Sweeps

“Men in tight dresses make lousy victims.”

—Law & Order: Trial By Jury, “Boys Will Be Boys”

In a 1972 episode of Hawaii Five-0, “Didn’t We Meet at a Murder?”, a “homosexual transvestite” (another character’s words) commits suicide after being blackmailed into committing a murder. It’s an early example of a trans spectrum person in the loosely knit genres of police procedurals, cop dramas, and detective shows, and it predicts two of the major tropes in which trans people would appear on such shows: as villains (usually killers) and as victims (usually being killed). This essay will explore transgender appearances in these ever-popular genres: as villains, victims, and in rare cases as investigators. In all cases, the real relationships between trans communities and the criminal punishment system is obscured by an emphasis on interpersonal violence and a misplaced trust in the system to operate fairly and justly towards trans people.

I begin with an analysis of the wide array of transgender characters in this genre-set, focusing on the victims and villains who make up the overwhelming majority, analyzing the common tropes and how those tropes affect perceptions of trans people. In the second part, I explore in more depth how the fictional relationships in these shows compare to the real-life relationships between transgender people and the criminal punishment system.

I. The Array

Trans and gender non-conforming people have been depicted as killers on film at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930), in which female impersonator Handel Fane turns out to be the real killer. Trans and gender non-conforming people would eventually turn out to be the killer or attacker in television episodes ranging from the Miami Vice episode “My Brother’s Keeper” in 1984 to the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit two-parter “Devil’s Dissections” and “Criminal Pathology” in 2015. While they vary in tone, the episodes have in common a pathologization and fear of non-normative genders, such as connecting gender non-normativity to violent behavior or expressing anxiety that gender variant people might not be readily noticeable.

The X-Files episode “Gender Bender” (1994) puts a unique twist on the trope, but in doing so functions as a particularly apt illustration of the dynamics under the surface of trans killer plots. “Gender Bender” centers on Marty (Peter Stebbings / Kate Twa), a member of an isolated religious sect who can change gender, sex, and secondary sex characteristics at will. Marty also possesses powers of attraction, and uses those powers to lure people into sex, which invariably kills Marty’s partners.

Marty’s intrinsically seductive and deadly nature gives a supernatural spin to long-standing tropes of both trans fetishism and the fear at the core of trans panic, to say nothing of the fear of an increasing slippage of gender categories and the fear that such slippage might actually be desirable. More grounded than “Gender Bender” is Law & Order: Criminal Intent‘s “Maledictus” (2002), in which the killer’s cross-dressing (along with his penchant for sadomasochism) is used to pathologize him despite having little to nothing to do with the actual murder. “Devil’s Dissections” and “Criminal Pathology”, which reveal a barely noticeable recurring character as both a cross-dresser and a killer, play into fears of dangerous trans people not being noticeably deviant. Trans killers across the board play nakedly into society’s fears of trans people, particularly trans women, giving those fears a fictional justification.

But trans killer plots are not necessarily intrinsically transphobic, as at least one show manages to evoke the trope while turning it on its head. The How to Get Away with Murder episode “Two Birds, One Millstone” (2015) features Alexandra Billings as Jill Hartford, a college professor who claims to have killed her husband in self-defense. Jill’s lawyer tells her that the investigators think Jill killed her husband because he panicked when he found out she was trans, despite Jill’s claims she was out to her husband: “You heard the detective. They want to make this into a story they can understand.” Jill replies simply, “That story’s played out.” Audiences are not only drawn to side with a trans woman who killed her abusive husband, they are encouraged to see the situation outside of readymade transgender tropes like deception, trans panic, and trans violence.

In the early 2000’s, the trans villain trope was supplanted by the trans victim trope. Although it has existed since at least the 1950’s, as I’ve argued before, these tragic, victimized images “really began to proliferate around the turn of the millennium with the release of Boys Don’t Cry” in 1999, a watershed moment in representations of tragic transgender characters. As evidenced by reality-based films like Boys Don’t Cry, A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story (2006), Soldier’s Girl (2003), The Danish Girl (2015), there is an appeal of “real” transgender stories, and that’s apparent in in fictional trans victimizations, which trade on the very real violence experienced by mostly trans women of color as reference points for narratives in which detectives must investigation anti-trans violence, even as that violence is often projected onto white trans characters.

