We Ended The Year On A Sad Note

It was a record breaking year.

At least 26 transgender people were killed in America this year, but the number is likely higher
It’s been more than 20 years since Gwendolyn Ann Smith started keeping track of transgender people killed around the world. She says it’s getting worse.
The Hill
By Anagha Srikanth
December 26, 2019

Story at a glance

• While the Human Rights Campaign reported 26 transgender people killed in the U.S., other estimates put the number as high as 40.
• The FBI reports a 34 percent increase in hate crimes against transgender people between 2017 and 2018.
• A majority of transgender people killed in America this year were black women.

At least 26 transgender and gender nonconforming people were killed in the United States this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), with some outlets reporting higher numbers.

“We’re seeing the number of cases go up,” said transgender advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith, who started the Transgender Day of Remembrance. “The last couple of years they’ve been growing and growing very quickly and that’s concerning.”

In November, monitoring group Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide reported 331 killings of transgender and gender-diverse people between October 2018 and September 2019. Thirty-one of those murders took place in the U.S.

Since then, seven more transgender people have died in the U.S., according to the "trans lives matter" web project, which reported 40 deaths this year, including suicides. The most recent was the death of Yahira Nesby, a black trans woman killed in Brooklyn on Dec. 19.
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Despite increased awareness in recent years, the transgender community still faces high rates of discrimination, which creates barriers to employment, health care and housing. This year the Federal Bureau of Investigation released statistics on hate crimes that showed a 34 percent increase in violent hate-based attacks on transgender people between 2017 and 2018. Nearly 9 in every 10 victims were transgender women, and 58 percent of all domestic deaths occurred in southern states, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign.

There are many factors that have caused a rise in murders and hate crimes, some maybe caused by better reporting of trans murders but I think one of the many causes is the hate coming from our “leaders” in Washington.

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I thin another factor in the increase of hate crimes against us is our increased visibility, the haters feel threaten and in a corner, they feel that they have a right to subjugate us.

The internet made trans people visible. It also left them more vulnerable.
This decade has been a double-edged sword for trans people.
VOX
By Katelyn Burns
December 27, 2019

Few marginalized communities have experienced such dramatic whiplash of fortunes over the course of the 2010s as trans people. Where once the public only had access to trans stories through traditional media coverage (that was rarely flattering), we exit the decade with trans people starring in regular roles on television and in film, and transgender journalists beginning to break through into the traditionally cisgender-controlled media apparatus.

This year, 24 percent of Americans reported having a close friend or family member who is transgender, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll — that’s more than double the 11 percent who reported knowing a trans person in 2011.
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We didn’t arrive at this moment overnight, though. The story of how we got to a point where centuries-old conceptions of gender are now being regularly challenged in popular culture begins and ends with the thing that we love to hate: the internet.

It was the internet that brought me out of the closet, reading the stories of Dr. Becky, Melanie Anne Phillips, and others I realized that the world didn’t come to end for them when they transitioned.

While the early internet of the 2000s established a way for trans people to connect with each other quickly and over long distances, the second wave of web progress — social media and YouTube — has helped trans people leverage visibility into substantial policy gains. But with that progress also came a conservative backlash and campaigns to discredit our basic human rights. The internet, and trans visibility at large, has devolved into a double-edged sword for the trans community. It’s a dynamic I am all too familiar with.

Do you remember the early talk show hosts like Maury Povich, Geraldo Rivera, and Jerry Springer that made us into freaks.

But then all that started to change… we started to get positive coverage.

That media dynamic only began to shift after another pivotal Cox moment. In a 2014 interview, Katie Couric asked trans model and actress Carmen Carrera invasive questions about her genitalia and her transition. Couric’s next guest was Cox, who pointed out how Couric had been out of line. According to Adams, Cox was one of the first trans people to immediately push back on an interviewer’s inappropriate questions.
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“[The internet] was a game-changer as far as I’m concerned,” trans writer and activist Monica Roberts told Vox. “Unlike the ’90s, we now have real-time communication links where we can not only talk to each other nationally, but internationally and in an inexpensive way.”

But at the same time the opposition also found the internet and their lies and hate also had a real-time communication link between like haters and the internet because an echo-chamber for their hate.

As we started to win our human rights the haters were pushed back into the corners where their hate festered along with other like minded haters. We now see their hate live-streamed like happened down in New Zealand and other haters are emulating their ‘heroes.”

We see down in Washington an administration that fosters the hatred and has white nationalists on their staff. In an interview Linda Ronstadt said,

“If you read the history, you won't be surprised. It's exactly the same," Ronstadt replied. "Find a common enemy for everybody to hate. I was sure that Trump was going to get elected the day he announced, and I said it's gonna be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews. And sure enough that's what he delivered."

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One last thing...

What we need is a national trans organization to speak for us. The news media shouldn't have to go to the Human Rights Campaign a GAY INC non-profit to find out how many trans people died this year.