Rethinking discrimination and hate crimes against gay and transgender people:

Because of the widespread misunderstanding and confusion about the difference between being gay vs being transgender, discrimination and hate crimes against transgender people are almost always incorrectly identified as being crimes against gay people. The vast majority of so-called "gay hate crimes" are mostly crimes against visibly gender-variant CD/DQ/TG/TS people, instead of against people who are simply known to be gay.

Discriminators and attackers themselves often believe that they are attacking "gays" when attacking the transgendered. Then too, some victims are simply feminine-looking men or masculine-looking women who are neither gay nor transgender. Furthermore, those gay men who are attacked are often young men who are small and effeminate, and who thus appear "stereotypically gay" (i.e., effeminate). What seems to trigger the rage and horrific attacks upon these young gay men is the appearance of femininity and vulnerability in a "male". A tragic example is Mathew Shepard, the small, strikingly beautiful, sensitive young gay man who was beaten and tortured to death in Wyoming in 1998.


Mathew Shepard
[December 1, 1976 - October 12, 1998]




In many cases, gay activists have exploited the "invisibility of transgenderism" by publicizing all attacks based on gender variance as being "anti-gay" hate crimes, while not clarifying the transgender, transsexual or otherwise physically gender-variant status of the victims.