Anti-Transgender Violence: How Hate-Crime Laws Have Failed

On the morning of June 5, 2011, a 23-year-old African-American transgender woman, Chrishaun McDonald, and her friends were walking down Lake Street in Minneapolis. As they passed Schooner Tavern, Dean Schmitz, a 47-year-old white man, began shouting racial slurs at McDonald, asking, "Did you think you were going to rape somebody in those girl clothes?" Schmitz and two other bar patrons then attacked McDonald.

During the attack, glass was smashed into McDonald's face and Schmitz was killed. McDonald was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

The details of what happened are still not clear. However, considering the widespread discrimination, harassment and violence that transgender people face every day in the United States, McDonald and her friends had ample reason to fear that Schmitz's attack could lead to serious injury, if not death. A recent report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that 50 percent of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) murders in 2009 and 44 percent of LGBT murders in 2010 were of transgender women. This year, does not seem to be a safer year for transgender people either:

In January 2011, in Minneapolis, a transgender woman named Krissy Bates was strangled and then stabbed to death by her new boyfriend.

In February, the body of an African-American transgender woman, Tyra Trent, was found in an abandoned house in Baltimore.

In April, Chrissy Lee Polis, a 22-year-old white transgender woman, was brutally beaten by two black teenage girls at a McDonald's in Baltimore, Maryland. The vicious attack made news only because an employee filmed and posted it online. The video captured not only the assault, but the lack of intervention from both employees and other patrons. While the attack on Polis may not have been fully motivated by her gender identity, bystanders' unwillingness to intervene was.

Given these recent attacks and the lack of public outcry, or even sympathy, one can understand why McDonald and her friends feared for her life when attacked that morning.

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