LGBTQ Victory Fund candidate Zoeey Zephyr won the election for Montana’s 100th state House District. With this historic victory, she is now the first out trans person ever elected to the Montana state legislature. SJ Howell, running for Montana’s 95th state House District, would be the first nonbinary person elected to the Montana state legislature; SJ’s race has not yet been called. A record number of trans and nonbinary candidates ran for office in the 2022 midterm elections.
Mayor Annise Parker, President & CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund, issued the following statement:
“Tonight is a resounding win for Montana and for trans people across the country. From tackling the housing crisis to securing affordable health care, Zooey is ready to enact policy founded in equity and fairness. Montana, like so many other communities, has seen a deluge of transphobia and bigotry this year. Zooey courageously ran despite this divisiveness and her win is a deafening rebuke to hate. We are confident she will be a skilled, powerful legislator and an inspiration for trans people across the country.”
There are currently just eight out trans state legislators in the entire country, according to LGBTQ Victory Institute. There are currently only six out LGBTQ elected officials in Montana.
Victory Fund is tracking Election Night results at victoryfund.org/2022.
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LGBTQ Victory Fund
LGBTQ Victory Fund works to achieve and sustain equality by increasing the number of openly LGBTQ elected officials at all levels of government while ensuring they reflect the diversity of those they serve. Since 1991, Victory Fund has helped thousands of openly LGBTQ candidates win local, state and federal elections.
The trial over Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for trans children recently began. As vulnerable children await to hear if their bodily autonomy will be stripped away, we should remember that cisgender children seek gender-affirming care with relatively little social stigma attached.
Twenty years ago, in rural Maine, I was one of them.
As a teen boy who identified as a boy — randomly sprouting breasts really, really sucked. I hated my body, wore a shirt in the pool, dreaded the school locker room, dressed in layers and walked hunched over to hide my shape.
When I was going through puberty, my body’s hormones were firing in every direction, and I started developing breast tissue similar to a girl’s. The technical term for this condition is gynecomastia, but most of us know it as the dreaded “man-boobs.” Up to 60% of teen boys have asymptomatic gynecomastia, according to the National Institutes of Health. Adolescent symptomatic cases, like mine, are less prevalent, but it affects about 65% of adult men.
As a teen boy who identified as a boy — randomly sprouting breasts really, really sucked. I hated my body, wore a shirt in the pool, dreaded the school locker room, dressed in layers and walked hunched over to hide my shape. I lived in constant fear of nipple-grabbers at school (teen boys are weird) and being outed as a “boob-haver.” I was uncomfortable and embarrassed 24/7 and had about zero percent confidence in myself, all because of the misalignment between how I felt I should look and how I actually looked.
When I confided in my conservative dad about what was happening, I was about 15. He saw how much this was holding me back, and we immediately went to a plastic surgeon for a consultation. A quick procedure and a few weeks of wearing an ace bandage later, I was flat-chested and finally had a body that looked like mine.
Trans children deserve the same consideration.
The next year was the best year of my life up to that point. I felt great. I felt confident. I made a ton of new friends, decided to get in shape, played a sport, put gel in my hair, started dating, partied — all the good stuff. For the first time, I felt and acted like an average teen instead of just barely participating out of aggressive discomfort and fear. I went from a guy who hated being seen to the most seen guy at school in no time.
Over the years, I’ve had medical procedures that saved my body, but my breast reduction saved my mind. Receiving care that affirmed my perceptions of my gender drastically changed my life for the better. I can attest that having mind-body alignment feels like a superpower.
The care that I received is just one small example of the gender-affirming care that cisgender folks receive regularly. We just call it “health care.” I got breast-tissue reduction surgery, but breast augmentation for cisgender women to conform to a perception of womanhood is even more common. Cisgender people alter their eyes, noses, lips, faces, hairlines, facial hair, body hair, height and even the nether regions to more closely align with our culture’s ideals of “the perfect man” or “the perfect woman.”
We frequently change or “enhance” our bodies hormonally, too. Kids have been dosed with human growth hormone since the ‘60s to make them taller, and men looking to achieve a cartoonish level of “manliness” get testosterone pumped into their veins. Hormone replacement therapy is commonplace for cis-women and menlooking to maintain or enhance their vitality in ways that align with their gender identities and gender ideals.