I’ve previously suggested that a key moment in transgender appearances on these shows is the 1993 Law & Order episode “Sweeps”. “Sweeps” blames a tabloid talk show host for the death of Mary, a trans woman he pressured to come out both on television and to her parents in the studio, resulting in the father’s heart attack and Mary’s eventual suicide. The reference point for “Sweeps” is not only the familiar appearance of trans people on daytime talk shows, but also the sense of tragedy that goes along with trans lives.

Indeed, a common thread in tragic trans representations, as we will see, is that they depend on familiarity with perceptions of trans lives as tragic in order to be legible, as in Mary’s case, in which the talk show host can be read as a catalyst of a tragedy already waiting to happen. Meanwhile, Mary’s confinement to a show-within-a-show (she appears only on a television watched by other characters) reinforces the interconnectedness of film, television, and the commodified spectacle of transgender tragedy as entertainment.

Just as, in Anastasia Walker’s words, “headlines about murders are good eye candy”, loglines about murders are good eye candy too. As I wrote in “Methodical Killing”, “[i]n the 24 years since ‘Sweeps’ aired, at least 25 trans spectrum characters have died on American crime-solving shows alone”, an average of more than one a year, a number that gets larger when it encompasses trans people victimized but not killed in Without a Trace‘s “Transitions” (2005) and Nash Bridges‘ “The Javelin Catcher” (1996) or deaths otherwise associated with gender non-conformity, as in the Numb3rs episode “Devil Girl” (2010), in which a serial killer team cross-dresses their male victims post-mortem.

These episodes usually feature trans and gender non-conforming people’s deaths as catalysts for the episode’s main investigation plot, and most episodes carry an air of advocacy: that is, most episodes seem to think they’re performing a public service by featuring transgender deaths. “In contemporary politics”, Dean Spade writes, “being a ‘crime victim’ is much more sympathetic than being a ‘criminal'” (“Their Laws”, 170), and for many, the concept of victimization, at least when applied to a marginalized group, generates positive but condescending feelings like sympathy and pity. Sympathy and pity, then, are frequently the desired outcome of these shows.

CSI‘s “Ch-Ch-Changes” (2004) exemplifies both the plot catalyst principle and the victimhood-as-advocacy approach and reads like an overstuffed melange of the various approaches and tropes found in other trans victim plots. The episode opens on the death by slashing (of her throat and genitals) of Wendy Garner (Sarah Buxton), who is revealed through internal examination to be a trans woman. The investigators then, as crime show investigators often do, enter a subculture-of-the-week, in this case the trans community, including gender therapy groups, SRS surgeons, one incredibly awkward attempt at a flirtatious encounter between Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and trans woman Mimosa (Kate Walsh), and an anecdote about transgender oysters in the spirit of any number of naturalist justifications of queer and trans lives.

The episode has all the markings of an attempt at legitimacy and verisimilitude, including a brief cameo by transgender surgeon Dr. Marci Bowers as a gender therapist, while it simultaneously gives its cisgender characters free reign to express every ounce of discomfort or humor that pops into their head, including when one man randomly interjects, “For the record, I really like having a penis”. The sequence in which investigators use a computer to de-transition Wendy’s image in order to identify her against an old driver’s license — borrowed from a similar sequence in Diagnosis Murder‘s “All American Murder” (1995) — gives investigators a chance to manipulate Wendy and delegitimize her identity, helping to reinforce existing gender boundaries and mark Wendy’s identity as artifice. In the end, the detectives discover a deadly back-alley surgical clinic and a murderer who killed Wendy to cover it up, reinforcing the power and legitimacy of traditional medical pathways and gatekeepers while avoiding the discussions of the social conditions that drive trans people to back-alley solutions for hormones and body modification in the first place.

“Ch-Ch-Changes” somewhat paradoxically depends on an audience’s awareness of trans people’s existence but lack of real knowledge of or experience with trans people and communities in order to sensationalize trans identities; later, Special Victims Unit‘s “Transgender Bridge” (2015), as evidenced by the title, counts on the audience’s growing familiarity with transgender people as a social group, reflecting the sea change in transgender awareness of the past few years.

