Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay

Compiled and arranged from the “Remarks” section of Transphobia vs. Transrespect research project (2014) “Trans Murder Monitoring results: TMM TDOR 2014 Update.”

Brunete was beaten to death with a stick. The victim was shot by two men on a motorcycle in front of a motel. The victim was shot in the head. The suspected murderer is a former military police man. A neighbor heard the victim scream at night and saw two men walking out of the victim’s room but could not remember their faces. The case is under investigation. The victim was found tied to a chair with multiple stab wounds in her abdomen. Police reported that the trans person was well known and admired and murdered by her lover with 7 stabs. A 14 year-old trans person was found strangled. The victim was stabbed 8 times. The victim was shot by a man on a motorbike. The victim was shot two times by two men on a motorbike. The victim was found in a lake. She was a Romani person. The body of the victim was found handcuffed. The body of the victim was found dismembered. The body of the victim was found handcuffed. The victim was a person of colour. The undignified way her burned body was dumped in a trash bin indicates transgender hostility. Rosa was a person of colour and of Indonesian descent. Police is investigating a possible hate crime. Police is investigating the crime as a possible homophobic hate crime. Alondra was a person of colour. Police suspect that more than one person was involved in what they describe as a barbaric murder. The victim was slaughtered, beaten and stoned; the corpse was found half naked in a wasteland. The face of the victim was smashed by the client with a stone after having sexual intercourse. The victim’s body was found with tied hands in plastic bag on the road. Investigations revealed that several cars had run over the corpse. Noe Lopez was attacked at a sex worker’s place, forced into a vehicle by a group of armed men wearing bulletproof vests and balaclavas. Amnesty International see this murder in connection with a series of murders of sex workers in San Pedro Sula. The note in the newspaper reports that the homicide is the product of insecurity and violence lived in the city. Sanchez was on her way to a party dressed in a skirt, when she was attacked by two men who stabbed her to death. Belizean LGBT NGO UNIBAM called the murder a hate-crime. Sanchez had been harassed and received death threats before in the days leading to her murder. The victim was killed with an axe after having a dispute with a young man in a bar. Witnesses reported that the victim was verbally assaulted and later shot. The victim was set on fire by four persons, and died from burn injuries in a hospital. Buxexa was a person of color. The body of the victim showed signs of torture. The police believe that the murder took place because the victim was a trans person. Strangers shot towards the victim’s house, causing her death. According to a newspaper report the victim was tortured and beaten to death by a lawmaker and four of his assistants accusing the victim of theft of a mobile phone. The murder is described as a barbaric crime. The victim was dismembered and her face totally destroyed with a knife. The victim was killed by a 14 year-old minor. The police is investigating the crime as a possible hate crime as this is the second stabbing of a trans person within one month and under similar circumstances. The victim was beaten to death by a group of people and found hanged. The victim was a person of color. Raissa was shot six times on the head and thorax. The victim was using a public phone when she was shot to death with 10 shots by two men on a motorbike. Denise was tortured with the peak of a bottle. The victim was stabbed 11 times. She was attacked by a man in a group of 5 men. The murderer claimed that the victim criticized on his unimpressive sex they just had. He was angry and then beat her with a hardwood and stole her valuables. The victim was found wrapped in a black plastic bag. The NGO Red Umbrella reports that Sevda’s murderer was her boyfriend, who fled to Serbia from where he called the police and confessed the murder. Police reports that the murder was the result of fights between trans people. “Alex”, an 8 year-old child moved six months ago to Rio de Janeiro to live with the father. The father has beaten the child to death to “teach him to behave like a man”, as the child did belly-dancing, wore female clothing, and loved dish-washing. Camila was executed with 15 shots. CCTV footage shows how a trans sex worker is approached by a man sitting in a car and then shot from the inside of the car. The victim was stabbed to death and her personal belongings were stolen such as her laptop computer. The murderer is still unknown and the case is under investigation. The victim’s body showed signs of torture. Andressa was attacked by several persons at a cemetery and stabbed 15 times. Rose Maria was stabbed 12 times. The murder happened several weeks after the implementation of the so-called Anti-Gay-Bill in Uganda. Queen, a trans sex worker, has been attacked by a guy, whom her friends believe