The care that I received is just one small example of the gender-affirming care that cisgender folks receive regularly. We just call it “health care.”
But I don’t see the care that affirms cisgender norms, expectations and functions, including for children, being questioned to the same extent as transgender care. By contrast, even the most basic of trans care — respecting gender identity and expression, puberty blockers and hormone therapy — is scrutinized endlessly and demonized to the point of being life-threatening for patients and doctors alike.
The double standard is glaring. And a recent viral interview between Jon Stewart and Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge about her state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth points to a large part of the problem. Without being able to name a credible source, Rutledge claimed that 98% of youth with gender dysphoria would grow out of it. To which Stewart replied, “Wow, that’s an incredibly made-up figure.”
This idea of elected officials stripping away the autonomy of parents and children to make the kinds of medical decisions that would be best for them is appalling. As Stewart pointed out to Rutledge, the state is not even allowing parents to weigh their options based on the guidelines of the country’s top medical organizations.
We should think more deeply and compassionately about those seeking health care in the trans community as they suffer mind-body misalignment that many of us can’t even imagine. Having a little empathy is a good thing, and for those of us who get to bathe in the privilege of doing whatever the hell we want to our bodies, it’s probably even our responsibility.
Some folks may disagree that the care I received was gender-affirming, and I’ll admit I’m not an expert on health care — cis, trans or otherwise — but I am an expert on me, what I did and why I did it. For me, it was straightforward: I’m a dude, I was born a dude, I want to be a dude, and having breasts didn’t align with that for me. They needed to go for me to live a fuller life.
Some may also argue that societal pressures and expectations influenced my choices, and to that, I don’t necessarily disagree. Who knows, if breasts on a guy were the pinnacle of manliness in 2002, I might have rocked it, but surgery is a lot faster than turning the Titanic of culture, and I would have missed some of the best years of my life waiting.
Here’s what I know for sure, had I been trans and seeking the same surgery, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have been as easy as it was for me — 20 years ago in rural Maine or today.
Tuesday, LGBTQ Victory Fund candidate James Roesener won the election for New Hampshire’s 22nd state House District, Ward 8. With this historic victory, he is now the first out trans man elected to any state legislature in U.S. history. A record number of trans candidatesran for office in the 2022 midterm elections.
Mayor Annise Parker, President & CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund, issued the following statement:
“Tonight is a resounding win for New Hampshire and for trans people across the country, with James shattering a lavender ceiling and proving that America is ready for trans men leaders in our state legislatures. From safeguarding reproductive rights to increasing investment in New Hampshire’s education and health care systems, James is well prepared to enact legislation that will deliver lasting results for his community. At a time of intensifying transphobia at all levels of government and society, he showed incredible courage throughout his historic campaign. Trans people – and trans men in particular – remain severely underrepresented in government at every level, but we are confident his win will inspire many more trans people to run for office.”
There are currently just eight out trans state legislators in the entire country, none of whom are trans men, according to LGBTQ Victory Institute. There are currently just six out trans men serving in elected office.
Victory Fund is tracking Election Night results at victoryfund.org/2022.
_________________
LGBTQ Victory Fund
LGBTQ Victory Fund works to achieve and sustain equality by increasing the number of openly LGBTQ elected officials at all levels of government while ensuring they reflect the diversity of those they serve. Since 1991, Victory Fund has helped thousands of openly LGBTQ candidates win local, state and federal elections.
Like the ex-gay movement that rose to prominence in the early 2000s and then came crashing down as leaders recanted their “conversions,” the detransition movement is showing similar signs of a crack-up.
Ky Schevers is just one of the prominent voices of the detransition movement to reconsider her choice to reject her gender evolution and publicly denounce transition. She began her transition in college but ended it after coming to the belief that gender dysphoria was a false idea caused by misogyny and trauma, a theory she shared widely in interviews and online.
