News :: GLBT
Slain transgender people remembered around world...and in BostonMonday Nov 23, 2009 A year ago this month, Lateisha Green, a transgender woman, was shot to death as she sat in a car outside a house party in upstate New York. In July, a Syracuse jury convicted Dwight DeLee of manslaughter as a hate crime.
And on Friday, Nov. 20, people from New York to the Netherlands gathered to remember Green and other hate crime victims like her on the 11th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance.
A candlelight vigil was held in Allston honoring the memories of 23-year-old Chanelle Pickett and other victims of transgender-based discrimination. Pickett was beaten and strangled to death in November of 1995. Despite strong evidence against her killer, William Palmer, he was convicted only of assault and battery and received two years of jail time.
"Chanelle’s killer did not merely target a transsexual woman -- he preyed on a woman who had already been victimized because of her identity," a press statement from the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition stated. "Unprotected by the law, Chanelle’s vibrant life was brutally cut short because so many doors had already been closed on her."
Mourners gathered at St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s church in Allston Friday night -- some coming from as far away as Maine -- and flooded the sidewalks with candles lit in memory of victims.
In Manhattan, a memorial was scheduled at a community center for transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn was scheduled to host a discussion of anti-transgender violence.
"First and foremost, it honors those who have been killed because of transphobia and anti-trans violence,’’ said Sharon Stapel, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project.
"Second, it raises awareness that this is a serious, serious problem in our community. Transgender people are killed simply for being who they are on a far too regular basis. It also allows the community to come together to talk about solutions to prevent this kind of violence."
The remembrance was started after San Francisco activist Gwen Smith organized a candlelight vigil after the 1998 stabbing death of a Boston transgender woman, Rita Hester.
Hester’s killing, like the slayings of many transgender people, remains unsolved, event organizers said.
In June, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, of which Stapel’s organization is a part, said transgender people accounted for 12 percent of victims of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people reported in 2008.
Among them was the killing of Green, 22. DeLee’s conviction was the first hate crime conviction in New York state for the killing of a transgender person and only the second such conviction in the country.
DeLee received the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
The only other hate crime conviction in the slaying of a transgender person was in May, when a jury in Colorado convicted Allen Andrade of beating 18-year-old Angie Zapata to death with a fire extinguisher after discovering she was biologically male.
"This country continues to stigmatize people who express their gender identity in a way that doesn’t conform to society’s mores," Stapel said. "Often, people with the most marginalized identities are the people who experience the most violence. And transgender people have the most marginalized identities within the LGBT community at this time." - Marcus Franklin, Associated Press
Hannah Clay Wareham, Bay Windows staff reporter, contributed to this report.
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