I have been sitting here angry and shaking--I don't know for how long. There are tears in my eyes and they are sliding down one of my cheeks. I'm not reaching up to brush them away. I'm not sure I want to. There are times when I just want to feel the salt afterburn, the dry heat on my skin that the tears leave behind; this may be one of those times. I want to scream. I want to hit something. I want to climb into my bed, bury my head under a pillow, and never again emerge.
I don't do these things. I sit and shake and cry. And I stare at the story on my computer screen. A friend sent it, a gay man who once was a student of mine, and he sent it apologizing:
Not trying to disturb anyone by sharing this. However, I thought it was worth sharing, given the seriousness of the report.
He is right. It is worth sharing. It worth
raging about. And that is why I am sharing it also with you. But don't read on unless you are ready for real pain. There is no way to avoid it here.
The story that my friend sent me is almost a year old, but I had not heard about it before. He said he found it while doing a search about human rights. In a world full of hate crimes against LGBTQ people, this might just be one of the hardest to handle that I have ever come across.
The headline? "17-Month-Old Roy Jones Brutally Murdered For Acting Like a Girl." The article reports the story of a toddler boy, left with his mother's boyfriend at her home on the Shinecock Indian Reservation, who is beaten and killed for not behaving consistently with "his caretaker’s idea of what a less-than-two-year-old boy should act like."
The boyfriend, who admitted to having beaten the boy in the past, told the police:
“I was trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl...I never struck that kid that hard before. A one-time mistake and I am going to do 20 years...
A tribe spokeswoman said the whole tribe is in mourning, but the child's grandfather said, "He infiltrated my family through our trust, through the heart of my daughter and then stole the life of her child. I hope the justice system turns around and steals his."
A "one-time mistake"? My arms go rigid just typing that phase. As a commenter on the article stated, "Spilling a glass of water is a mistake... tripping over a rock is a mistake... murdering a baby because (he isn't) masculine enough for you??" This is not a "mistake." This is a horror.
And it is a horror too often visited upon LGBTQ children even in this more enlightened age when we celebrate the many steps forward that we have taken. In the wake of the outrageous beating of a TG woman in a McDonald's in Baltimore earlier this year (caught on videotape), the press was all over itself reporting the sensationalized video, but few noted the even more horrific fact that in this country a transgender person is murdered every month. For being who he or she is.
The only thing that changes in each scenario is the reaction of the public. In the case of adults (in cases where there is not incriminating video), the reaction generally ranges from "so what?" to "whatever--freak" to, if the TG woman was a prostitute, "she had that coming" and laughter and derision at the unfortunate man who "did it with a guy." With teens, society tends to go easier on the victim, though a clear element of "freak" can usually be heard. But when the victim is a child, then we all feel it with full force. The 17-month-old Roy was not acting masculine enough for his killer, so he was beaten to death. My anger cannot be any stronger.
The thing is: all of these victims, equally, are beaten and killed because they fail to meet some arbitrary standard of gender appropriate behavior. And what on earth is the difference between their not meeting it at 17 months and at 17 years? Or at 37 years? We are who we are. Somehow, someway, the idiots and assholes out there need to learn that the real freaks are those who feel the need to beat and kill anyone different from themselves because they have so little confidence in who they are that any perceived deviation can utterly derail them.
Meanwhile, I will take my solace in the knowledge that child beaters and child killers are among the lowest people on the prison totem pole. I hope that man enjoys his twenty years.