When I heard about the beating of “a gay man” in Lowell, I knew that I had to do something. I drove down to Lowell to find the victim, “James” Nickola.
After a bit of detective work, someone led me to her house. I met “James” and talked with her for a while. I told her that there was a candlelight vigil being planned in response to the violence she experienced.
While talking with “James”, she disclosed to me that she is not a gay man, but a transgender female named Jenine. I gave her some information about Fenway Community Health’s Violence Recovery Program and we talked for awhile about what happened the night she was attacked. Then I headed back to Boston.
At first, I did not mentioned on my blog that Jenine is transgender. I am writing about it now because Jenine has disclosed this information herself during an interview with Channel 7 News and during an interview with BayWindows. I applaud Jenine for her honesty and openness. The reason I did not mention that Jenine is transgender is because the Massachusetts hate crime laws to not include gender identity or gender expression.
Jenine’s attackers have been charged with a hate crime. Once the lawyers for the men who attacked her find out that Jenine identifies as transgender, they will probably try to have the hate crime charges thrown out in court. They will argue that the men attacked Jenine because she was transgender, not because they thought she was a gay man.
This is a huge problem in Massachusetts. Gender identity and gender expression are not covered in the state’s hate crime or non-discrimination laws. There are 17 states that do cover gender identity and gender expression in either their hate crimes or non-discrimination laws. Massachusetts usually leads the country on issues of fairness and equality. In this case, we are behind 17 other states.
This year a bill, H1722, was introduced to include gender identity and gender discrimination in our hate crimes and and non-discrimination laws. This bill must become law to protect people like Jenine. If her attackers are successful in arguing that the hate crime charges do not apply to their case, it will be a real blow for justice in Massachusetts.
Go to the Massachusetts Transgender Polititcal Coalition website to find out what you can do to right this wrong.
Everyone who reads here knows that I am very much opposed to Gay Marriage, and such issues. Yet here, I find I must draw a line in the sand.
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What a person is, a person is. As you are aware, I believe that a given state of being does not entitle a person to specific rights, or allow specific behavior accorded to others in a different state of being, any more than a criminal in prison is entitled to freedom.
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But I am appalled by what took place in your community of Lowell. The perps deserve to be strung up by their anatomy, perhaps with piano wire, and left to twist in the wind. That this will not happen is a travesty of justice, IMHO. My heart goes out to the victim, whatever their gender, and however they have changed it; I may disagree with their rights to certain heterosexual benefits, but I cannot tolerate their abuse.
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It is my fervent hope that where the perps are concerned, Massachusetts will see fit to deal with thsse animals as they deserve. For starters, see above.
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Best,
Chuck
It would be my preference that the “hate crime” statute be repealed in its entitrety, just because the reason behind an attack is far less relevant than the fact that an attack occured.
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Unfortunately, it seems that that ship has sailed.
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If you are going to have this thing called a hate crime, it seems rather cold to exclude a group of people so specifically targeted for fear/hate reasons.
Expand a statute that makes no sense in the first place?
It would be principled for the entire statute to be repealed. But it is not going to be repealed. And adding GLBT to the statute neither increases nor decreases the liklihood of ultimate repeal.
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GLBT people are indisputably targeted for “hate” attacks, and leaving them off the list while others get on the list is grossly unfair.
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It is something like the position SSM should be abolished because the state should not be in the religious business of conferring the sacrament of marriage to anyone. The problem is that it already does, and the position is a neat way to attempt to deny to Group X what has already been granted for everyone else.
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Folks hate lawyers too! And the Yankees.
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Get them on the list.
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Not sure where the benefit of expanding the statute — even by a peppercorn — gets you. If you’re against the statute to begin with on the condition that it’s pointless and provides no deterrent, then adding more pointless victims to the list seems very PC, and little else.
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But, I suppose PC is an end in itself.
You’re certainly the first on this site ever to call me PC.
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Lawyers are specifically taregted for vilence because they are lawyers? In the same manner, as, say, blacks or gays? Please.
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As far as I know, the offending statute makes no reference to PC absurdities like “verbal violence”, which is where I would draw the PC line in 2007.
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Yes, the hate crime statute was stupid. We’re not supposed to have thought crime, given that one’s brain is supposed to lie beyond the government’s writ.
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Yet there it is, right there in the General Laws, and it evidently aint going anywhere. And given the certainty of the continuation of its existence, this particular omission from it is an injustice.
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I am not comfortable with the position that (i) the statute is dumb, and therefore, rather than expanding it, we should suffer it to offer its “protections”–whatever they may be– to every group that .
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I don’t think it is particularly PC to acknowledge that homosexuals are targets of bigoted violence more than lawyers.
