From Questioning Transphobia comes an excellent analysis of the recent killing of Angie Zapata, who was murdered because she was a trans woman.

Allen Ray Andrade, 32, is currently charged with second-degree murder in the death of Angie Zapata, who was born Justin Zapata but lived as a young woman. Andrade is being held without bond. It was unclear whether he has hired an attorney.

Prosecutors have 72 hours to file charges, including a possible first-degree murder commission of a hate crime. Andrade admitted to investigators that he beat Zapata first with his fists and then with a fire extinguisher after he grabbed her genitalia and discovered Zapata had a penis, according to a Weld County arrest affidavit…

What stands out about this case is the way people have quickly closed ranks around the killer, saying that this is not a hate crime and attempting to blame his violence on “trans panic” (the idea that men experience a sort of temporary insanity when they find out someone is trans). ABC freaking news starts out its story with this sentence:

A man accused in the beating death of a transgender teenager he met online snapped when he learned in person that the 18-year-old living as a woman had male sex organs, authorities in Colorado said Wednesday.

Snapped? As in “went insane?” As in the media is actually feeding the defense a temporary insanity defense, and priming potential jurors to believe it? Uh huh.

And Cara from the Curvature points to other news sources, who are printing stories that say stuff you couldn’t make up, like this:

Experts say it may not be easy for prosecutors to prove it was a hate crime.

“A prosecutor is going to talk about this being a knowing killing, that the defendant knew what he was doing. The defense is going to argue that it was the heat of passion, that he did it because he, the defendant, was so upset for being duped,” said 9NEWS legal analyst Scott Robinson.

Robinson believes that while the prosecution will be seeking a conviction for second-degree murder, the defense could seek a lesser offense of heat of passion manslaughter.

“This is not a classic hate crime, where an individual is beaten to death because of their orientation. This is a case when an individual reacted irrationally and unlawfully to learning they had been fooled,” said Robinson.

I’ll say this slow, so Mr. Robinson can understand me: this. murderer. was. not. “duped.” He was not “fooled.” Angie Zapata said she was a woman and she was a woman. Andrade was transphobic, so he couldn’t accept that. In the most “classic” sense of the term, he committed murder as a hate crime against Angie, specifically to punish her for being transgendered.

When certain types of violence are considered acceptable somewhere in our minds, we find ways to make the motives of the perpetrator “better.” Specifically, there is a cultural idea that men (not women) have some sort of magical loss of control when they become sexually aroused or angry, and particularly when their masculinity is threatened. That’s why there used to be laws on the books lessening the sentence for men who killed their wives after discovering infidelity, and why murderers have gotten away with killing gay men for “coming on to them.” That’s why men are acquitted of raping women for wearing the wrong thing.

Of course, this supposed testosterone-fueled “insanity” only justifies violence toward certain people… You know, the worthless ones. People who are either women, or who have been “demoted” to the status of women, as gay men and trans men can be at a moment’s notice.

The trans panic defense would never fly in a culture that expected men to avoid violence in the same way it expects women to avoid violence. The same belief in the “uncontrollable male” that lets so many men get away with sexual assault is clearly at work here.

It would also be impossible if transgendered people were considered to be as human as cis people. Andrade would not have anyone saying that his crime wasn’t a “classic” hate crime if he had killed a male friend he believed to be white when he discovered that the guy was actually biracial.

So, does your college have a program in place to prevent men’s sexual violence that challenges the myth of the male “loss of control,” and counters the devaluation of the people most likely to be targeted for violence (women, people of color, LGBTQ folks)? If not, why not? Are they waiting for a case like this to happen on campus, or just hoping they’ll be able to cover it up when it does?

*Update: This post by brownfemipower made me realize that I really dropped the ball in giving an analysis of the fact that Angie was not just a trans woman, but a Latina trans woman. By far the majority of victims of transphobic violence are women of color, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Angie’s ethnicity played a role in her victimization. After reading BFP’s post, I thought about the murdered trans women I knew off the top of my head, and did an internet search to look for stories of other trans women who have been murdered. At first it was just a quick search, but I’ve been looking for nearly an hour now, and every. single. one. that has come up has been a woman of color. The numbers are so overwhelming, and the trend so unmistakable, as to be similar to the number of women killed by partner violence versus the number of men killed by partner violence.

To put it mildly, it’s clear that there is no separating Angie’s murder from her entire identity as a Latina trans woman.