Other portrayals, though, can be insultingly reductive: CSI‘s “The Accused is Entitled” (2002) uses a trans murder victim almost exclusively for the trans panic motive and plot misdirection; “Silence”, a Special Victims Unit episode also from 2002, uses a trans girl’s death to kick the episode off only to discard her as the story moves away from her; the Special Victims Unit episode “Rapist Anonymous” (2013) even slips in a transgender murder as a punchline, as the show’s medical examiner jocularly reminisces, “it turns out she’s a lesbian, he’s transgendered, and we found the murder weapon lodged in his anal canal”. The flippancy of the latter is galling, but it also illustrates how common the trope of trans death must be in order to make the joke legible in the first place.

The Mentalist episode “Ruby Slippers” (2012), by contrast, works within the bounds of the trope to at least partly subvert it. “Ruby Slippers” centers on the death of a teenager outside a drag club. Drag performers are popular trans victims in these series because they give investigators a chance to explore a drag subculture for an episode, and “Ruby Slippers” is no exception. But the twist of the episode is that the teen in question has faked their death and been reborn in the drag club as a woman named Fifi Nix (Nicholas R. Grava). The episode thus associates gender non-conformity with transformation and new life rather than death. But not only is “Ruby Slippers” dependent on existing trans crime show tropes for much of its legibility, it is still, at best, the exception that proves the rule.

The trans killer and trans victim tropes form the bulk of trans representation in crime-solving series, and they’re more similar than might appear at first glance. In crime-solving shows, trans characters — both victims and villains — are frequently reduced to a series of plot misdirections and missing puzzle pieces. This goes back at least to Murder!, in which a wrongful conviction of a woman in a murder case hinges, in part, on Handel Fane’s successful re-gendering of his voice. In both NYPD Blue‘s “Jumpin’ Jack Fleishman” (a 1994 trans killer plot) and Bones‘ “The Drama in the Queen” (a 2014 trans victim plot), investigators discover feminine ephemera at a crime scene and seek out a woman only to discover she does not exist and that male-assigned people involved were actually transfeminine. Paul Millander (Matt O’Toole) had appeared twice already as a serial killer on CSI before “Identity Crisis” (2002) revealed him as trans and intersex, a revelation that largely functions to help obscure the mystery and delay its solution (and pathologize Millander). In Psych‘s “Who Ya Gonna Call?” (2006), a man believes he is being haunted by a female ghost, only to learn that one of his multiple personalities is a trans woman (while another personality is killing people to prevent the trans woman personality from undergoing bottom surgery).

Trans identity also provides misdirection in Veronica Mars‘ “Meet John Smith” (2004), notable mostly for featuring a trans woman at the center of an investigation who is neither victim nor villain. That misdirection works both ways, too, as in CSI‘s “The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp” (2007), when a “mutilated tranny” — as one of the CSIs describes the body — turns out after some investigation to not be trans at all. Whenever they drop the possibility of transgender people without prodding in Special Victims Unit or CSI — and they do so plenty, in Special Victim’s Unit‘s “Pique” (2001), “Dolls” (2002), “Appearances” (2003), “Lowdown” (2004), “Cage” (2006), and CSI‘s “Getting Off” (2004) — that’s a clear sign there isn’t a trans person involved. And as far as puzzle pieces go, the Bones episode “The He in the She” (2008) involves literally piecing a trans woman’s corpse back together, and the mental process required to make her gender/sex-incongruous parts conceptually fit together.

The revelation is another moment that many trans killer and trans victim plots have in common. Matlock‘s 1986 episode “The Stripper” and the Special Victims Unit episode “Transitions” (2009) both save the perpetrator’s trans reveal for near the end of the episode, each one taking place in court while the perpetrator is testifying (in the latter case, in a particularly transphobic maneuver, the prosecutor forces a trans woman say her birth name aloud in order to out her).

Most trans victim plots place the revelation for earlier, but the reveal is always a major moment, as in “All American Murder”, in which two characters who know a trans murder victim’s status nonetheless draw out the process of revelation to a third character — and by extension the audience — by having him closely examine her body. As in film, genitalia (offscreen genitalia, unlike many films) often comes as the moment of reveal and the moment when the gendered perception of the investigators shifts; see one investigator calling out “beans and franks” to reveal a murder victim’s trans status in “The Accused is Entitled” or an investigator peeking under a dead woman’s skirt in CSI:NY‘s “The Lying Game” (2007). Big reveals serve to reinforce cisgender assumption and continually mark transgender people as social anomalies even after death.

