Things you need to read
Aug 5th, 2008 by Rebecca
I’ve been mentally putting together a post about a host of things - ‘trans panic’ defences, ‘deception’, victim blaming, and all the issues that’ve been swirling around my head in the wake of the Angie Zapata murder.
I’m not quite there yet, but there’s been a few excellent things written over the last couple of days, however, making some really excellent, and sometimes overlooked points when we’re talking about transphobic hate crimes. I put them here so I won’t forget as much as anything else, but they’re posts that really need to be read.
Holly:
There’s also been quite a few people making the point that if you transfer the ‘deception’ bullshit so often used to blame trans murder victims for their own deaths into basically any other context, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Though I’m so unsurprised that even in these circumstances, some “feminist” folks can’t resist using our dead for a good old rhetorical debate: witness the turning of the Shakesville thread into a big ol’ debate about genderqueer pronouns. Ugh.
Yeah..I even felt bad making points over it because what I really wanted to do was find pictures of her and plaster them all over my blog(s) and say “Look! This is a PERSON, not a thing, and she’s dead and it was horrible and you all should care!”
But I couldn’t.
A google search for JonBenet Ramsey will give you thousands upon thousands of pictures. A google search for Angie Zapata gave me none.
And BFP is so right about the racial thing coming into play, too. So often when these murders happen, it’s not just a trans person, but a trans woman (always!) almost always person of color and often sex worker.
(it, in the preceding comment, of course being her murder)