#anti-trans violence

[aliceundrground]

Semi related to my posts earlier but kind of a tangent. This is messy but its something that's been eating at me and I don't really know how to move forward.

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. There are many names we know and mourn, but there are many more that are never seen. Many names are missing because they could not be acknowledged as their true selves after, or before, their deaths.

The thing that's been bothering me is that the lists most groups will consult, these missing names include those lost to suicide. Known cases of trans people, often young people, are being left out of these lists. Their deaths are not considered part of "the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence".

Every trans suicide is a murder.

Its not a coincidence that minorities have higher rates of suicide. Its the way we are treated, our quality of life, that most influences these statistics. I have seen news of at least one case, a trans man in Alberta, who committed suicide explicitly because of the anti-trans policies his province was set to enact.

Ive seen dozens of articles. I've seen a trans masc's instagram, where the most recent comments are from their friends. On a post where they were celebrating starting hrt, the most recent comment is mourning their loss, that they didn't live to complete their first year on T. I've looked at their posts, I've read their words, I've seen their smile. And they're gone.

Their name was Bekett Noble. They deserve to be remembered.

There's dozens of people each year who share thier experiences and go unnamed. The young man in Alberta, for example, was not named publicly in the article where his death was mentioned. Due to a family connection, I know of at least one instance of a murder of a trans man in western Canada that I have not seen any news of publicly at all. His body was found with his genitals mutilated.

There's many half formed things I could say about these lists when it comes to trans men and mascs specifically but I don't feel my thoughts are solidified enough and it's not what I want to focus on here.

I believe trans suicides should be part of these Remembrance lists. Its a disservice to our community that they aren't.

If you can, please use the site below. They have a database going back decades with a well implemented filtering system.

These are the known deaths of trans people in Canada since last year's TDoR. Each name links to a page of information about them and links to where the information was sourced.

As for many things, these lists are a community effort. If you see that a death you know of is missing from the list, please contact them with whatever information you have. The second entry, whose name is still unknown, was added after I contacted them and provided the article in which I'd learned of his death. Since then, the folks running the site have done additional research and added what they could to his info page, including an extensive statement from his aunt, whom he was close to.

This past September, The Trevor Project published a report:

From 2018 to 2022, 48 anti-transgender laws were enacted in the U.S. across 19 different state governments. The study examined the causal relationship between these laws and suicide risk over this five-year time period, using national survey data collected from more than 61,000 transgender and nonbinary youth. Results concluded that, during this time period, anti-transgender laws significantly increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%.

[...] Across the full sample of transgender and nonbinary young people ages 13-24, an increase in suicide attempt rates of 38% to 44% was observed.

- The Trevor Project

Every trans suicide is a murder.

There will always be missing names on these lists. I don't believe that known instances of trans suicides should be excluded from them. They deserve to be remembered.

[feckcops]

Police refused to label Brianna Ghey’s murder a hate crime. Why?

“In the hours after her murder, Cheshire police chief superintendent Mike Evans said her killing wasn’t a ‘hate crime’, pointing to the existence of the kill list as evidence. ‘I think if it hadn’t been Brianna, it would have been one of the other four children on that list,’ he said. ‘Brianna was the one who was accessible at that time, and then became the focus of those desires.’ At the subsequent trial, presiding judge Mrs Justice Amanda Yip also gestured towards online discussions of transphobia as a possible factor in the crime, telling potential jurors to discard ‘uninformed views’ about Brianna’s murder.

“This is a profound mistake. Brianna Ghey’s murder sits at the intersection of several social issues facing us in Britain today. 

“It’s a crime committed by desensitised children, numbed to the magnitude of their actions via consumption of violent content and the detachment enabled by digital-first communication. It’s another sad entry in the logbook memorialising the women and girls who’ve fallen victim to an epidemic of gender-based violence. And it’s an example of the extra vulnerability engendered upon trans people, particularly trans women and girls, by a climate of transphobia that has now seeped from mainstream politics into the schools and playgrounds.

“Messages swapped between the two killers reveal Brianna’s gender identity to be a prominent theme of conversation. Boy Y ‘didn’t agree’ with trans and gay people, testified his co-defendant. In texts, he referred to Brianna as ‘it’ and called her slurs. Meanwhile, Girl X spoke of an ‘obsession’ she had with Brianna, pairing praise for her beauty with reference to her genitals.  

“‘I think it’s quite clear that dehumanisation and fetishisation played a part in the psychosexual way in which they plotted this very, very violent murder,‘ says Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue.

