Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:20:20 -0800
From: Clare Howell <clareq@idt.net>
Subject: GenderPAC Editorial

MEDIA ADVISORY - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Editorial from GenderPAC's Executive Director:
==============================================

It is at once sobering and heartening to see straight news
media finally giving gay hate crimes the serious attention
and space they deserve. Even the New York Times has weighed
in with repeated editorials on the vicious murders of Matthew
Shepard and now Billy Jack Gaither. The gay press, of course,
is filled with these stories; the HRC webpage opens with
Billy Gaither's terrible murder.

        I used to explain to college audiences and Congress-
members alike that every four or five months another fairly
straightforward, unambiguous gender hate crime occurs. Awful 
as that figure is, I didn't know how good we had it.

        Rita Hester in Boston, Chanel Chandler in California, 
Steve Dwayne Garcia and Jane Doe in Houston, Lauryn Paige in 
Austin, Fitzroy Green in New York, Vianna Faye Williams in 
Jersey City, and Tasha Dunn in Tampa... We are now averaging 
one gender-murder every month. Simply put, in the last half-
year, this country has turned into a meat-grinder.

        Where are the voices crying out against the murders 
of these people? Is it that the violence done to Rita Hester 
or the sadistic torture and murder of Lauryn Paige are less 
horrific? Is it that the hatred which impelled the killer of 
Tasha Dunn to, in the words of the police, beat her to her 
last breath any less virulent and profound?

        Or is it that when a hate crime occurs based on race, 
or religion, and now, at last, on sexual orientation, 
reasonable people can reasonably hope that voices will be 
raised in protest? But are six murders, or sixty murders, 
that occur based on gender rendered mute and invisible 
because certain kinds of bodies and certain kinds of hate 
don't matter as much? Within the queer community and 
certainly within the straight press, we are disposable 
people.

        How many of us will need to die violently, alone, 
and in terrible pain before our press, our leaders, and our
organizations speak out? Perhaps they never will speak out, 
and some of us will continue to pay for being gender-different 
with our lives.

        It is ironic that GenderPAC's National Survey of 
TransViolence reveals that the most common epithet used 
when we are bashed is "faggot." Transpeople are targeted 
because of the perception that we are gay. And gays are 
often picked out because they are "visibly queer," that 
is, because they are gender-different.

        But the fine-line distinctions we draw to populate 
and protect the divisions among us--between orientation and 
gender or between gay and queer or between you and me--are 
lost upon those who stalk and prey upon us. We are all at 
risk, even if only some of us count. 

        -- Riki Anne Wilchins
                
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