This page is dedicated to our brothers and sisters who have been lost to ignorance and hate. We must never forget them, and must never let those that would deny them justice forget them either.

Tyra Hunter was a 24 year old transsexual woman who died on August 7, 1995 in Washington, DC after being injured as a passenger in a car accident. Emergency medical technicians at the scene of the accident uttered derogatory epithets and withdrew medical care after discovering her birth sex, and ER staff at DC General Hospital subsequently provided dilatory and inadequate care.

On December 11, 1998 a jury awarded Tyra's mother, Margie Hunter, $2,873,000 after finding the District of Columbia guilty of negligence and malpractice. While $500,000 of the amount was awarded for damages attributable to the withdrawal of medical care at the accident scene, a further $1,500,000 was for conscious pain and suffering endured by Tyra in the emergency room as the result of medical malpractice. Dana Priesing, an observer at the wrongful death trial, wrote that the evidence supported "the inference that a stereotype (namely that Tyra was an anonymous, drug using, TG street person) affected the treatment received," and that the "ER staff, as evidenced by their actions, did not consider her life worth saving."

Brandon Teena

Brandon Teena was murdered just after 1:00 am on New Years Eve, in a tiny farmhouse in Humboldt, Nebraska. Two other people were murdered as well in the house, the only survivor of the slaughter was an eight month old baby in his crib, sobbing for his mother, who lay dead in her slowly leaking waterbed.

Outted By Police

Brandon Teena, whose birth name was Teena Brandon, was originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, moved to nearby Humboldt in 1993, shortly after beginning to live full-time as a man in preparation for eventual sex-reassignment surgery.

Brandon passed easily as a man in Humboldt, but was discovered to be biologically and legally female by local police following his arrest on a misdemeanor check forgery charge two weeks prior to his slaying. Police publicly released this information to , the Falls City Journal, the local newspaper.

One week later, on Christmas Day 1993, Brandon was raped and assaulted at a Christmas party by two men, whom he identified to local police as Nissen and Lotter, despite the fact that they had threatened to kill him if he reported the incident to the police.

However, charges of rape and assault were not filed against Nissen and Lotter until after Brandon's slaying, despite the fact that his sister Tammy Brandon had called Richardson County sheriff Charles B. Laux four days before the slaying to ask why Lotter and Nissen had not been arrested when Brandon had identified them as his attackers.

According to Tammy Brandon, Sheriff Laux responded to her inquiry by telling her that "he didn't need her to be doing his work." Laux has also been quoted as saying "you can call it 'it' as far as I'm concerned" when describing Teena.

Laux has claimed that he was "pursuing" the rape charges at the time of Brandon's death. Yet during preliminary hearings last fall, Sheriff's deputies testified that they were convinced that Lotter and Nissen had committed the rape and sexual assault, but were directed by Sheriff Laux not to arrest them. Thankfully, Laux was defeated in his bid for re-election as Sheriff.

Local authorities have denied that their outing of Brandon Teena in any way contributed to his killers' motives, and have declined to classify the murder as a hate crime.

However, Lotter's sister has confirmed that both Lotter and Nissen were enraged after learning that Brandon was anatomically female but had been living as a man and was dating a local woman (Lana Tisdale). Witnesses for the prosecution at Thomas Nissen's trial testified that both Nissen and Lotter were enraged at and resentful of Brandon after learning that he was anatomically female but living as a man. Testimony during that trial also revealed that the Sheriff's office had interviewed dozens of people and prepared an extensive report on Brandon's rape and sexual assault during the week between the rape and the murder.

Gwen  Araujo                                                            

The The 2002 death of transgender woman Gwen Araujo is a violent hate crime that “underscores just how much transgendered kids are at risk for violence”, according to Jim Weston of the Billy DeFrank Gay and Lesbian Center in San Jose, California. 

Araujo (whose legal first name was Eddie) went to a party in Newark, California on October 3rd, 2002 and never came home. Two weeks later, her body was found in a shallow grave 100 miles away. According to police, she had been beaten and strangled by men who had learned, after engaging in sexual activity with her, that she was biologically male.

The two men accused of her murder were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. They offered a “transgender panic” defense, claiming that they killed the victim because they were so shocked to see that she was biologically male.

The prosecution pushed for a “hate-crime enhancement”, which would have increased the severity of the sentence, but the jury was not receptive to it, so it was dropped. There was a third man involved, but the jury remained deadlocked on his sentence, and a fourth man, who agreed to testify against the first three in exchange for a lessened sentence: 11 years for voluntary manslaughter. The trial made activists “grimly aware of how difficult it is to obtain a first-degree conviction when the victim is transgender”.

Araujo’s mother, Sylvia Guerrero, chose to bury her child as a girl and to have the tombstone bear the name Gwen, explaining “He was born this way. He always felt like a girl.” What made the Araujo case particularly noteworthy, according to Greg Hernandez in The Advocate, is the activism undertaken by her family members, who openly discussed the murder and spoke of “their deep love for Gwen and their determination to obtain justice.”