From BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10803570
10 August 2010 Last updated at 10:57 ET
By Chris Summers BBC News
A man has been convicted of murdering a transsexual prostitute in north London. Destiny Lauren was one of a number of transgender people to suffer violence, and there are concerns such attacks are on the increase.
Because he always denied murder, it is impossible to know what motivated Leon Fyle to kill Destiny Lauren, a pre-operative transsexual born Justin Samuels.
In the witness box he claimed she performed a sex act on him, but he said she was alive and well when he left her flat.
But after strangling her and stealing her mobile phone, some cash and a ring in November 2009, Fyle got on a bus and went to a brothel in King’s Cross, where he paid £250 to have sex with two women.
Murders are obviously at the extreme end of the spectrum and remain very rare.
But while figures for transphobic attacks are not collated nationally, Bernard Reed of the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (Gires) said they were on the increase.
He said this was partly because of the rising number of people living openly as transsexuals.
Continue Reading at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10803570
Women Born Transsexual 
August 10, 2010 at 3:27 pm
“He said this was partly because of the rising number of people living openly as transsexuals.”
Yep, once again BLAME THE VICTIMS.
How DARE you live openly — don’t you know men have ZERO self control? Don’t you know “civilization” is merely a veneer? Goodness, if it’s O.K. to beat up your girlfriend (“bitch had it coming!”), what’s the problem with killing a tranny hooker? Heck, even the nice proper “transgender” folks want nothing to do with them.
It’s not murder — it’s just a “cleansing”.
August 10, 2010 at 3:48 pm
We are the ones the bigots practice upon. They consider us “mud people”. If you listen to the people they listen to including all those Christo-Fascist preachers and so called faith based hate machines as well as the constant stream of hate speech from the right wing media machine murdering trannies is not just socially acceptable but “doing the Lord’s work.”
August 10, 2010 at 5:42 pm
The statement was from the guy from GIRES. I think he was referring to increased visibility. I can’t imagine he would be blaming the victims.
August 11, 2010 at 12:09 am
Bringing up the fact people “live openly” as a cause for violence says you avoid violence by not “living openly” — by not being yourself, or by being as totally “stealth” as possible. Then, when someone “discovers” you have a transsexual background — well, then they kill you for “deceiving” them.
damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
How is that not blaming the victim?
It is like saying , “My raping her is all HER FAULT — it was those clothes she wore (or that long blonde hair, or her sexy lips, or she was out too late – “nice girls” are home by that time ……………. well you get the idea).
I understand how it was supposedly meant —- but, in a civilized society you do not rape, kill, assault, abuse, people for how they look or for being “visible”.
Saying there are more of us — thus we are better targets — does nothing to solve any problems.
August 11, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Véronique:
> The statement was from the guy from GIRES. I think he
> was referring to increased visibility. I can’t imagine he
> would be blaming the victims.
The “guy from GIRES” doesn’t think before publicising, or seeking to be the only person consulted by officials on vital trans issues, or writing “guidance” which he mails to hundred of official bodies. Partly because he has no experience of transsexuality or transgender (he is only the father of a woman who transitioned in her twenties, who never seems to be consulted by her “professional tran-activist” mother and father), and partly because most of what he “knows” is from “experts”, who similarly have no experience.
Elsewhere, for examples, he slurs transsexual children as “confused”, and slams equal treatment of them as “child abuse”. For years he acted as a platform for the abusive UK children’s gender clinic, and has not taken down that material from his website. He published dangerously bad hormone advice. He pushes (to legislators and schools) childishly stupid ideas on on the etiology of transsexuality. He is promoting the harmful term “gender variant”, which pathologises our gender, (which is inborn and unchangeable) and was invented by reparative therapists. He holds out to represent all trans people but totally omits the needs of those who identify solely as the sex of our identity, and misrepresents other vital concerns, as mentioned above. He and his wife recently both received public awards (medals) for these “service”.
In the context it is therefore not surprising that he doesn’t locate the background blame for women being murdered by sex clients on the women’s education having been disrupted, on limited job and romance opportunities, on isolation from the women’s support that other women (whether socialising, dating, or in sex work) rely upon for safety, or from families. He doesn’t say that poor medical treatment leaves women extra visible and vulnerable. He knows nothing of those things.
Here he allows it to seem that he says it is the fault of the victims, but he can also be interpreted as meaning that people are being public and equating that with honesty, which it is not.
He totally fails to see that it could be that it is becoming more difficult to be private, because of media intrusion, public awareness, and generally decreasing public respect for privacy. Or it could be that social networking online is tricking people into danger.
Either way it is irrelevant to sex workers who are doing the same thing as sex workers have done for many years – advertising themselves, especially when they use “pre-op” as their selling point. Or to people who are well known locally (there is a good reason many of us move locations). The killing of such people has a long history. Just as has harassment and hate. Those are probably connected, and both should be taken more seriously.
Increasing, deliberately, religiously-inspired hatred might be having an effect even in the UK, but no one seems to have bothered to investigate the religious connections of the killers. Certainly religions really never mentioned us until recently, so there is a recent potential effect there. But personal insecurities are more likely to be at work.
Gay men have long been subject to attack by men who cannot face their own homosexuality, or bisexuality, and see the homosexual as a lesser form legitimately subject to their whim. But realising an attraction to a trans woman potentially triggers multiple insecurities: the same homosexual ones if they see her as a homosexual male; transgender ones if they identify with her, perhaps desperate envy too; hatred of women, and the exercise of power that is behind most rape; almost suicidal despair of themselves as men if they desire penetration by a woman; or perhaps a feeling of having been duped (although obviously not if the woman advertised herself as “pre-op”); etc..
Whatever the police say about their priorities, if the are lumping such crimes in with homophobia they are not taking it seriously. They are different, and the causes, and the perpetrators are mostly likely to be different.
The BBC report also shows how the media fail to take it seriously, and indeed treats as us creatures of the underworld, disposables, which serves to validate crimes against us. This is on the huge BBC website, but it is virtually unheard of for such reports to be on their television news, and rarely on the radio news of their dozens of local stations, even when such attacks are local (and please remember that murder is pretty rare in most UK localities and usually front page news).
Before the general election the BBC lobbied, successfully, to be exempted from the “pubic sector equality duty”of the new Equality Act, which requires all public bodies to “promote equality”. They claimed it would interfere with their “editorial independence”. The homophobia, transphobia, and sexism in their news coverage shows them to be the public body most in need of being subject to that duty.