Was Murdered Teen Lawrence King Gay or Transgendered?
July 09, 2011 10:25 AM EDT
by Dave Rattigan

http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979595386

The trial of Brandon McInerney for the murder of classmate Lawrence King continues in California. It was a crime seemingly motivated by anti-gay hate. But was Larry gay, or was he transgendered?

[...]

She taught him how to wear makeup, telling him to apply less, because "you want it to enhance the natural beauty you have." She bought him a gift of nail polish and also a green, spaghetti-strap homecoming dress, presented in a leopard-skin gift bag.

Details like these raise the question whether Lawrence King was a gay kid who liked to cross-dress, or he was transgendered. It has also been reported that Larry told a teacher to call him Leticia. Inside, was his burgeoning identity chiefly about his sexual orientation or about his gender?

While I am happy to hear that one teacher in the Oxnard School district is knowlegeable and compassionate toward Trans/Gay students, I must ask "what happened to the others that the murder suspect can now even contemplate the so called Trans Panic or Gay Panic Defense?"  With proper education on Gay and Trans students, the panic would be ovecome.  The prosecution SHOULD be able to show in the case in chief that the accused had sufficient knowlege of the victim and others like +++ to know that there was no social or moral danger of hell fire from the victim.  There is no panic defense for violence that erupts in heterosexual flirting or attempts at attention. 

"whether Lawrence King was a gay kid who liked to cross-dress, or he was transgendered."

yet more ignorance. If you cross-dress you ARE transgendered and sexuality has nothing to do with gender. Blind leading the blind down a path of fail.. trying to link sexuality and gender at any opportunity.

  ...We may never know in this case.  It is murder in either case and the accused should pay the same in either case if found guilty.  I like Lawrence's teacher though, stressing his natural beauty. 
  Joelene

Mybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but the fact still remains, he was murdered in cold blood. His or HER killers should be thrown in jail and butally sodomized for the rest of their lives.

  Whoa, easy Julia.  You're in adolescent mode, even without the HRT!  Nobody should be sodomized in prison!  Not even the child molestors!  This protects those that are in for nonviolent crimes and those found not guilty later as well.  Those 'goodfellas' in there who do sodomize do not differentiate on the charge the got person in there, but on their youth and 'feminine' appearance. 
  Joelene

Quote from: Joelene9 on July 11, 2011, 12:04:45 AM
  Whoa, easy Julia.  You're in adolescent mode, even without the HRT!  Nobody should be sodomized in prison!  Not even the child molestors!  This protects those that are in for nonviolent crimes and those found not guilty later as well.  Those 'goodfellas' in there who do sodomize do not differentiate on the charge the got person in there, but on their youth and 'feminine' appearance. 
  Joelene

But im an adolecent.

yeah less time spent on trying to figure out who lawrence was and more focus on getting the killer into somewhere where he'll be butt f***ed for the rest of his life. Priorities people! I mean if people of the world want to be utter brainless c***stains then it goes both ways. No love or hugs for bigoted killers I say I say!

Quote from: Muffin on July 11, 2011, 02:01:59 AM
yeah less time spent on trying to figure out who lawrence was and more focus on getting the killer into somewhere where he'll be butt ->-bleeped-<-ed for the rest of his life. Priorities people! I mean if people of the world want to be utter brainless c***stains then it goes both ways. No love or hugs for bigoted killers I say I say!

I LOLed

A reminder that this is a support site, and we do not advocate rape for anyone, even someone serving a sentence in prison for a heinous crime such as this. Some within our community here have been raped, and some have been in prison!

Zythyra, News Admin

context.

It doesn't matter. Whoever killed him didn't know the difference, nor did they care to.

Quote from: Muffin on July 10, 2011, 10:34:49 PM
"whether Lawrence King was a gay kid who liked to cross-dress, or he was transgendered."

yet more ignorance. If you cross-dress you ARE transgendered and sexuality has nothing to do with gender. Blind leading the blind down a path of fail.. trying to link sexuality and gender at any opportunity.

Can you explain this a bit more, Muffin? I wrote that article, and I tried to be as sensitive as possible to the issues.