The ambiguity of the field and the similarities between trans villain and trans victim plots come together in Special Victims Unit‘s 2003 episode “Fallacy”, which features Cheryl Avery (Katherine Moennig), a trans woman who kills a man in order to prevent him from outing her and who is eventually sent to a men’s prison, which becomes the focus of the latter part of the episode. The episode operates on a lot of tired tropes, but Cheryl also occupies a liminal space that is neither purely victim or purely villain: over the course of the episode various people blame her for actions out of her control, deem her justified for actions she did commit, sympathize with her, reject her, exploit her, try to punish her and try to save her, and what’s more, what to one character counts as victimization counts leads to vilification by another. She is forced to fight for her own victimhood, recalling the Dean Spade quote above about about the relative desirability of being a victim. “Fallacy” illustrates just how unclear the line between the two archetypes really is, with the end result of both being a violent collision with transphobia, whether by the state or enabled by it.

II. State Violence

What’s really important here is how transgender people, through these shows, are consistently positioned in relation to the criminal punishment system in ways both deeply misleading and fundamentally damaging. As noted above, episodes like “Ch-Ch-Changes” clearly see themselves as exposés that do a public service by depicting the deadly consequences of transphobia. But in utilizing the criminal punishment system as a lens through which to view the issue of transphobia, such shows do more harm than good, and to argue why, I’ll turn to queer critiques of anti-hate crime laws (and to a lesser extent anti-discrimination laws) in order to examine the ideological similarities between hate crime laws and the trope of fictional transgender deaths in crime-solving shows and to show why arguments against hate crime laws are applicable here.

In Normal Life, Dead Spade critiques hate crime laws on the grounds that they “do not and cannot actually increase the life chances of people they purportedly protect”, and that they “strengthen and legitimize the criminal punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect” (87). Spade’s argument applies just as well to the constant images of trans deaths investigated by police. Just as hate crime laws do nothing to protect trans people in life, neither do the fictional efforts of the investigators; instead, these efforts reinforce the myth that law enforcement is a just and noble institution, erasing the violence done to trans people, especially poor trans people and trans people of color, by the systems these shows depict working devotedly towards (post-mortem) justice.

Liliana Segura argues that hate crime law supporters — and, I would argue, about the people behind transgender victim plots on crime shows — “may believe that, despite all its ugly dimensions, the criminal justice system can be used for more noble ends, to force bigoted elements within society to change and to protect vulnerable communities” (192), but ultimately these shows do more harm than good by ideologically asserting the value of the criminal punishment system just as hate crime laws increase its actual power. Simply put, in Lori Saffin’s words, “[w]hen national LGBT groups rely on political projects that further hate crimes legislation, they are feeding the prison industrial complex” (156) — feeding it legally while crime shows feed it ideologically.

Spade also writes that “[d]efining the problem of oppression so narrowly that an anti-discrimination law” — or, we might add, the efforts of dogged television investigators — “could solve it erases the complexity and breadth of the systemic, life-threatening harm that trans resistance seeks to end” (Normal Life, 86). In other words, while the constant images of trans victimhood might seem like advocacy because at the very least their lives are deemed worthy of investigation and prosecution, such images fall back on simplistic notions of what constitutes harm and violence. Spade evokes what Alan Freeman calls “the ‘perpetrator perspective'” to criticize the emphasis on “the behavior of a perpetrator who intentionally considered the category that must not be considered (e.g. race, gender, disability) in the decision she was making” (84).

Crime shows similarly disavow most types of violence other than interpersonal, and in doing so obscure the complex and multifaceted ways that transphobia operates. Transphobia in real life, in contrast to television, manifests itself in forms like poverty, job and housing insecurity, lack of access to medical care, and rejection by family and friends, all of which intertwine with one another. Hate crime laws, anti-discrimination laws, and crime-solving shows reduce the true spectrum of violence down to a single form: conscious, person-to-person acts based on conscious bigotry. And that reduction is damaging because it obscures the way power really operates and makes it easier for that power to go unchecked.

