I first heard about this story on Jezebel. Pair this with all the other stories about rapes and murders and the violence against women become a huge picture of violence and misogyny, one that includes transsexual and transgender women.
Many years ago I was stunned to go for rape counseling and find a feminist run rape crisis center wasn’t able to wrap their minds around the idea that a post-SRS woman with a transsexual history was actually a woman, who could be raped and traumatized by having narrowly escaped being murdered.
Part of it was the stereotype that we were all prostitutes. Yes even feminist women, lesbian women who swear to hold as a principle “Is this good for women” engage in “slut shaming” and the rating of the legitimacy of the victim. “Trannies”, hookers, people of color, “white trash”, who live in trailer parks and mobile homes are never seen as really being victims.
Excuses are always made for the murderers or rapists. The victim deceived us. We didn’t know she was a “trannie”. We thought she was older than 11.
These fucks gang raped an 11 year old and posted videos of it. People are making excuses for these scumbags. How are their actions any different fro the actions we condemn when they occur else where?
From Jezebel: http://jezebel.com/#!5780022/media-blows-it-with-pathetic-gang-rape-coverage
March 9, 2011
In Cleveland, Texas, 18 young men and boys have been charged with participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer home. As if the event weren’t awful enough, the papers reporting the incident aren’t exactly being, oh, say, fair in their reportage.
In December, police learned of the assault when an elementary school student told a teacher about a cellphone video featuring one of her classmates. Authorities say that on November 28, the girl was offered a ride by a 19-year-old who took her to his house, then ordered her to take her clothes off, saying she’s be beaten if she didn’t. She was raped by several men and boys, then moved to the trailer where more assaults occurred as the attackers took cellphone videos and photographs.
The New York Times published a story today about how the case has torn apart the town, and the paper chooses to focus on the plight of the accused men. The author says the town is wondering “how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?” as if they were tricked into gang raping a child. Then there’s this quote:
“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
Continue reading at: http://jezebel.com/#!5780022/media-blows-it-with-pathetic-gang-rape-coverage
From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=rape&st=cse
Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: March 8, 2011
CLEVELAND, Tex. — The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates.
The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.
Five suspects are students at Cleveland High School, including two members of the basketball team. Another is the 21-year-old son of a school board member. A few of the others have criminal records, from selling drugs to robbery and, in one case, manslaughter. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to a 27-year-old.
The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?
“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=rape&st=cse
Instead of making excuses for these vicious scumbags they should be rounded up and sent to the darkest hell hole of prison we have, some super max where they would spend 23 hours a day in lock down,
Women Born Transsexual 
March 9, 2011 at 6:20 pm
Locking away those young men, or just killing them, which would be cheaper, might make you and me feel better, but that won’t do a thing for the young women who were victimized. For there was not just one victim here. Everyone in her class knows that it wasn’t them just by chance. We are all stalked by these terrors every day. Some of us die every day. Some of us survive. Some wait to be brutalized and beaten tomorrow.
What is needed here is fundamental change. Our history, our society, our economics are all predicated on institutionalized injustice. We make pretty mouth noises about freedom and dignity and equality, but we do not operate in such a way that those terms have any meaning. Something like this happens and the curtain between our beliefs and out actions is torn. We punish a few children, put the curtain back and we go back to business as usual.
Man or woman does not matter, rich or poor does not matter, white or black does not matter, young or old does not matter. Just so long as we celebrate hatred, fear and institutionalized injustice, we will have incidents like this to remind us that our hypocrisy will always come home to roost, harming us all, taking us all as its victims.
March 9, 2011 at 6:26 pm
We lock away people for drug possession for many years. I would legalize drugs and empty the prisons of drug users. In their place I would fill the cells with rapists and the Wall Street thieves.
March 9, 2011 at 9:26 pm
All this reminds me of what it was like when I was 6 years postoperative and a graduate student in Counseling Psychology at USC beginning in 1983. I was having to commute from my mobile home park in Garden Grove, a nine minute walk to catch a bus to Disneyland , a second bus to Downtown Los Angeles and a third to USC. The average travel time each way — 2 1/2 hours!
That nine minute walk led to a bus stop on Harbor Boulevard, at the southern end of a zone frequented by prostitutes and customers in cars. Every trip would have men in cars trying to get my attention, men who were constantly offering me a ride at the bus stop, hundreds a year. When I turned them down, they wanted to know if I was sure? Once in a while, on being turned down some of these guys were hostile and threatening, yelling nasty remarks and even threatening to rape me, but I was able to evade them. 90% of these guys were White & over 40. One of the scariest times was when a guy in an RV followed me all the way into my mobile home park. I thought he lived there like me!.
