Last month, I was reading about a case in Colorado in which a transgender high school student was being harassed by a far right hate group from California. My first question was why would this group target a teenage girl in another state for what was essentially a hoax. Quickly I found this was a sickening attempt by the Pacific Justice Institute to launch a campaign to overturn a California law protecting trans* students. Worse, a Baltimore area lesbian lawyer with a history of trans-phobia was working with this anti-gay group and putting this child in danger. In fact, they’ve kept up the hate campaign against this girl, including posting videos to YouTube. See this recent article from Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/07/transphobic_youtube_video_fuels_debate_over_bathroom_bill_partner
I assumed the Southern Poverty Law Center would be tracking this case. After all, they have an LGBT program. There was a report on the wave of hate crime against transgender people in DC, but it was ten years old. Nothing on the recent wave last year. In fact, I learned, the SPLC does not have a transgender staff aware attorney so they often do not track any information concerning the transgender community. This puts the trans* community at a significant disadvantage as SPLC is not reporting on any level the violence and hate that is occurring against this marginalized group.
As I was asking these questions, I met Allison Woolbert, a trans* activist who is currently using KickStarter to fund a database to track crimes targeting trans-people. So, read the interview, then go here: http://www.transviolencetracker.com to support this effort.
Allison, what is the Trans* Violence Tracking Project?
The primary goal of this system is to track the violence against the transgender community. Now we have termed violence at this point to include murders, violence in general (ie; assaults, etc), suicides and missing persons. Those four areas will be the primary focus of our initial system that we hope to fund and build.
Why is this project important to the trans* community?
There are numerous reasons why this project is critical to the needs of the trans* community. For starters, we simply have no database or website that provides us with a location to centralize and track the violence that is committed against us every day. Without provable data, we can make many assertions that are unverifiable and therefore as a whole, not credible in proving the dire needs of our community for safety.
What is the difference in those who are murdered who are transgender?
The crimes against my people are very different than the average murder or assault. I can unequivocally say that the violence level is much higher in transgender murders and assaults. Take for example Sasha who was just set on fire on in November this year. Sasha was targeted as she was gender nonconforming in California where hate groups like the Pacific Justice Institute are fear mongering their state against transgender students concerning the bathroom bill ballot recall. I can’t remember the last time I heard about a youth being set on fire for their gender identity. However in my community, I wish I could say this level of violence is a rarity. Unfortunately, it seems to be the norm. In New Brunswick a few months ago, a young transwoman was stabbed 13 times in the neck. In Jamaica, earlier this year, a cross-dresser was at a dance- he was dismembered, the body burned and a few weeks later, the home where he lived was burned to the ground by a mob. I wish I could say that the sensation that is happening to my community is out of the ordinary. It’s simply not true- we are suffering at an unbearable rate.
Internationally, the situations are even more dire. In Brazil for example, the government is completely unable and unwilling to protect the transgender community. For the past two years, this country has had the highest reported murder rates of transgender people anywhere in the world. At one point within the last two years, every single advocate of the transgender community was murdered. The advocates themselves in some cases were not transgender. Without clear and concise data, going to places such as the United Nations becomes impossible. This project is international in scope. We plan on creating the portal where all nations can report the incidents of violence and can be gathered and highlighted at any point in time for reports or inquiries where it will make a difference.
What kinds of data will you track?
Some of the fields we plan to track are the basic demographic information of the individual, as much as can be gathered as well as many details as we can gather concerning the violence that happened to that individual or individuals. We will also be attempting to collect trial data including the perpetrators information, any key statements, the sentencing and following the case throughout the courts.
One of the more important areas we will be tracking is where no perpetrator has been located. The open cases that are occurring and how many in each police department are happening we believe are quite staggering. Our database website will provide us with insight as to which law enforcement agencies are potentially not protecting our transgender people as well as to insure that the FBI is monitoring the proper data necessary to derive the appropriate numbers as I clarify below.
What needs does it fulfill?