Special Victims Unit‘s “Transgender Bridge” offers a critique of transgender-inclusive hate crime legislation, but fails to recognize the function of transphobia within the system. “Transgender Bridge” revolves around the death of Avery Parker (Christopher Dylan White), a trans teen who is harassed and accidentally pushed off a bridge by three cisgender teens. That Avery is white and from an affluent family and the other teens are Black and from working-class families is important, because the show sets these traits against one another as Avery’s death is turned from a potentially restorative moment into a punitive one in which anti-trans hate crime law does more harm than good in meting out racist punishment as the politically-motivated zeal to send a message about so-called hate crimes leads to a brutally unfair trial and conviction of a Black teenage boy.

All of this is true enough: the system does privilege white, affluent trans folks as stand-ins for the entire population (call it the Caitlyn Jenner Principle), and does come down particularly hard on Black people. But the episode replicates harmful dynamics rather than critique them by making Avery a trans representative and imagining anti-trans hate crime laws as harmful to cis communities of color presented as mutually exclusive from white trans people. In essence, “Transgender Bridge” refuses to tell the whole story, namely, that trans people of color (and poor trans people, and disabled trans people, etc.) exist and are affected by the actions of the criminal punishment system. That trans people, particularly those who are poor, disabled, and/or of color, face harm from the criminal punishment system is far outside the frame of “Transgender Bridge”, and Special Victims Unit in general, suggested by remarks at Avery’s funeral, in which she is said to have been “inspired by the compassion of her classmate, her teachers, and even the police”. Avery is a privileged victim who, in finding defenders in the criminal punishment system, shuts down critiques of the state violence.

“Fallacy” seems to at least partially grasp the concept of a violent system working against trans folks. The bulk of the episode is devoted to Cheryl’s struggles within a fundamentally unjust system that is biased against trans people and identities, including a failure to recognize fear of violent reprisal to having one’s status revealed, a jury that may harbor transphobic sentiments that can be exploited by prosecutors, and placement in the inappropriate gendered housing. Cheryl’s plight is repeatedly disavowed and responsibility abdicated on the part of the investigators and prosecutors, who alternately blame Cheryl for her own situation and blame Cheryl’s politically driven attorney, who, faults aside, does advocate for Cheryl and recognize that the system is weighted against her.

The questions Yasmin Nair asks — “What do we do when the violence is committed by the system itself? … Does the system … have a way of accounting for its own ‘hate crime?'” (201) — are questions “Fallacy” is willing to ask but unable or unwilling to answer. The episode comes to a close as prosecutor Alex Cabot (Stephanie March) finally begins to feel uneasy about her role in prosecuting Cheryl, and the episode ends with Cheryl, who has just been assaulted in a men’s prison, wheeled through the frame to reveal her substantial injuries. The final shot of the episode is a close-up of Alex’s conflicted face; as is often the case in the Law & Order universe, a complex question is raised only to be left unanswered (and ignored as the series continues).

The episode ultimately raises the question only to evade structural analysis by locating guilt in Alex and even in Cheryl rather than the system itself: when Alex asks “Why do I feel so lousy?” after Cheryl’s guilty verdict, another character responds, “Because you look at Cheryl and you can’t imagine what it’s like to feel that your own body is a mistake.” Thus, instead of questioning Alex’s role or that of the larger system, the show is more interested in falling back on transgender tropes to blame Cheryl by arguing her body is wrong, an extension of the system’s continued inability to fit Cheryl into its already violent compartments.

Indeed, the final reaction of Alex is little more than liberal guilt that goes nowhere, certainly nowhere the show is interested in going. At best, “Fallacy” reveals something, partly unintentionally, about the way trans people are treated by the system: bounced violently between contradictory places and ideas, a process that exacerbates the harm already done by the system. At worst, “Fallacy” is, like Special Victims Unit and most similar shows, invested in the criminal punishment system’s status quo, and Cheryl can be seen as a lone aberration in what is presented as an otherwise just system.