When they changed the bus route to stop at a different Disneyland stop, I found myself having to deal with men at bus stops who were hitting on me constantly. Unlike the male college students who ignored me, and the White guys in the cars, these guys weren’t students nor were they White. They were from the neighboorhood:
“How you doin’ ! You sure do look fine! You got a boyfriend?”
Such a long commute has connections that fail and I ended up at isolated bus stops at night. Once at 8:00 PM , I was sitting alone on a bench in Norwalk , when a man approached me from the side on a bicycle. He was Latino and he had big slash scar under his eye:
“Do you wanna make pu**y?”
Another man walked toward me at a bus stop next to a construction site against a chain link fence next to a freeway overpass at 10:30pm.
“How come White folks get nervous when Latinos walk by?”
When I became a counseling intern at Laguna Beach Community, in 1985, they had some special training opportunities for educational outreach in their Sexual Assault Prevention Program and for those who would serve on a Sexual Assault Victims Hotline.
I was interested because one of the reasons I became a counselor was that my brother’s 12 year old daughter was kidnapped, raped and murdered in 1978, 3 weeks after I was denied an opportunity to visit her for the first time as me for being a transsexual and one year post operative.
It was two opportunities that I could not take advantage of because of a gay PhD supervisor who did not want me to get any work. He was afraid that the community might find out that a transsexual worked there and I was kept from seeing the five hours of clients that I required each week in my field work. When I complained I was given the deadbeats, the chronic no-shows, those ordered for counseling on probation. I was even handed off the client, the boss hated the most, a local transgender homeless woman and alcoholic who had declared herself to be a nun and was trying to set up a shelter. My boss saw her as nothing more than a “freak man in a dress” and gave her to me as we were so much “alike”.
It all came to a peak when it was announced that certain “senior” counselors were going to be paid for their work, a token amount like $5 an hour, but I wasn’t eligible because I didn’t have enough clients. They had 30 counselors interns on staff booking 73 hours a week. You don’t have to do much math to see that’s about 2.4 hours per counselor a week. When I was ready to sue them, the new counseling coordinator told me that I was absolutely right! Also good luck and goodbye!
Fortunately for me I had a woman supervisor who helped me. I was recruited by two lesbians to work at The Center Garden Grove, five blocks from home. They welcomed me and made sure that I was getting ten hours of clients a week and more with L G B & T clients. I was even invited by a woman to co-lead a lesbian incest survivors group! I was a pioneer transsexual and I was able to serve about 150 hours working with transsexual people!
My clients paid $25,000 for the 1500 hours I served there from 1986 to 1988, serving Lesbian individuals, couples and the group for 900 of those hours. But when the two Lesbians left The Center a few months after they helped me to come out as a Lesbian, I was to be outed, threatened by violence by 4 women, ejected from the Womanspace and purged from my job by the new Lesbian Separatist administrator.
15 years later, in 2003, when I was homeless, a man attempted to rape me in broad daylight in Downtown Marysville, Washington. I was in need of a counselor to deal with post traumatic stress, but I was afraid to go to any rape crisis center, because I didn’t know if they would understand.
But it almost happened and the man got away. Later he was caught and convicted on 7 counts against as many victims, given 28 years.
A nasty woman at my shelter who had tormented me when my secret was leaked by a shelter staff woman, got word of it:
“Aw gee, who’d want to rape it?”
In 2005, the Vancouver (B.C.) Rape Relief allowed transsexual and transgender women to be barred from counseling rape victims “because they might be traumatized at speaking to someone who was formerly (or perhaps currently anatomically) male”!
We all know that I found myself unwanted as a facilitator by the leading transgender organization in Seattle, despite my training and experience as a counselor, an organization that makes post-opeartive transsexual women feel unwelcome. And we all know that I’ve been shunned and excluded by the lesbian community here, as recently as yesterday.
But six days ago I had the opportunity to do something. that no one else like me could do these days. I was invited through my WHEEL organization to participate in a roundtable discussion by women from NARAL to the discuss the ongoing problem of CPC’s. Networks of 4,000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers , fake clinics created by religious fundamentalists , who are anti-abortion, anti-birth control designed to look like real women’s health clinics, but there to use all means possible, including lies and deception to keep pregnant women from seeking an abortion.
All I ever wanted to be was an accepted and respected woman among women, So here I was, able to do something that matters where I was invited and wanted by large groups of feminist women including WHEEL—- where I am not welcome or wanted– to do anything by the lesbian, transgender or LGBT community. But I found my community of acceptance!