she met at a bar. During the attack she called her friends by phone saying “the guy is beating me, the guy is killing me.” She was found later by her friends with severe wounds and signs of torture (cuts from a bottle on her body and in her anus). Queen was hospitalized and died several days later. Coco was a well-known drag queen. The victim’s body was thrown to the street, allegedly the police saw the event and did not intervene. Vanessa received death threats before she was murdered. Paulete was executed with 15 shots, when she approached a client in a car at night. The murder was reported as homophobic hate murder. Dani was beaten in the face, before she was shot to death. Parts of the body of the victim have been found in different garbage bags at a cemetery. The skin of the torso was torn off. The suspect is a special force police officer, who wanted to pay less for a service and killed Jade Esmeralda inside his car, when she didn’t agree. Giovana was a person of color. The victim was found stabbed to death in her condominium unit. The victim was beaten to death by a group of people in the middle of a street at night. The victim was hit in the head. Giovanna was stabbed 11 times. The victim presented stabs all around the body. She was murdered by two clients in her own apartment due to an argument over the price for the sexual service. The victims body showed signs of physical violence and was hit on the head. The victims body showed multiple wounds on its body. The victim was stoned. Nicole was shot five times in the head. The victim was found stabbed four times and her body was burned. The victim was a person of color. The arrested suspect offended Jenifer and two other trans women who were sex workers. Later he returned with another man in a car and stabbed Jenifer to death. The victim was a person of color. She was shot by two men. The victim was found tied up and showed signs of torture, with her face burnt on purpose. Marcia was executed with a shot in the head. The victim’s body was found in a pit and showed signs of torture, plus a shot to the head. Other bodies were found in the pit. The victim was a person of color. The victim was found tied with multiple stab wounds and with her genitals exposed. The victim was a person of color. Shayara was found beaten to death with a stick on a hill in Rio de Janeiro in the morning. A news magazine reported that she provided sexual services to a policeman the night before. The victim was a person of color. She was found burned behind a garbage bin. The victim was a person of color. The victim was raped before she was beaten to death with a stick. The victim’s body was beaten multiples time on the face. The suspected murderer strangled Kellen and threw her body into the swimming pool of the hotel. Makelly was found naked and with signs of hanging. Police is searching for a man who is chasing and killing trans persons. Two men in a car approached Dennysi and shot four times at her. Dafine was walking in the street with another trans person, when two men on a motorbike approached them and shot Dafine to death. They also tried to shoot the other trans person, but failed. The victim was having a drink in a bar, when two men on motorcycles passed by and shot her in the head. The victim was suffocated with a plastic bag. The victim’s body was found with both hands and feet tied-up. The victim was stabbed 15 times. The victim’s body was found in female underwear and as a newspaper reports “without eyes.” Two other trans women in Detroit were shot within days of the murder inside Palmer Park. Geovana was stabbed 6 times. The victim was found inside of her own apartment. The suspected murderer had an argument with Alexandra in the street and shot her in the back only steps away from her home. Karen was seriously injured and thrown out of a moving car by a client. Cris was shot 4 times by a man passing by in a car. The Police affirm that the victim was raped before being killed. The victim was walking with another person and was stoned, causing her to die. The victim’s body was found in her apartment. Her body presented 18 stab wounds. Mahadevi was impaired and pushed out of a moving train by two adolescents. It seems to be that the aggressors harassed the victim, who tried to hide, but they killed her with a shotgun. Bili was standing with two other trans people near a bus stand, when a man namely Raja started misbehaving with Bili and got annoyed and stabbed and injured her. Bili died in the hospital. The body of the victim was found floating in a creek. Bruna was shot by a man on a motorbike, when talking with a client in front of a motel. A local LGBT NGO speculates that the motive could have been “transmisogyny.”

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Torrey Peters is an editor at Topside Press, which publishes the work of transgender writers. Her work has been published in Epoch, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Gawker, The Pinch, and elsewhere. For this essay, the standard honorarium paid by Brevity has been donated to the Trans Women Of Color Collective.  See the work TWOCC is doing at: http://www.twocc.us

Photo by Dinty W. Moore