Rather than trying to link sexuality and gender, I thought I did the exact opposite by making a distinction between the two: "Inside, was his burgeoning identity chiefly about his sexual orientation or about his gender?"

To my knowledge, cross-dressing doesn't always mean you are transgendered. What about men who cross-dress occasionally but are happy in their male identity? Are they transgendered?

I have been in prison, andI have been raped while in prison.
For forged checks and theft.

No one should be raped regardless of the crime they comit.

Rape is NOT part of the prison package deal when the judge sends you down the river.
Rape is the most demeaning and inhumane thing to ever endure. Bad enough that I have vowed that I will force the next one who trys to rape me to kill me instead.

BOTH the accused (he has not been convicted yet) and the victim DESERVED good reliable information of the sort that breaks down prejudice and hatred. A good and acceptable place for gaining that information was from the school and teachers at it.  Ideally, of course, the information should have come from their families and neighbors from their "milk" training from babyhood.  Neither of them got that information and training and thus the murder.   I live within less than an hour's drive of where this occurred and could even have been called into jury duty in the courthouse where this trial is taking place in Southern California.  I do not know if it is related to this case, but a law requiring the inclusion of GLBT contributions to California History is waiting the Governors signature, it will not cure the problem, but may give one tiny step more toward good information to fight the prejudice involved here.

Rape should NEVER be in any vision of appropriate punishment for a crime, even if it is meant as a statement of your personal anguish toward a situation.  Rape is always about the subjugation of one person to another, not punishment, just subjection and injury to the persons humanity.  By suggesting rape as the desert of the accused in this case, you are offering power to people who would more than willingly victimize you with as little disregard, and even a laugh at you for letting them do it to you.  If anywhere people need to undstand that, its here.   

Quote from: Dave Rattigan on July 11, 2011, 09:24:10 AM
Can you explain this a bit more, Muffin? I wrote that article, and I tried to be as sensitive as possible to the issues.

Rather than trying to link sexuality and gender, I thought I did the exact opposite by making a distinction between the two: "Inside, was his burgeoning identity chiefly about his sexual orientation or about his gender?"

You did start with asking that question but then went on to say "..was just an innocent gay teen's attempt to assert his blossoming sexuality." which is kinda misleading.. one of my pet peeves of news articles. A lot of the articles I've read focus on the fact he wore make-up, wore heels and received make-up tips and a dress as a gift form his teacher. These all suggest that he preferred to express a more feminine gender which doesn't automatically make him gay even if his sexually did so happen to sway that way. There has been more focus on his gender expression than comments about his sexuality, about whether he even had a boyfriend or was even interested. Some articles do quote comments that can lead one to assume he was gay but not directly from his mouth, for all we know being only 15 he may not of even given it a single thought. The attack appears to be more provoked by his appearance and how that bothered other children, especially McInerney. If the attack so happened to be centred around this then I don't see the relevance of his sexual orientation at all. Speculating or assuming only adds confusion where it's really not needed, not to mention he was only 15 and legally underage. I'm personally sick of seeing the words gay and gender in the same article where it's just not needed at all.

Quote from: Dave Rattigan on July 11, 2011, 09:24:10 AM
To my knowledge, cross-dressing doesn't always mean you are transgendered. What about men who cross-dress occasionally but are happy in their male identity? Are they transgendered?

You could ask a million people this and get a million different answers but as you're asking me I'll give you my "opinion". To me to trans gender is to cross the fem/masculine divide whether that be part time or full time, in reference to crossdressing this is primarily done part-time. For a guy that is completely content with his male body/sex yet yearns to express his feminine side from time to time. Most taking on common feminine gender-roles and gender-expressions to then go back to their male lives/bodies you could say. When someone born male feels their gender is fixed as feminine and wish for their body to match their gender then they'd most likely be transsexual.
A crossdresser typically trans the gender-roles and expressions only. If they just wear the clothes and nothing more i.e no feminine expression then they're more likely a transvestite. Yet all these are forms of trans- gender (except transsexual which is trans- sex).
Lawrence was only 15 and from what I gather was still finding himself and could of simply been experimenting with his gender-expression.. for all anyone knows he could of been transsexual or simply just transgendered. From the information provided it suggests he was transgendered (at least). Though I wouldn't want to speculate without having much much more info... though to be honest it doesn't bother me as much as knowing his killer will get to meet the ol' boys down the local prison showers.