Lack of intersectionality is a problem in these episodes, which almost exclusively focus on transphobia as removed from things like racism, classism, and ableism, even when trans murder victims are of color, as in Special Victims Unit‘s “Broken Rhymes” (2016). This is a problem because, as Lori Saffin points out, “examination of violence against transpersons in isolation is myopic because it fails to connect anti-transgender violence to other systems of oppression, such as poverty and racism” (142).

“Broken Rhymes”, as the final piece of a Special Victims Unit triptych that starts with “Fallacy” and “Transgender Bridge”, only increases the problems began in the first two pieces as the episode not only neglects to consider racism as a factor in transphobic violence but again, as in “Transgender Bridge”, locates transphobia as originating from people of color, specifically from Black masculinity. Thus, even the (relatively) more nuanced series like Special Victims Unit rarely if ever tackle structural transphobia (which is inextricable from racism and classism) in a meaningful way, whether the plot involves transgender victims, transgender killers, or the myriad transgender sex workers who frequently function as set dressing (or plot misdirection), in the latter case taking the criminalization of sex work, a major component of structural transphobia, as both just and simply a given even as trans sex workers are subject to violence as a result of criminalization both in real life and on television.

Epilogue: A Seat at the Table

Where crime shows preclude resistance against the criminal punishment system by eliding structural harms and aligning law enforcement with the fallacious hate-crime logic of justice, The Closer episode “Make Over” (2009) does the same through the assimilation of a token trans woman into the institution of law enforcement itself. “Make Over” features another rare appearance of a trans person in a role unrelated to either a trans villain or trans victim plot: Beau Bridges plays a police detective named Georgette Andrews who, unbeknownst to her former precinct, has transitioned and is living as a woman.

Georgette’s former precinct calls her back in relation to a previous case, and her former partner learns of her transition in a moment maximized for shock. The evocation of standard tropes like the reveal are important for positioning Georgette within the field of cis-oriented trans images, essentially reinforcing and highlighting her trans status through stereotypes. This is important, because the core of “Make Over” is the alignment of a white, middle-class trans woman with the side of law enforcement, and not only does her stereotypical nature make an easier story to swallow for cis viewers, it ensures that Georgette can inhabit the existing system without threatening it too much.

Trans women occasionally serve as investigative sidekicks, like RuPaul’s character Simone Dubois in “The Javelin Catcher” and Mikaela (D.J. ‘Shangela’ Pierce) in Terriers‘ “Pimp Daddy” (2010), members of a community or subculture unofficially assisting the police or private investigators, particularly when their own community is victimized. Georgette, though, has real police power, and embodies the assimilationist approach to trans rights which involves getting a seat at the existing table.

By the end of the episode, Georgette wins the admiration of the precinct, her former partner, and the audience because of her ability to work within the system, even going so far as to present herself as a man to do so. Georgette’s transition, presented as a disruption and then slight recalibration of the status quo, ultimately reminds audiences that amid a sea of trans victims and villains caught up in the criminal punishment system, those exceptional individuals can succeed within the system. Georgette’s success forecloses any real examination of the way trans people, especially trans people who are also of color, poor, and/or disabled, relate to the criminal punishment system. After all, Georgette made it, so everything must be okay.

Sources

Groothuis, Eleven. “Methodical Killing: Losing Trans Film Characters Devalues Them IRL”. Bitch Media, 24 July 2017. https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/stop-killing-trans-people-on-screen

Nair, Yasmin. “Why Hate Crime Legislation is Not a Solution”. Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Edited by Ryan Conrad. Oakland: AK Press, 2014.

Saffin, Lori A. “Identities Under Siege: Violence Against Transpersons of Color”. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment in the Prison Industrial Complex. Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith. Oakland: AK Press, 2011.

Segura, Liliana. “Do Hate Crime Laws Do Any Good?” Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Edited by Ryan Conrad. Oakland: AK Press, 2014.

Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Duke University Press, 2015.

———. “Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer: An Introduction”. Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Edited by Ryan Conrad. Oakland: AK Press, 2014.

Walker, Anastasia. “Empathy and Spectacle in the Transgender Killing Fields: On Media Coverage of Anti-Trans Violence”. Huffington Post, 15 April 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/empathy-and-spectacle-in-the-transgender-killing-kields_us_58f2884de4b0156697224ff3?utm_hp_ref=transgender