Friday, September 24, 2010
Sadly, yes
So....I've been posting really sporadically lately. You may have noticed. But it means I've been missing some of the things I usually post on with some degree of regularity. And violence against trans people is one of them. In a comment exchange on an earlier post someone asked if it seemed like lately there's been an unusually high number of cases where a trans person is assaulted and/or murdered, and to add insult to injury the police/media handle it horribly. And as distracted as I've been, it does seem that way. I don't have any statistics to share, but do a quick survey of recent posts on individual instances of trans violence on all the usual blogs and you'll see what I mean. Here's the most recent example. I don't really know what to say about this, but I feel like something needs to be said. Is it that awareness of this problem has increased so it's getting more coverage? Is there some social shift going on that's causing an increase in the violence? I have no answers.
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I've heard that violent crimes increase during hard economic times. Maybe this is a reflection of that. Like if your the kind of person who thinks crimes against the LGBT community are somehow justified,or who thinks the "I snapped" defense will fly in court (and it might), then when things are tough and your already angry at the world your more likely to commit a crime on a trans (gay, black, whatever) person.
ReplyDeleteI know that most of the mainstream feminist blogs are still not great on trans issues, but I do think there has been an improvement. Trans advocates have been able to raise awareness of these issues, so the coverage has gotten better. And honestly, most of the smaller individual feminist blogs like this one were always better on trans issues than the "big ones."
ReplyDeleteBut I think these things go in cycles too. Awareness is increased so we start hearing more about it. And then it seems like such a pervasive and ugly problem that its hard to see any solutions. And when it seems hopeless its too depressing to hear about, because what can we do about it anyway? And so then people kind of check out again, etc.
ReplyDeleteI think sometimes the cycle is broken by gains like legislative victories on hate crimes, because then there's a sense that there is hope, so people check back in again.
I've been feeling pretty depressed about this lately as well. I don't have any answers eaither, but I've noticed the trend too.
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