70 Percent of Anti-LGBT Murder Victims Are People of Color
by MIchael Lavers
Monday, July 18 2011, 9:29 AM EST
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/70_percent_of_anti-lgbt_murder_victims_are_people_of_color.html (http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/70_percent_of_anti-lgbt_murder_victims_are_people_of_color.html)
It's an all too common, if shocking story: A transgender Latina woman with HIV is attacked on a street close to her home in a low-income neighborhood in the Bay Area. Making a bad situation worse, police officers literally drag her from her bed at 6 a.m. because they think she committed the crime herself.
"They kept telling her she wasn't who she was, and that she was a man," explained María Carolina Morales of the San Francisco-based Communities United Against Violence as she recounted the incident to Colorlines. "She was arrested. She was taken to the station. She wasn't listened to. She spent the weekend in jail."
The woman went to court a month after her arrest, but disappeared shortly after her court date.
The synopsis of the article seems to pretty well sum up the situation for a lot of trans people in the US by the sound of what I hear on here.
Discrimination and bigotry force people into poor areas where the crime rate is high. They end up involved in prostitution or on the fringes of crime in a lot of cases , and they suffer disproportionately.
Short of major social changes I can't see any alternative appearing unfortunately. I feel for those who are made to suffer because they want to be real.
Karen