“Brianna, Faye adds, was targeted as a victim because she was anxious and therefore vulnerable – something that Faye says is ‘very common among trans kids of her age. Yes, it might not be the sole motivating factor, that Brianna was trans,’ she explains. ‘But she was selected, or more vulnerable to being selected for this terrible crime because she was trans. Mainstream reporting […] reduces the inflection of transphobia on the whole thing.’

“Cross-examination during the trial of Girl X and Boy Y revealed that all other potential victims on their kill list were identified because one party had a personal grudge against them. Brianna was the exception. She was singled out because Girl X – who had struck up a friendship with Brianna the previous year – found her ‘really interesting’.”

[a-gay-poptart]

I have found the best ally

Straight and cis people will say that they are allies, but you will NEVER measure up to my dentist.

Me: "Hey, is it ok if I can change my name on my info from [DEADNAME] to Aspen?"

Random woman that I wasn't even talking to in the chair next to me: "Honey, if that's the name you had at birth, [DEADNAME] is your only name."

My dentist, very slowly turning her rolley chair towards the woman: "Shush."

Random woman: "Excuse me?"

Destist: *closes privacy curtain while staring bullets at the lady*

Me: *pissing myself laughing*

My dentist while changing my name in my info (reminder that English is not her first language, she immigrated from Russia): "There, Aspen, you have pretty boy teeth. Smile and make all girls swoon."

Me not having the heart to tell her I'm not transmasc but I'm Agender, and still pissing myself laughing: "Thank you [DENTIST NAME]."

Edit: Ok, this has gotten alot of attention, but right now my other posts is what really needs attention. I have a few fundraisers for people trying to evacuate Palestine and Gaza, but also a diabetic who needs her insulin shot. Please please please, go to my page and at the very least repost those posts, have the day you deserve and free Palestine🇵🇸

[b33viemm]

WE ARE NOT FOUND DEAD, WE DO NOT PASS AWAY UNEXPECTEDLY, WE ARE NOT JUST BULLIED. WE ARE ATTACKED AND MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD BY HATEFUL BIGOTS THAT ARE ENABLED BY THE TERRORIST RUN LEGISLATION.

edit: ID in alt

[qurbanjaan]

My experience and personal view on veiling as someone who grew up under a Burqa

When I was born, my father didn’t want me because I was a girl. When a girl is born, she isn’t cherished like a boy. Your life is received as a deadweight (note: I’m not saying this is something that happens every single time, just most of them) and a disappointment by the family. When your first breath comes in, the honor is on your shoulders.

My parents were so disappointed they gave me up to my aunt and uncle until I was one year old. When I was three, my father tried to sell/promise me into marriage. My grandmother, his mother, was the one who intervened and stopped him from doing it.

As I grew up, I noticed clear differences between me and girls from less conservative families, but everything was relatively normal until I hit nine years old. When it happened, I suddenly stopped traveling with my parents, stopped being able to leave the curtains open, couldn’t wear the clothes I used to wear even though I was still a child… as I grew older and older, the restrictions increased as my uncle and my father said I was becoming a beautiful woman and “I would be a problem for their family”.

Then, when I noticed, I wasn’t allowed to appear on windows, get packages from the mailman, go out in the yard, have a phone, stay alone in my room, talk to men (even if it was something as trivial as buying groceries), going out alone, needing to looking down when men walk past you, stay in your room when there’s visitors and don’t make a noise so they can’t hear you, not speak too loudly either, not share your name… the list is endless.

And, when you grow up inside a such conservative, traditional and religious family, your only future is disappearing. Along with having no voice and no face, servitude is as inescapable as death.

When you’re under a piece of cloth, you become faceless, you have no identity of your own. Outside the house, you’re a ghost. Inside the house, you’re a servant. You have no choice over yourself. This is your identity, a servant ghost who’s screams people pretend not to hear.

To a certain level, when you try to reflect on it, the veiling can be comforting. Being invisible can be comforting, no one sees you, you don’t need to worry about a thing. You can hide all your thoughts and most shameful actions from the daylight and no one is going to find out about them. But, when you are under the veil, your identity becomes something only you know about. To the rest of the world, you don’t exist, you’re not human. The veil will slowly dehumanize you, you will start fading away and there’s nothing you can do about it because how can someone attribute a face to a piece of fabric with a mesh on eye level?

