Today is the 11th annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day when we remember those killed because of anti-transgender hate. The event was created in 1999 to memorialize Rita Hester, a trans woman who was killed in San Francisco. Her case remains unsolved, as do so many murders of transgender people, who face extremely high rates of discrimination and violence. TDOR has a partial list of those we remember today. In the past year, we have seen the convictions of the killers of Lateisha Green and Angie Zapata, and the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Act, the first major piece of federal legislation extending legal protections to LGBT people; yet there is much more work to do.
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Kelly Whalen, Producer of NIOT Gwen Araujo story, reflects on transgender victims of hate crime and the law
EDITOR’S UPDATE: After deliberating for two hours, on April 23, 2009, a Weld County jury found Allen Ray Andrade guilty of first-degree murder and a bias-motivated crime in the killing of Angie Zapata. The trial was Colorado’s first successful hate crime prosecution involving a transgender victim. Andrade was sentenced to life in prison without parole, the mandatory penalty in Colorado for first-degree murder.
Below is a video of the statement by Zapata’s family:
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