The killer just might end up one of the prisoners doing the raping. He has already shown the ability to harm others.

Everyone assumes that rape in prison is not only justified in some cases, but also a given at all times.
You know who gets raped in prisons? The weaker smaller ones. The ones who have feminine attributes.
Basicaly the targets are those who are not prone to hurting others, those who are differant than the average thug in the joint.

This kid is unlikely to be sodomized in prison. But I do not doubt he will be doing the sodomizing latter on down the road.

Thanks for your response, Muffin.

It's my understanding that Lawrence King himself identified as gay, though if that's just an assumption, I'm happy to be corrected.

In retrospect, I maybe could have been clearer, but when I described King's behaviour as "an innocent gay teen's attempt to assert his blossoming sexuality," I was describing how the prosecution has portrayed him:

QuoteIt was a crime seemingly motivated by anti-gay hate. But was Larry gay, or was he transgendered?

Both the defense and the prosecutors agree that in 2008, 14-year-old McInerney, now 17, fired two shots into the head of Lawrence King, 15, in an Oxnard, CA, classroom. King died two days later. The prosecution says it was a hate crime, motivated by homophobic prejudice. The defense says it was manslaughter, not murder, an act committed out of "a heat of passion" because of Larry's alleged sexual aggression and harassment of McInerney.

To one side, the unusually effeminate and flamboyant behavior was just an innocent gay teen's attempt to assert his blossoming sexuality. To the other side, it was a flirtatious pursuit enough to drive McInerney to shoot him.

I was setting up those arguments so I could challenge them by asking whether King was gay or actually transgendered.

The reason I wrote the article was precisely because I'd noticed the media has uniformly described Larry as gay, where the way he dressed, the makeup he wore and his request to be called Leticia suggest his emerging identity may have been about his gender, rather than his sexuality. I have myself written other articles about or mentioning Larry King where I didn't question the assumption he was simply gay. So I wrote the article partly to express how my own assumptions had been challenged, too.

As regards the meaning of "transgender" and "cross-dressing" and how those two relate, aren't I right in thinking that your perspective is not a common way of looking at it? I've always understood ->-bleeped-<- to refer to people who believe their gender is other than that assigned at birth, where cross-dressing or transvestism refers to people who dress as the opposite sex but are content in their own sex. I was trying to make a distinction between them, hopefully to be sensitive to how most transgendered men and women perceive themselves. (And I avoided the word "transvestite," as I wasn't sure whether that was a term cross-dressers ever apply to themselves, or simply an outdated term with derisive connotations.)

Anyway, thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

Quote from: Dave Rattigan on July 11, 2011, 03:15:12 PM
The reason I wrote the article was precisely because I'd noticed the media has uniformly described Larry as gay, where the way he dressed, the makeup he wore and his request to be called Leticia suggest his emerging identity may have been about his gender, rather than his sexuality. I have myself written other articles about or mentioning Larry King where I didn't question the assumption he was simply gay. So I wrote the article partly to express how my own assumptions had been challenged, too.

Hi Dave,

Welcome to Susan's! Many thanks for writing your article and for joining our discussion here!

Most of the media reporting has represented Larry/Leticia as gay, however from the earliest reports I read, hir feminine gender expression was also often mentioned. While we will never know exactly how zie identified as zie isn't here to tell us, I would consider Larry/Leticia to have been murdered not only because of homophobia, but also transphobia. Thus, I think it's a valid question whether King actually transgendered.

Zythyra (News Admin)

Now that the conversation has been returned to a mature level, I feel better about posting - Thank you Zythyra

I also Thank Dave (The author of the article) for joining the conversation    Welcome to Susan's

I would tend to believe that the victim was transgendered and this is a hate crime against trans people... A also feel that the murderer should be tried as an adult and be committed to serve a life sentence

Bringing a gun to school and shooting another student twice in the head in a classroom is premeditated murder in my book

- Virginia