Now Schevers – who is transmasculine and uses she/her pronouns – has regrets about her place in the detrans movement. From 2013 to 2020, she regularly wrote and made videos about her detransition. She was featured in several major publications – even interviewed by anti-trans journalist Katie Herzog – to promote the idea that transgender identity isn’t legitimate and that gender dysphoria was a mix of internalized sexism and trauma response for her.
But now she’s speaking out against the movement she once supported.
“Trans people deserve access to support, and it makes no sense to shut down people’s access to medical transition just because some people end up detransitioning,” she told Slate.
The number of people reporting detransition is small. According to a study this year from UCLA’s Williams Institute, 1.3 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, or 0.05 % of the population. Another 300,000 youth, ages 13-17, do so, as well.
Of those who transition, about eight percent report detransitioning, according to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, and most – 62 percent – of that eight percent said detransition was temporary. A 50-year survey in Sweden revealed about two percent of the trans population regretted undergoing gender-affirming surgery.
Schevers said the detransition movement she helped spark became overtly transphobic and repressive and left no room for doubt or questioning individuals.
While she came to believe her own gender dysphoria was in check, it came roaring back over time. “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude or a gender weirdo,” Schevers said. “But I was fighting against these feelings because I’d built a life in the detransition community, and I knew a lot of the other women in the community wouldn’t be happy with it if I came out as trans.”
The detrans movement assigns a variety of reasons to what they consider the false concept of gender dysphoria and provides attendant solutions to the non-existent problem.
Detrans promoters liken the urge to transition to drug or alcohol addiction, encouraging sufferers to avoid triggers and commit to abstinence, concepts adopted from 12-step programs. They characterize dysphoria as internalized misogyny stemming from a lack of self-love. One theory, known as “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” describes being transgender as a social contagion spread among adolescent girls online, like accusations of witchcraft among young women at the Salem witch trials.
Schevers says of her own dysphoria, “I tried to explain it in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn’t really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them. I had to make a move to accept them.”
Anti-Trans Legislation Across the United States Permits Rights Violations Against Intersex ChildrenSEE IT HERE
On Intersex Awareness Day, observed annually on October 26th, the groups introduced an interactive map that highlights how lawmakers across the US have included clauses in their bills that allow or encourage human rights violations against children born with intersex variations. Dozens of bills with intersex exceptions have been proposed, and so far three have passed into state law.
“State legislation in the US that targets transgender youth is also harming intersex youth,” said Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interACT. “When lawmakers propose and pass explicit exceptions for surgeons to operate on intersex bodies before the patients themselves can consent, it makes it clear that these bills are about erasing bodily diversity, not protecting anyone.”
“Intersex” refers to the estimated 1.7 percent of the population with innate bodily traits that do not fit conventional expectations of female or male bodies. Also known as variations in sex characteristics, intersex traits cause a person’s chromosomes, gonads or other internal reproductive organs, genitals, and/or hormone function to differ from characteristics that are “typically” male or female.
Children with intersex variations are often subjected to “normalizing” surgeries that are irreversible, risky, and medically unnecessary. These surgeries are performed without the patient’s consent, most often taking place in infancy or early childhood. Surgeries include procedures to reduce the size of the clitoris, create or enlarge a vaginal opening, reroute a working urethra, or remove the gonads. These surgeries are justified by decision-makers on the grounds that they will reduce stigma and prevent gender dysphoria, but they often have the opposite effects, and also carry risks of scarring, loss of sensation, lifelong sexual dysfunction, urinary incontinence, psychological trauma, and permanent sterilization.
These surgeries have been deemed human rights violations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and other authorities, but there have been only modest efforts in the US to regulate these operations. Recent legislative proposals that primarily target transgender youth often include provisions that expressly permit and sometimes encourage medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex youth.
Over the last several years, state governments across the US have been waging assault on the basic rights of transgender children and their families. Dozens of bills targeting transgender youth have been introduced in state legislatures. One form of these discriminatory bills seeks to ban or restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender young people. Some bills define gender-affirming care as unprofessional conduct, possibly affecting the licenses of physicians who offer such care, and others set criminal penalties for doctors as well as for parents who support their children in seeking the care that they need.
