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.
Lateisha Green
On Friday, a jury found Dwight DeLee guilty of manslaughter in the first degree as a hate crime for killing Lateisha Green. This is the first hate crime conviction for the killing of a transgender person in New York state, and only the second such conviction in the United States. Though the trial is concluded and Lateisha’s family feels justice has been served, transgender people around the world face extremely high rates of discrimination and violence. Posts at Transgriot, Questioning Transphobia, and Feministe address the issues of pronoun usage, the lack of protection for trans people under New York hate crime laws, and the ongoing threat of violence to transgender people.