpassing 2015's count.
The Advocate
By Trudy Ring
October 6, 2016

A transgender woman was found shot to death in late September in Birmingham, Ala., and the number of known murders of transgender people this year is officially the highest ever.

The victim, initially misgendered by police and media, was found dead at the Kings Inn in Birmingham September 23. Her sister identified her as Jazz Alford, 30, of High Point, N.C. Like many trans murder victims, she was African-American.

“Her death was a huge hit for the LGBT community,” her sister Toya Milan, also a transgender woman, told AL.com, a website for several Alabama newspapers. “There was another transgender shot multiple times somewhere else recently. People think transgenders [sic] are monsters, when really we just want to be accepted.”
[…]
Alford is the 22nd transgender person known to have been murdered in 2016, surpassing 2015’s total of 21. This, however, does not include those whose deaths have not been reported or who have been misgendered.
The article goes on to say they have a suspect,
Police are questioning a man in connection with the recent shooting of another trans woman in Birmingham, and they are trying to determine if he was involved in Alford’s death, they told AL.com. The second woman, who was shot in the face but survived, was attacked Monday during a home invasion.
Is someone going around in the Birmingham Alabama area killing us?

As more hate is being stirred up in the political arena, it is spilling over to crimes against us. In 2014 the FBI reported that,
Of the single-bias incidents, 109 offenses were a result of gender-identity bias. Of these:
  • 69 were anti-transgender.
  • 40 were anti-gender nonconforming.
It will be interesting when the 2015 data comes out, because I would expect to see more hate crimes report last year than the year before.

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