Many of these bills include an explicit exception for procedures performed on intersex children, usually described in these pieces of legislation as “children with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development” or “DSD,” which is a medicalized term for intersex variations widely viewed as pejorative. These provisions purport to ensure that doctors who perform genital and other surgeries on infants and young children with intersex traits are immune from prosecution and civil or professional penalties. These clauses are in the same laws that attempt to punish performing the exact same procedures on older transgender youth who are actively requesting such care.
“This map shows the cartography of legal attacks on intersex rights baked into anti-trans legislation across the US,” said Holning Lau, Willie Person Mangum distinguished professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law. “Intersex children’s rights to health, bodily integrity, and human dignity are all threatened by this legislation.”
Intersex advocacy groups, as well as a range of medical and human rights organizations, have been speaking out in support of intersex children. There is growing consensus that these medically unnecessary nonconsensual intersex surgeries should end, and some countries have banned them. Nevertheless, some parents in the US continue to face pressure from surgeons to choose these operations when their children are too young to participate in the decision.
“Bundling the unconscionable assault on transgender children’s access to health care with provisions allowing for medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex kids is just two human rights violations for the price of one,” said Kyle Knight, senior researcher on health and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights at Human Rights Watch. “Transgender and intersex children are harmed when politicians use children’s bodies to uphold regressive ideas about gender and sexuality rather than protect everyone’s fundamental rights to bodily autonomy.”
Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the window for transgender voters to verify their identities for voting is closing fast.
Roadblocks for trans people to acquire accurate identification abound, while ID requirements to vote are getting stricter in a growing number of states. The predictable result will be fewer trans people voting in 2022, just as their rights are coming under attack from anti-LGBTQ candidates.
According to the latest research from UCLA’s Williams Institute, over 200,000 trans voters could be disenfranchised this November.
It could be worse. A 2015 study from the National Center for Transgender Equality reveals voter participation from trans people is higher than among all eligible voters, 54% to 42%, meaning more trans voters will manage to cast a ballot despite the barriers to their participation.
Trans people face numerous challenges in changing their official ID gender markers. The process can take time, money, and access to medical care that many trans people, particularly younger individuals, don’t have.
According to the Movement Advancement Project, 10 states require documentation from a medical provider in order to change a trans person’s gender marker. Eight states require proof of surgery, a court order, or an amended birth certificate. And ten states have “burdensome” or “unclear” policies on changing gender markers.
Changing a birth certificate to get a new ID can also present problems. 12 states require trans people to undergo some form of gender-affirming surgery before officials will revise a birth certificate. Four states don’t allow changing a birth certificate gender marker at all.
Name changes aren’t easy, either. Nine states require people to publicly post a name change request online, which can lead to harassment or violence.
“Such obstacles can impact voting in the 35 states that have voter ID laws,” according to the Williams study. “In these states, voters encounter additional verification requirements at the polls on top of federal standards for voter registration and eligibility determination. The strictest of these voter ID laws require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polling place, and provide no alternative for voters who do not have a photo ID, or as is often the case for transgender voters, have an inaccurate photo ID.”
According to the Williams study, “Transgender people who are Black, indigenous, or people of color, young adults, students, people with low incomes, people experiencing homelessness, and people with disabilities are overrepresented among the over 203,700 voting-eligible transgender people who may face barriers to voting due to voter ID laws in the 2022 midterm election cycle.”
Trans voters can seek help updating their state and federal identification with organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality, which provides up-to-the-minute requirements for voter ID state by state, and other gender and name ID change information.
Voter ID laws are promoted by their primarily-Republican sponsors as a way to protect against voter fraud, a nearly non-existent problem in the United States, despite the hype. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and The Brennan Center for Justice have called voter ID laws a form of “voter suppression” that mostly disenfranchises Democratic voters.
“Regardless of whether you’re transgender, every eligible voter should be able to cast their ballot without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told LGBTQ Nation. “Onerous ID requirements are just one of the many strategies used to exclude marginalized people from participating in the political process. This kind of voter suppression is contrary to the guiding principles of American democracy, and is a blatant violation of the fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans.”
Just in case you missed it, the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is now LIVE! If you haven’t taken the survey already, now is a great time. For the first time in 7 years, you have a chance to be part of the largest survey of trans people in the United States. We hope you’ll take about 60 minutes to share your story and be a part of history.
