Crystal Edmonds of Baltimore was walking on a sidewalk in Northwest Baltimore in the wee hours Friday morning when someone walked up behind her and shot her in the back of her head.

She was found on that sidewalk and rushed to a hospital, but she died Friday afternoon.

The 32-year-old Edmonds was a transgender woman.

In the face of adults in positions of responsibility who were questioning the wisdom of recently adopted guidelines meant to assure the safety and well-being of transgender students in Anne Arundel County, MD, a student rose to speak.

Scott Howarth is a student at Anne Arundel High School and current president of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils.

A FreeState Justice has filed a lawsuit in Federal court against Talbot County on behalf of a 14-year-old Maryland transgender boy accusing an Eastern Shore school system of violating Title IX by denying him access to locker rooms consistent with his gender identity.

The boy, who was not identified in the lawsuit, will be a ninth grader at St. Michaels Middle-High School, and wants to try out for soccer in August, according to Jer Welter, FreeState Justice's deputy director and managing attorney.

During last school year, the boy used a gender neutral restroom far from the gym and his classrooms.

This has been a problem. It is stigmatizing for him. It marks him as different from the other students.

--Welter

Keyonna Blakeney, 22, was found dead in a room of the Red Roof Inn Saturday morning. She had suffered severe trauma to her upper body. Police classified her death as a homicide.

Police were also very quick to suggest that Keyonna may have been working as a prostitute and to release her arrest history.

It has been ten whole days since I wrote about the murder of a trans woman of color.

The respite couldn't last.

In the early evening on Thursday Zella Ziona, 21, was walking in an alleyway between two shopping centers in Montgomery Village, Maryland when she was surrounded by four or five teenagers. According to a witness, one of the youths pulled out a gun and shot Ziona in the head.

Zella was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Police initially identified the victim as a woman, but by later in the evening insisted on misgendering and dead-naming her. As usual, the media followed suit.

An impromptu vigil took place last night.

In a decision in Maryland Administrative LAw Judge Denise Shaffer has ruled that officials at Patuxent Institution in Jessup Maryland have failed to comply with the national standards for protection of sexual abuse as set forth in the Prisoner Rape Elimination Act.

Sandy Brown, a 40-year-old transgender woman, was serving a five-year sentence for assault in 2014 when she was placed in 24-hour solitary confinement for 66 days at Patuxent after a routine mental health screening. While so housed, Brown says that guards routinely watched her shower and encouraged her to commit suicide.

They didn't see me for the human being I am.

They treated me like a circus act. I understand how animals at the zoo feel now. They gawked, pointed, made fun of me and tried to break my spirit.

These were people I’d never met, people I’d never done anything to.

--Brown

PREA requires prisons to have clear policies and mandatory training for prison personnel concerning the treatment of transgender inmates.