It wasn't so long ago that Duanna Johnson was murdered in Memphis. Now, in the same city, Leeneshia Edwards was shot - she is the third transwoman to be shot in Memphis in the last six months.
Renee notes that in the small number of articles that have covered the shooting, all mention Edwards' involvement with prostitution, "as though this somehow justifies the violence that has occurred."
We are given no relevant facts about her life other than that she is a trans woman of colour and that she has been associated with prostitution. Can anyone's life be so minimized in this way. It is as though these aspects alone made up her entire identity. We are meant to think of her as soiled, and beyond redemption. By reporting her attack in this way without explicitly victim blaming the media has reduced her to a two dimensional being; and therefore less likely to illicit any form of empathy or emotion.
Edwards - who was shot in the jaw, side, and back - is in critical condition.
For more information and ways to take action, check out the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition.
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that story sort of makes me wonder if there isn't some sort of awful hate-crimes/vigilante group in Memphis.
And yes, as usual, leave it to mainstream media to reduce the victim of a heinous crime to (1) race; (2) sex and (3) class/occupation. Because really...that's all you need to know to judge a victim.
It seems to me prostitutes are always reduced to their profession when they are murdered or attacked and transwomen are always reduced to that portion of their identity. The intersection of the two just guarantees dehumanization by the media.
It should probably be noted that a lot of transwomen are actually forced into prostitution just by the immense amount of prejudice we face when trying to get any type of more socially sanctioned job.
I've personally known several transwomen who are sufficiently skilled with computers to be working reasonably well paying jobs in the IT sector, but who've instead had to regularly result to prostitution just to pay the rent and keep food on the table. They quite simply can't get a fair interview. And even when they do, they'll eventually get forced to quit just due to the sheer volume of ugly comments from co-workers that management refuses to do anything about.
It's immensely depressing to walk into someone's house and see that they have one bedroom room filled with old computers and networking equipment... And another room with a bed, a lamp, a night stand and some mildly trashy posters on the walls, for when they bring johns over.
Very few states actually have employment nondiscrimination laws that include transpeople.
A decade ago, as a computer science student, I was required to take a course for my degree... It was a course that satisfied my upper division writing requirement but actually centered on how to present yourself well in the business world in general (interview skills, PowerPoint, etc... Things that engineers supposedly typically have trouble with.) At one point the instructor actually related a story about how he on one occasion participated as part of the hiring board at some company, and a transwoman came in ("a guy dress in full drag, with makeup and a handbag and everything, and even going by a woman's name!") and he "had to come up with a polite way to dismiss the person."
He presented this as a useful story illustrating one way not to present yourself in the business world. If I wasn't still firmly in the closet at that point, I'd have probably walked out of the class and filed a complaint against him right there and then.
I think it's disgusting the way transfemales and transmales are treated, we're all different, that doesn't mean just because we have a certain genetalia we have to stick to strictly look and dress the way all the rest of our birthgiven gender look like.
Very few places, and very few people in the world accept people that are not of a majority..
It's sickening..
Knowing the relation of the majority of people to similar transsexual experts, she has asked not to mention, but to speak about it it is necessary.
It seems to me prostitutes are always reduced to their profession when they are murdered or attacked and transwomen are always reduced to that portion of their identity.games