Ignorance Breeds Violence

As a member of a society that is compelled to label all humans like inanimate products on grocery store shelves, I define myself as a middle-aged, cissexual woman, and with that title comes no particular insight or expertise surrounding the topics of gender or gender identity. My thoughts are sparked by a quiet evening of idleness that progressed to a night of aimless and frenzied Google-searching that eventually led to the discovery of a disturbing video that has stealthily embedded itself into my mind and now steals my sleep each night.

The video is a mere three minutes and two seconds long which hardly seems time enough to evoke any sweeping effects on its viewers, especially when compared to the fourteen hundred and forty minutes that it takes to complete one day, or the forty one million minutes that mark an average human’s lifespan; yet, I know these three voluntarily relinquished minutes of my life will effect the remainder of my existence.

Taped by a young man who found amusement in the events that unfolded before him, his laughter, heard throughout the gruesome footage that he captured on his cellular phone, creates an incongruous mixture of emotions as my eyes see a woman being beaten nearly to death while my ears acknowledge the backdrop of his ill-fitted chuckling. This disconnection further assails my already struggling sensibilities as three eternal minutes of merciless brutality end with the unconscious victim in the throes of a violent seizure and the amateur videographer’s laughter enduring until the bitter end of the clip. 

Without a grasp on the context of this repulsive display of kicking and head stomping, an initial assumption of racial motivation manifests as the victim is a young white woman and the two culprits are young black women. Further enlightenment and contemplation proves this a definite hate crime with the eventual realization that the object of the hatred of the two assailants, who are teenaged girls rather than young women, is the transgender status of the woman they brutalize. These two rogue teens—whose ignorance prevented them from understanding that a transgender woman is a woman—claimed outrage over seeing a man enter the ladies’ room of a public eating establishment as the justification for their sociopathic behavior.

Each time I think about this violent spectacle—one that I initially felt unfortunate to have stumbled upon—queasiness overtakes me as the realization that this scene is but one instance in the daily glut of stares, verbal attacks, taunts, and physical assaults that transgender people endure the world over. I was meant to see this video so that the stark reality of how far humanity still has to travel before humans are accepted for who they are, rather than what we think they should be, would be more evident to me and force me to speak out. All of us, without regard to the hetero-, homo-, bi-, cis-, pan-, a-, or trans- prefixes that society uses to label our sexuality, need to raise awareness and defend each other’s right to be ourselves and live freely and safely in our world.    

Invisible Women

Whether women wear burqas and hijabs (veils) by force or by choice remains unclear to me. Some Muslim women say that they choose to wear their veils for religious or personal reasons, and they want the right to wear them without criticism or insults from those of us who do not understand them. Fair enough. But, if these women shroud themselves by choice, why do I see no joy in their eyes?

Photo credit: shesoverseas.com

Photo credit: AP/Fred Ernst

Photo credit: Natalie Behring-Chisholm/Stringer/Getty

Photo credit: Walter Callens

Photo credit: religionnerd.com

Photo credit: babasteve on flickr

Perhaps it is the words of the Muslim cleric Sheik al-Hilali that disturb me the most. He compares unveiled women to pieces of uncovered meat and men to cats who have no control over their actions. He suggests that a group of Muslim men who received 65-year jail terms for being gang rapists are the victims of vile women who caused their own rapes. Here are his words:

There were women, he said, who 'sway suggestively' and wore make-up and immodest dress "and then you get a judge without mercy and gives you 65 years. But the problem, but the problem all began with who?" he said, referring to the women victims.

Addressing 500 worshippers on the topic of adultery, Sheik al-Hilali added: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it..whose fault is it - the cats or the uncovered meat?

"The uncovered meat is the problem."

He went on: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred."

My translation of the cleric's offensive words: Women must remain invisible by covering their heads and faces or men will rape them. 

It seems to me the men should be the ones covering their faces.