The report of a homicide prepared by police included basic facts: the gender of the deceased. The name. The sort of basic information that would comprise any police report, that would be expected of any police report. And yet, it’s not only the subject of controversy, but outrage. What could possibly make the recording of facts so very wrong?
Laverne Cox says she “sobbed and wept” after reading a new report from ProPublica about multiple transgender murder victims who were repeatedly misgendered by the police departments and agencies charged with working the cases.
Cox said the lack of policies in place to ensure transgender murder victims’ gender identities are respected was an “injustice on top of injustice.”
The complaint is twofold. First, that the deceased is “misgendered,” such as a transgender female will be noted as a male based on biological attributes. The second is that the police will “deadname” the transgender victim, using the person’s legal name rather than the name by which they preferred to be known. ProPublica found this practice to be pervasive.
Studies show that transgender women are disproportionately likely to be victims of violent crime, not just in Jacksonville, but nationwide. Yet most local law enforcement agencies persist in handling these cases much like the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, or JSO.
There are reasons why this is the case, which are well known but rarely mentioned as the reasons are controversial as well and deemed offensive. Denying the reasons has done nothing to save people’s lives, but political correctness is apparently more important the survival.
Across the nation, ProPublica found, some 65 different law enforcement agencies have investigated murders of transgender people since Jan. 1, 2015. And in 74 of 85 cases, victims were identified by names or genders they had abandoned in their daily lives. Our survey found that arrests have been made in 55 percent of the killings of transgender people nationwide in the last three and a half years. The overall clearance rate for murders in the U.S. is only slightly higher, at 59 percent.
Clearance rates for homicides are relatively poor for everyone. Cops aren’t nearly as good at investigating as TV shows would suggest. In the murders of transgender people, they’re slightly worse. 55% rather than 59%. This minor difference might be easily explained by the circumstances surrounding the murders, but advocates chalk it up to misgendering and deadnaming.
Advocates say that not using the name and pronoun a person was known by can slow down an investigation during its most critical hours. People who knew the victim or who saw them in the hours before they were murdered might only have known them by their preferred name and gender.
“If Susie is murdered, don’t use ‘Sam,’” said Monica Roberts, an activist and journalist who tracks murders of transgender people. Roberts worries that deadnaming both prevents the community from identifying victims and fosters mistrust of police.
It would seem to be a matter of sound investigation to seek information using the most effective tools, such as using the name with which people would be most likely to recognize in the course of investigating a murder. But the issue extends beyond the police seeking to investigate a murder into police “respecting” the victim’s transgender identity.
In investigating the murders of Walker, English and James, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office says it has just followed its policy, which is to identify people based on a medical examiner’s report and whatever name and sex are listed on their state identification.
After Walker’s death, the sheriff’s office referred to her in reports and public statements as a man and released a male name to the media, one she hadn’t used in years. Friends and activists called the agency, asking officers to respect Walker and use her chosen name, but say they were told that wasn’t how the agency handled such cases.
While it may seem “respectful,” to use a person’s preferred name rather than “whatever name and sex are listed on their state identification,” it raises significant issues as well. An autopsy report that lists the deceased as female, because that was her preferred gender, when the person was biologically a male, would raise bizarre issues at trial as to the accuracy of the autopsy.
There would be questions about whether the deceased was “out” to family and friends outside the transgender community. How long would a transgender person have to identify as transgender or use a fictitious* name before the police would adopt it as the official name for reporting purposes?
What if the person changed names, since there’s no reason their preference couldn’t change from time to time as they decided a different name was more to their liking? There’s nothing wrong, per se, with wanting to be known by a name other than the one given at birth, but if names can be changed at will, they no longer serve much use as identifiers.
There is a significant difference between conducting an investigation based upon a person’s chosen name rather than their official name, as a matter of sound law enforcement investigatory practices. After all, asking about “Sam” to people who knew her as “Suzie” isn’t merely politically incorrect, but incredibly ineffective. If you want to find a murderer, asking the wrong questions because of official policy is idiotic. But as obvious as this may seem, it’s not the problem about which Laverne Cox complains.
“I have been saying for years that misgendering a trans person is an act of violence. When I saw that I am referring to cultural and structural violence,” Cox wrote in a note posted to social media about the article. “The police misgendering and deadnamng [sic] trans murder victims as a matter of policy feels like a really good example of that cultural and structural violence.”
Calling things you find wrong or unpalatable “violence” is certainly the trend within a definition-challenged people, but it ignores the problems raised in favor of political agenda. Police should investigate and solve, to the extent they’re capable, the murders of transgender people as they would any other murder victim. To do so, they should use the tools most effective to accomplish their task, regardless of policy as to what should appear in official reports for the sake of technical accuracy.
But to reduce objective reality to a matter of political correctness, even if Cox “feels” that it’s “cultural and structural violence,” contributes nothing to finding killers and closing murders. As ridiculously ineffective as it is to canvas the transgender community with the name “Sam” when she went by “Suzie,” it’s similarly ridiculous to cry “violence” for failure to put the gender agenda ahead of ascertaining, prosecuting and convicting, the killer.
*While it’s politically incorrect to characterize a transgender person’s preferred name as “fictitious,” it remains an objective fact that the person will have an “official” name, the one on her birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, that government recognizes as the name of that person.
Deadnaming The Dead curated from Simple Justice
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