Much like many marginalized communities, evidence of wrongdoing is often pushed under the carpet, underreported and in some cases simply erased. My community needs a central location to be able to gather the information that is happening, have facts to gain accountability in law enforcement, the media and the justice system as well as provide a fact based case for the needs for protection of our people. Without this level of factual data, and without a growing awareness of what is happening, our community will continue to be marginalized with very little basis to bring about redressing the needs we have. This project is one small step in gathering information and providing it to those with a need to be able to clearly document what is happening.
What will the community gain by this project being developed?
I think there is a vast gain by our community in knowing what is happening on a daily basis in our communities and our world. Often, as a marginalized minority, we are unable to bring facts to bear about our lives and the devastation that transgender people experience. We often are unable to gain justice due to gender bias as well as blatant transphobia with law enforcement as well as the transphobia generated by religious organizations. My community needs a tool to begin the process and continue the process of educating not only law enforcement, but the government and the citizens as to the world that we live in today. I feel the ability to have facts that can raise awareness on a daily basis is crucial in gaining further understanding and in providing another platform from which others can gain insight into our lives.
I visited the FBI Hate Crime Statistics site a few days ago. There wasn’t a break out of hate crime against the trans* community. What’s up with that?
In the last few years, the FBI has been charged through the Matthew Shepard Hates Crime Prevention Act with providing reports on gender identity hate crimes starting in 2013. That data should start coming out sometime in the first or second quarter in 2014. Unfortunately, after working in some of the police data collections systems over my career, the systems aren’t established to accurately collect the required data. There are still the standard male/female check-boxes with no allowance for transgender as an option. This makes it virtually impossible for the FBI to accurate report the crimes against us. This leaves us at a severe disadvantage on a number of levels. The first level is the numbers are going to be severely underreported by a federal agency. That allows those who are anti-transgender to point at a falsely derived figure and make increasingly false claims against our community for the need for protections. Secondly, the numbers are only reporting hate crimes which leaves us at a distinct advantage given most states are refusing to prosecute crimes under the hate crimes statutes. That means that without a clear and concise provable record of the crimes against us, the default numbers produced by the FBI will falsely be the report that is utilized.
Tell me a little your story? Why is starting this project is important to you?
Since I have begun doing public speaking engagements and Transgender Day of Remembrance vigils over the past five years, the one area where our community has very little documented information available is the severe violence that happens against our community. We usually have to wait until November to truly get a sense of the overwhelming levels of violence that are perpetrated against us worldwide. Additionally, there isn’t a website or system where we are able to collect the information on the actual trials and outcomes once a perpetrator is charged. That leaves a serious gap in the level of information we can provide about if the sentencing was appropriate, or whether for example certain areas of the country are not serving justice but are administering gender bias and victim blaming.
These are important questions to answer and to follow. In some areas, law enforcement has refused to charge hate crime statutes against the murderers and those who assault a transgender person. They literally refuse to obey the law or apply the law strictly due to their own biases against our community. Without a system in place, we are unable to have any oversight of those who are charged with protecting us against the crimes committed. With the transgender violence tracking project, we have a tool that can help in demanding accountability of these organizations.
What is your background in being able to create this project and get it off the ground?
In 1983, I was privileged to become a Maintenance Statistical Analyst in the Air Force. It was a developing field that merged data analysis with some of the first computers in the aircraft maintenance units.
In 1995, I began Phoenix Consultants Group, a custom software development firm that continues to build software solutions for data storage and analysis internationally. We have developed and delivered hundreds of applications since that time from small databases to incredibly complex calculation engines and large data management systems for some of the largest corporations in the world. This particular system is fairly straight forward with very little complexities within the programming. Given our background in building such data applications, we are in a great position to create the software and implement it long term for the community.
Thank you, Allison, for giving your time, both here and in developing this needed resource.
So, go to: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1280267427/transgender-murder-violence-and-suicide-website and support this effort today!
The post Interview with Allison Woolbert of the Trans* Violence Tracking Project appeared first on The Political Garbage Chute.