If you are trans and plan to take the survey, here’s what you need to know:
The survey is open to people of all trans identities (binary and nonbinary), ages 16 and older, living in the United States and U.S. territories, regardless of citizenship status.
If you pledged to take the survey, you are not obligated to take the survey. Participation is voluntary. When you click on the link to start the survey, you will be asked to consent to take the survey.
The U.S. Trans Survey is an anonymous survey. Your response will be kept confidential and will not be used to identify you.
The time required to take the survey may vary, but make sure to set aside at least 60 minutes to take the survey.
The survey will be available in both English and Spanish.
Please let your trans friends and siblings know about the survey too!
The U.S. Trans Survey is a survey for trans people, by trans people. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality in partnership with the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the TransLatin@ Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.
Phyllis Frye’s statusas the “grandmother of the transgender legal rights movement” was always partly the handiwork of her stalwart support system, second wife, Patricia “Trish” Dooley Frye, whom she was wed to for 47 years. Frye is now navigating life without Trish, who died in 2020.
“We had such a good love that I want love again,” Frye told Outsmart last year. “Not everybody [gets that kind of love].”
Frye is working to move on, taking heart that her legacy as a queer rights leader is being cemented as of late. A new book from historians Michael G. Long and Shea Tuttle, Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights, documents her momentous life and its instrumental role in trans liberation. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frye is best known as a judge — in 2010 she became the first openly transgender judge appointed in the U.S. — but some of her most impactful work took place when she didn’t wield a gavel.
After becoming a lieutenant in the Army and marrying Trish, Frye came out as trans in the mid-70s, enduring non-stop harassment from her Houston-area neighbors. Instead of hiding from the world, the hate turned Frye into an activist, leading her to law school and an integral role in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. “Her trans advocacy would give birth to a movement and she used the march organizing as a means of [achieving] that,” march co-organizer Ray Hill says. “The state of our collective movement in 1979 was one of uneven development of its component parts. The trans movement did not exist, except for Phyllis’s advocacy.”
Frye would be involved in subsequent marches on Washington for queer rights, lobbying for trans inclusion and becoming the first transgender person to speak at a national march for lesbian and gay rights. Frye understood the importance of language and advocated for years — mostly through her positions in the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association and its influential Lavender Law Conference — to add the T to the LGB acronym.
Frye’s contributions to the trans movement continued through the 1990s. Among her many accomplishments are the six annual International Conferences on Transgender Law and Employment Policy which she organized, hosted, and provided grassroots training for. Eventually, Frye established a practice in criminal defense. “By 2010, I had become senior partner of my firm with lawyers who were either LGBT or supportive,” she recalls.
That year, Frye became the first out transgender judge in the entire country, when Mayor Annise Parker picked Frye to be an associate municipal judge for the city of Houston. As an associate she worked part-time, which allowed her to continue to practice law “and head this firm that I had worked so hard to establish.”
In recent years, Frye would take on transgender clients from around the state who need legal help with name changes and other paperwork. “I do kids as young as 6 and adults in their 70s and all in between,” Frye says.
Even after Trish’s death and an onslaught of anti-trans laws and political rhetoric, Frye remains optimistic and emboldened, telling everyone in the legal profession, including judges like herself, to come out.
“You’re dealing with so much angst if you’re worried about what other people are going to think,” Frye recently told out Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “They’re going to think what they’re going [to] think anyway.”
A new study has found that most people who initiate gender-affirming treatment in their youth continue it as adults — undermining the argument by right-wingers that transgender people are likely to regret such treatment and even detransition, and that young people are not ready to make decisions about gender transition procedures, even though they do so in consultation with parents and doctors.
The study, from Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, looked at 720 people who had been treated with puberty blockers and hormones at the center as adolescents and whether they continued with gender-affirming care.
“Most participants who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued this treatment into adulthood,” says a summary of the study, which was published online Thursday by The Lancet. “The continuation of treatment is reassuring considering the worries that people who started treatment in adolescence might discontinue gender-affirming treatment.” “Most,” in this case, was 98 percent.