And don’t fool yourself, the longer you keep your veil on, the harder the expectations will be. You may only need to cover now, but in some time, they will ask you why are your toes showing and why are you not hiding your hands behind the veil too, and why are you even outside your house? You should be home, protecting your family’s honor, you’re disgracing your family, go home.

And you may think “I’m invisible to the outside world but in my house I’m irreplaceable”, are you? How irreplaceable will you be when a younger, better wife comes in and the only safety you may have is the idea that your children will grow up to take care of you? How would someone possibly feel bad for you when you are nothing but a black trashbag? If you become a beggar, how will they see the suffering on your face if it will be covered and hidden away from the world?

I can’t be hypocritical and say that I don’t feel a sense of security under the veil, but it’s a false sense of security. When the time for your death comes, you won’t have your name on your grave, you won’t have a face. All you will ever have been is a servant, invisible to the outside world, with no God above to wonder “what about her?”. How dear are you inside those walls?

[punkspacepirate]

SHOUT IT

SAY HIS NAME: Nex Benedict, another 16 YEAR OLD was murdered in Oklahoma, news channels are deadnaming and misgendering him, just like with Brianna Ghey here in the UK. But I urge you to not let your grief drive you to despair. GET ANGRY. Do not become apathetic, do not let grief numb you. Stand united as a community, lean on each other, have each others back. Reach out to any trans individuals of any age and make sure they have support in some capacity. Speak with your family, your political representatives, your school, anywhere, with anyone, that may be able to make some change, whether big or small. Everything builds, that is the power of a movement, of solidarity. If you make life a bit safer for one trans youth once, then you may have saved their life that day. And that kid might then show some other kid that there is hope, and so they live as well. And it grows.

Fly high Nex.

[lenbryant]

Yes, and also...chilling. Trans people are the favorite target of their redneck violence in real life and their sick fantasies.

Republicans are getting more fragile. They are unable to defend their rhetoric. They have destroyed compromise. Everything is zero sum.

When they can't control, they go violent.

[lycandrophile]

i absolutely cannot believe people are trying to start discourse about whether nex benedict was actually nonbinary / whether it was okay for him to describe himself as nonbinary to some people if he didn’t actually identify that way as if he isn’t literally DEAD because he was KILLED. this is a MURDERED CHILD and these monsters are so busy getting mad at the possibility that he might have been a trans boy who described himself as nonbinary to his family because that was easier for them to take that they’re turning a CHILD who was MURDERED into fucking discourse. even when we die at the hands of cis people’s violence, our own community finds a way to make us the villains of the story.

and all of this bullshit on top of the ways that cis people are already trying to say our grief over his death is unjustified. all of this on top of people claiming he wasn’t murdered and speculating on other causes of death (i literally saw someone say he “clearly went home and took the coward’s way out” and i have never been more disgusted) or claiming that he started the fight as if any action on his part could’ve been enough to justify his death. i am haunted by the sound of his father screaming that his child was not filth because that is what people have been saying about this poor kid, that’s how cruelly his memory is being treated, and even the trans community can’t get it’s shit together enough to look past the stupid discourse and see the tragedy in front of us. did you all forget that it was supposed to be up to us to grieve him in the way he deserves when the rest of the world fails to care if people like him live or die? did you all forget that this child was our sibling, the future of our community, a life that we should have had the chance to know and treasure while he was still here but that we now have a responsibility to hold close to our hearts in his absence? nex’s life was precious and it was ended far too soon and if you truly believe that anything is more important than mourning his life and fighting for a world where no more trans people have to meet such an awful fate, you’re a traitor to this community and you do not deserve the place you occupy within it.

i’m so tired. i can’t even imagine how tired his family must be, to see the public treat the child they’re grieving so horribly, to see the world fail their baby again. leave him alone. he was already robbed of peace in life; the least you can do is let him finally have it in death.

[tigerrsmn]

"Say their name!"

Call and response at the Twin Cities vigil for Nex Benedict, organized by Thomas Edison High Gender and Sexuality Alliance.

[It is important to say their name. What’s their name?

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!

Say their name.

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!

Say their name.

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!]

[samwisethewitch]

Hey. If you are legally married to an abusive partner. If you believe your legal spouse will become abusive in the future. If you feel at all unsafe with your spouse. Or even if you are thinking of ending the marriage for a totally mundane reason:

Start taking steps to divorce them NOW.

I'm not saying you should leave now without a plan. Having a safety plan is still important. Having support people who can help you leave safely is still important. Keeping yourself safe is still important. But if you've been thinking about leaving or have been making plans, you may want to move up your timeline.