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Again, it is my position that the state should get out of the marriage business entirely and leave it to the churches. But this would not justify denying it to one group, alone.
Heh…pc….I knew you’d love that. 😉
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But, I don’t care much for the marriage analogy–analogizing criminal statutes to rights somehow doesn’t work.
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Just by example, let’s just agree that that we have a statute that says income tax evasion is illegal.
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Now, let’s imagine some well-intentioned Legislature deciding that if you’re a tax evader AND anti-semetic then the jail time is double. Maybe their reason is that tax evasion is a violation of Halacha or something. Who knows, the government rarely makes sense. Just go with my example.
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I think such statute would be stupid.
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Would it then be logical to seek to expand the group to double the jail time if the tax evader, its determined, hates, say, Catholics?
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I say no. But, it would be PC to make that determination, and to similarly expand the distinction for all religious groups.
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If you believe the statute has no basis to begin with, why would it improve if expanded?
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It’s the effect that the crime has in relation to the same crime committed under different circumstances.
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When a person is attacked because they are, for example, black, this crime makes an effect in the community that causes the black population to be afraid for their safety simply because they are black. This is, for all intents and purposes, an act of terrorism by definition. That’s why “hate crimes” get a harsher tone from the judicial system.
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If a murder happened on my street, I’d be worried. If the person was murdered for being Catholic, I’d go out and get a license to carry a concealed weapon.
Why is the first murder “better” than the second? The victims are just as dead.
The first murder has stronger reverberations in society than the second.
Perp commits crime, perp is prosecuted, convicted, and serves time. This is not enough of a societal statement that we don’t condone assaults, or whatever?
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These statutes are necessarily statements to the ordinary crime victim that what was done to them is somehow not as bad as the exact same thing that was done to someone else who happens to be listed in the statute.
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An assault is an assault, and cannot be tolerated by society regardless of why the perpetrator chose to commit the assault.
terrorism works by keeping people identified with a group cowed through fear. IMO that is what hate crimes laws are trying to address. hate criminals are not committing ordinary crimes – they target classes of people, thereby attempting to terrorize the remainder of that subpopulation into submission or at least inaction. cross burning continues to be a highly effective form of domestic terrorism, and is therefore a hate crime. i don’t expect you to understand to agree, but for those so targeted, the legislation makes a lot of sense.
Obvious example: the various degrees of murder and manslaughter. In the various degrees of both murder and manslaughter, someone is dead, but the moral culpability of the perp is taken into account when determining the sentence.
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I believe that, if you did some research (I haven’t) you would find that there are various degress of assault, too, since it’s the case with most crimes.
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BTW, regarding “PC,” as far as I’m concerned anyone whining “PC” (I know it wasn’t you, but someone to whom you were responding) uses the term as an epithet because they can’t otherwise frame an argument. It’s a noise term.
…most hate crimes are not murders. Most hate crimes are assault and/or batteries, vandalism, harassment (disturbing the peace), and so forth. The hate crime issue is usually discussed in terms of murder, but that isn’t the only issue.
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Since I’ve been watching the hate crime issue with a low level of interest since the early 1980s, I’ll also point out that most resistance to hate crime legislation did not materialize until it was proposed to add “sexual orientation” as a category to existing hate crime legislation. And that opposition was limited to the proposed addition, not to the existing hate crime legislation, which normally covered race, national origin, religion and sex.
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And most of the opposition came from conservative christians. They enjoy hate crime status, but gay people don’t. It seems like a bit of hypocrisy to me.
This post is Grade “A” journalism. You are one of the most inspired activists of the GLBT community, so it is a pleasure to see you here on BMG!
I’m happy to be corrected, because I don’t have time to look up the current law to check, but…AFAIK it doesn’tmatter whether a person is actually gay or not, as long as the criminals used perceived sexual orientation as a reason for the crime. Now, if they had yelled “you trannie!”, I think you’re right, that he would not be covered by the existing hate crime law. But they yelled anti-gay stuff, and attacked them because they are ignorant and thought he was gay. That (mis)perception is key, is it not?
But, take it with a grain of salt – because I’m not a laywer. I’ve just read a little bit about it. But I did stay at a holiday inn some time ago.
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In any case, it certainly will add depth to this ordeal, making it all the harder to convict the alleged criminals on hate crime charges in addition to assault and battery.
Here is the first paragraph from MGL which I linked to from the MA Dep’t of Ed site
This text does not mention “perception”, so I honestly can’t tell if my supposition above, that Jenine is covered by this law because her attackers assumed she was gay, is correct. According to the DOE site I liked to above, other laws can come into play, as I’m sure can judicial precedence. Just have to wait for a real lawyer to weigh in on this one I guess.