“To our knowledge, this study is the first to assess continuation of gender-affirming hormones in a large group of transgender individuals who started medical treatment with puberty suppression in adolescence,” the report notes.
“The key message [of the study] is that the majority of people who went through a thorough diagnostic evaluation prior to starting treatment continued gender-affirming hormones at follow-up,” Dr. Marianne van der Loos, a physician at Amsterdam UMC who coauthored the study, told The Daily Beast. “This is reassuring regarding the recent increased public concern about regret of transition.”
Gender-affirming care for youth is under attack from conservative politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere. Alabama and Arkansas have outlawed the provision of such care to minors, with the Alabama law carrying criminal penalties; both states’ laws are blocked while court cases against them proceed. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered that parents who allow their children to receive this care be investigated for child abuse; these investigations are also on hold because of a court case.
And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican known for her outrageous statements and embrace of conspiracy theories, has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to provide gender-confirmation procedures to minors.
A Florida sheriff’s office has cleared an officer of wrongdoing after he was caught on a body camera footage choking a Guatemalan transgender woman and calling her “it.”
In November 2020, Sean Bush, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO), said that a then-24-year-old trans woman named Jenny DeLeon had provoked his forceful arrest after she allegedly grabbed him by the wrist and knocked him off balance while he investigated a domestic disturbance on her property.
However, attorney Katherine Viker recently uncovered Bush’s body cam footage while conducting an unrelated allegation of another HCSO deputy using excessive force, The Huffington Post reported.
The November 2020 body cam video shows DeLeon greeting Bush with a fist bump and then refusing Bush’s instruction for her to sit down. DeLeon then says that no one in the home called for him to come and asked Bush to go back to his patrol car. Soon after, she asks Bush to please stay six feet away due to COVID-19 concerns. She then tells the officer, “You’re so awesome. Thank you for your service.”
However, when Bush moves towards her car, DeLeon raises her arm and asks him not to touch the vehicle because of fears of possible COVID-19 transmission. Such transmissions are rare, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bush then says, “Don’t touch me,” before grabbing the woman’s arm, shirt, and neck and pushing her to the ground in a chokehold. Bush then pulls out his stun gun as DeLeon says, “I’m epileptic!” Bush uses the stun gun on her, even though stun guns can trigger seizures in epileptic people.
Later on, he grabs her by the throat again and then shoves her into some plants before using the stun gun on her again. He then rolls her onto her stomach and began handcuffing her.
As two other deputies arrived, Bush tells them, “Just keep whatever it is down,” referring to DeLeon as an “it,” a dehumanizing transphobic slur.
After the HCSO received a complaint about Bush’s use of force and a slur, the office conducted an investigation which began on December 2, 2020. The investigation ended one month later, and by March 2021, the HCSO sent Bush a letter saying that it found neither evidence of “excessive or unnecessary force,” nor of Bush making derogatory remarks. It also called Bush’s chokehold “brief and unintentional.”
Chokeholds violate the HCSO’s use-of-force policy, according to its website. Bush remains an HSCO deputy.
In a statement issued last week, HCSO wrote, “Following review of body-worn camera video… it was determined that … the suspect continuously refused to follow commands on scene and was physically combative with the deputy…. The deputy unintentionally briefly used techniques that are not in line with HCSO’s procedures.”
After her interaction with Bush, DeLeon was charged with battery, battery on a law enforcement officer, depriving an officer of means of protection or communication, and resisting an officer with violence. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
One year later, DeLeon was fatally stabbed. A 40-year-old man named Damien Marshall has been arrested in connection to her murder. Marshall said he slept with DeLeon but denied killing her.
“You see the video; what they said happened compared to what actually happened is not true,” Viker told The Huffington Post in a statement. “The video is the best representation of what actually occurred. Videos don’t lie.”
Viker isn’t representing DeLeon’s family members. It’s unclear if the family will take any actions in response to the newly uncovered video.
A March 2020 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that half of transgender people reported discomfort with seeking police assistance. About 22 percent of trans people who had interacted with police reported police harassment, and 6 percent of transgender individuals reported that they experienced bias-motivated assault by officers.