No-fault divorce may be one of the things on the chopping block under Tr*mp's new regime. For those who don't know, these are the laws that allow couples to divorce even if no one is "at fault" for the failure of the marriage. This made it much easier to get a divorce in the USA, and made it easier and safer for victims of domestic violence to leave their abusers. Conservatives want to return to a fault divorce system, which would require the person filing for divorce to prove their spouse wronged them in some way, such as by having an affair.

TLDR: M*GA wants to make it harder to get a divorce, which is going to trap people in unsafe marriages.

If you are married to an abusive partner, or even to partner you just don't want to be with, I encourage you to file for divorce as soon as possible. ESPECIALLY if you are a woman or femme. Get out now, while it's relatively easy and simple to do so.

If you're scared of how your spouse will react to being left, contact your local domestic violence org and ask for someone to help you make a safety plan. These are trained professionals who can help you get out safely.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but what little government aid does exist for American DV survivors right now is probably going to lose funding or be shut down entirely in conservative areas. Just another reason it's a good idea to leave now if at all possible.

(Disclaimer: I am not an expert on politics, but I AM someone who has worked in domestic violence and sexual assault response and who has read what actual expert political analysts have written about Tr*mp and Pr*ject 2025.)

[remma-demma]

I’m actually scared of alienating some of my followers and moots with all the trans discourse I’ve been steeping quietly in and contemplating, but… I’m trying to not let being scared shut me up about this. That, in and of itself, is erasure and silencing.

Fuck staying quiet. Trans men and mascs deserve a voice, and we, as a group, are not oppressing or invalidating anyone else by using that voice. (Obviously there are shithead exceptions!! Anyone can be an asshole.)

I really hope that if I ever speak about any of this in the future, that people recognize that it’s not ever, ever trans femininity as a concept I have an issue with. It’s people who

- try to divide the community

- are reinventing gender essentialism from the ground up but make it trans

-police other people’s identities and decide for them what oppression they must face because of a tiny set of superficial traits

- simply. Don’t understand what intersectionality means.

- disregard and invalidate anyone who doesn’t fit a very specific (binary, rich, white, abled, flawlessly passing) idea of what it means to be trans.

None of those things are specific or exclusive to one identity. There just happens to be a community of transfems who are currently espousing many of these ideas as gospel. They are understandably defensive because of real actual transmisogyny they face. But other trans people are not your enemy. Accusing anyone and everyone who tries to point these flaws out as radical transmisogynists is simply not true. Pointing out bigotry is not bigotry in itself.

I don’t want the trans community to constantly be at each other’s throats. We each have to sit down and think if we ever catch ourselves blaming an entire other marginalized group for our issues. That’s just fascism babes.

[mikasasrippedtoenail]

Long nails are proof that women's beauty standards have always focused on frailty, rejecting any physical prowess exuded by women. Defining feminity with fragility connotations dissuades women from gaining strength and fighting for themselves. Long hair, Long nails and underweight bodies are all physically uncomfortable- they prevent the wearer from fighting back. Even when women excercise, it is focused on maintaining an aesthetic instead of gaining strength. Men are afraid of what we are capable of so they try their very best to suppress us.

[qurbanjaan]

When will European and North American women stop caring more about being perceived as racist instead of helping their sisters that endure abuse in their homelands? I couldn’t care less if an afghan male calls you racist and you shouldn’t either. He probably beats his wife, as 90% of afghan women report suffering domestic violence. We should care about each other, he would do the same to you and so would (and they do) every European and North American male if they had the chance. Women need to unite and stop caring about men’s feelings. They will never care or protect us, no matter where they are from.

[bogbutteronmycroissant]

For those who don't know, Nex Benedict, an American indigenous non-binary 16 years old, died in February 8. And I said died, but they were murdered: they passed away the day after three girls (whose names are still kept hidden) attacked them and their friends in the bathroom of the Owasso high school in Oklahoma. They were beated, insulted, and possibly suffered serious damage in the face and head. The next day, they collapsed and was declared dead at the hospital.

The school did and has done nothing. The teachers have done nothing. The police has done nothing. A kid died and the world stays silent. If Nex hadn't been indigenous or non-binary, then the whole country would have turned upside down.

Trans people deserve to live. Non-binary people deserve to live. Indigenous people deserve to live.

One of my close childhood friends is trans. He's also forced to go to the women's bathroom. Will he be the next victim? Who else will have to suffer for us to learn? When will justice be served?

We won't forget, Nex, and we won't forgive.