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By Erline Andrews
Thursday, February 21, 2008
“Fooled john stabbed Bronx tranny.” That was a Feb. 10 headline in The New York Daily News.
Harsh, on many levels.
Like many other transgender activists, June Brown was outraged by the reporting on the death of 25-year-old Bronx resident Sanesha Stewart. (After the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation—GLAAD—complained, the paper changed its online headline.)
Although the Daily News reported that “police sources” said Stewart was a prostitute, it also reported that her neighbors in the Belmont apartment building where she lived did not confirm this. An NYPD spokesperson said Stewart and suspect Steve McMillan were in a “known-to-each-other relationship.”
The Daily News did not return phone calls for this story.
The Stewart case is the latest example, transgender advocates say, of a society and media that remain insensitive to transgender issues.
“It’s not even sensationalism; it’s blatant disrespect,” said Brown, communications coordinator at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a transgender advocacy group. “I just feel had it been anyone else, it would not have been covered in the way it had been covered.” She describes most of the media images of transgender people “extremely disturbing,” “disgusting” and “unacceptable.”
Brown’s sentiments were echoed across the Internet mediasphere last week, following the publication of the story, which used Stewart’s masculine birth name even though she had it legally changed, referred to her by male pronouns, and went into detail about Stewart’s clothes and her cosmetic surgeries. It quoted “sources” as saying McMillan killed Stewart because he supposedly discovered she wasn’t a woman.
“Business as usual,” wrote “Holly,” one of the bloggers on Feministe, “is to make a lot of comments about what the murder victim dressed like and looked like, reveal what her name was before she changed it, automatically assume she’s getting paid for sex, and to make excuses for the alleged killer.”
The story touched nerves among a group of people who are vulnerable to violence because of transphobia.
The media can stir the pot of transphobia, say advocates, and fuel persistent misconceptions about transgender people.
“It’s either we’re victims of violence or we’re sex workers or we’re ‘tricking’ people because this is not our true gender,” Brown said.
She acknowledges that transgender people are at-risk of being victims of violence but adds that transgender lives also cut across a broad spectrum rarely explored by mainstream broadcast and print outlets.
“We’re students,” she said. “Some of us are parents. We’re in non-profits. We’re activists. We’re fashion designers. We’re everything. We’re everywhere. But I think people are so hung up on the negative because that’s all that there is being put out there by the media.”
Trishala Deb, of the Brooklyn-based LGBT non-profit the Audre Lorde Project, calls the persistence of the idea, evident in the Daily News story, that transgender woman are men pretending to be women, “painful and misguided.”
“Our belief is that there are more than two genders,” said Deb. “All people have the ability and the right to self-determine and identify our own gender identity. If Sanesha defined herself as a woman, then she was a woman no matter what she looked like.”
Deb advised the Daily News and other media organizations to seek help in improving their reporting on stories involving transgender people.
“There are hundreds of resources available in terms of community organizations in New York City,” she said.
She offered some basic tips for writing about and discussing transgender people.
“We never use the term ‘transgenders.’ We talk about ‘transgender people,’ ” she said. “We feel folks that are trans might use the word ‘tranny,’ but if we are not trans-identified we don’t use the word ‘tranny.’ ”
The NYPD wasn’t spared criticism for its treatment of the Stewart case and transgender women.
“The NYPD assumes that almost any young Black or Latina trans woman walking around on the street, or going into an apartment building with a guy, is getting paid for sex work,” wrote Holly. “Profiling is constant; women have been arrested around here simply for having a gathering in someone’s apartment. Apparently it’s too suspicious.”
NYPD spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Hayes defended the organization’s handling of Stewart’s case and others involving transgender people. NYPD officers are trained to be sensitive to “different ethnic groups, genders, religions, more so here than anywhere else in the world,” he said.
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