I am not sure I understand. Ally Lee Steinfeld was allegedly killed by her girlfriend Briana Calderas. Now, Briana Calderas began dating Steinfeld about a week before her death. Presumably, she new that Steinfeld was transgender. Why would she date a trans person if she hated them?
Edit: part in italics changed from “transgender” to “trans person” to comply to the comment below. I had not realised my comment was objectifying, English is not my primary language.
Why do you expect murderous bigots to behave in normal ways?
None of us know, because none of us were there. But Occam’s Razor suggests that the killing was premeditated well in advance.
BTW: linguistic tip. The phrase “a transgender” reads as objectifying. “A trans person” or “a person who is trans” would be the more normal usage.
I don’t expect them to behave in normal ways, because evidently they don’t. Killing a friend and mutilate the corpse in barbaric ways is not a normal behaviour, I would think. However, I expect their behaviour to respond to some twisted internal logic, because such is usually the case.
We know Calderas dated Steinfeld for a week. Presumably she did not plan the killing before starting dating as it would have been simpler and less obvious to not date at all.
Occam Razor actually suggests that Calderas dated somebody she perceived to be a woman and that she was a lesbian. Occam Razor also suggests that Steinfeld still had male sexual organs because Steinfeld just came out about gender dysphoria. Besides, at 17, Steinfeld may have been too young for surgery (not sure what is the legal age in Missouri, but a casual search shows that Missouri surgeons require one to be 18).
Possibly, Calderas strongly identified as a lesbian and was upset to discover that her new lover had male sexual organs.
I did not realise that, sorry. Post edited to comply.
Two of the perps are Caucasian. Christian caucasians are absolutely incapable of any bias or terrorist act. And since not all of the perps here can be so accused, none are.
Because healthy, functional democracy.
The topic here is specifically about trying to guess the motivations of a murder. I have confronted bigotry against transgender people both in person and online, and by far the cited motivation for that bigotry has been that transgender people are supposedly an affront to “Western family values”. I have had several people level this argument against me on YouTube just this week, as a rationalization for why they think transgender people should die. So I struggle to see how this isn’t relevant. I know that @the_borderer is in the UK, but the myth that people in the US are beholden to some poorly-understood Euro-Christian ideals seems be very much at the heart of the troubles transgender people face here.
So sure, it bears reminding bigoted US conservatives that what they are politicizing is not as Western, traditional, nor applicable as they suppose it to be. We are dealing with what seems to obviously be a somewhat organized political movement, rather than some sort of contagious emotion.
But I am not going to tell anybody that they can’t prefer to see the problem that way. There is a serious disconnect on BB where people are hostile to anybody framing issues from a perspective differing significantly from their own. I encourage people here to disregard perspectives they prefer to not engage with. But when we ask or tell people to be silent about matters, I think we step beyond our rights and prevent others from discussing important issues.
Indeed, the US is still a very religious country compared to most other developed countries (although you will find bigots everywhere). Transgender people definitely will suffer from that.
The particulars of this murder, however, do not seem quite consistent with it being an example of bigotry.
By your logic, there would be no difference between premeditated murder (“with malice aforethought”!) and manslaughter. Yet you’ve acknowledged you see the need. And how about conspiracy to commit murder, where it can be shown that the perpetrator thought ahead of time about how to commit the deed? Seems like that might be harder to prove in some cases than a hate crime, where a person is targeted not as an individual but as a member of a specific class.
Well, isn’t this exactly exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to happen in Kabul? Oh, wait…
This makes me so mad. No, that’s not right, it makes me fucking furious. What did trans women ever do to deserve such hate, such danger? A life expectancy of 35 years! It’s disgusting. Every time there is an article about trans people I read the comments desperately hoping that there will be more positive and supportive comments than negative. There never is. I don’t understand the hate. Friends of mine, people I love so much, are in danger. They live in fear everyday. And I feel so helpless.
So I am crying and I am furious.
It might not be true, but if people act as if it is, then it has truth in it, yeah?
A political movement that makes emotional appeals.
The problem isn’t that some of us don’t want to abstract the system out and discuss that. It’s that you have a tendency to bring these things up in a way when it’s raw and emotional. Abstracting away racism or transphobia or whatever, by focusing on the discourse that surrounds it doesn’t help when we’re trying to sort out the physical reality from the ideology. Yes, there is a time and place for discussing the ideological structures that shape our lives invisibly. In the thread discussing the obviously hateful burning and murdering of a transgendered person isn’t really that time.
Alright… It’s counter-intuitive to me, but thank you for the explanation. Sometimes it feels like the more important a topic is to me, the less people want me to discuss it, which can feel conspiratorial and weird. FWIW I had a non-trans friend who was burned to death about ten years ago, so I can relate if some of this hits a raw nerve. When things get bad, I tend to go into problem-solving mode.
People could consider the analogy of cause versus symptoms of an ailment. The most comprehensive treatment addresses the underlying cause, which is often subtle and invisible. But that does not make it abstract or separate. How weird would it be to say that someone who tries to work with you to fix the cause of the ailment doesn’t care, because you prefer to focus only upon the symptom? These are two ways of remedying a problem which work better together, not separately, because the goal is the same.
It’s not that the larger ideological issues don’t matter or that we don’t care about them. It’s that it feels like a slap in the face when those issues get brought up into a very concrete discussion about a particular person or persons who have been hurt or murdered. Like I said, there is a time for these larger structural and social discussions - a thread about the murder of yet another transgendered person being treated as less than important isn’t it.
That’s fine, but the way you want to solve the problem is high level and takes a revolution in our social and communal thinking… these are not changes that happen over night, but take a long time to cement into our society. Sometimes, like in cases like this, it makes more sense to speak concretely. Saying that we should just stand up to or ignore the justice system isn’t an immediate solution to this particular problem. It’s a long term solution that doesn’t need to happen on the back of individual victims.
Thank you for putting this so succinctly. I used to be of the same mindset (crime is crime and we already have ways to punish per level of motivation), and really never could pinpoint when or where I flipped on that or why.
I don’t have a when or where, but I have a why that I can share when this comes up among others.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
