Transgender activists marched Tuesday to protest the savage beating of Kathy Sal in Jackson Heights last Sunday and the actions of the police and media since that took place.

NYPD identified the victim as a man in their report, even though they were aware that she was known by a female first name. Television station WCBS deadnamed the victim (deadname: verb transitive, "identify a transgender person by their former name instead of their perferred name"). The Daily News and Newsday both misgendered the victim.

Daily News headline: EXCLUSIVE: Crossdressing Queens man brutally attacked, suspect repeatedly smashed his head into a curb

Newsday headline: NYPD: Cross-dressing man attacked in Jackson Heights, Queens

It seems to be a day for skimming the news involving the trans community. What do we discover?

The PP shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, is not transgender, but this won't stop right-wingers from using the claim, or anything else they can grab on to in order to demonize transgender people as threats to public safety.

Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton has been found guilty of choking and then drowning transgender woman Jennifer Laude in Olangapo City, The Philippines.

I first wrote about Samantha Hulsey back in January, when she was attacked with a friend on a Muni bus by a man who stabbed her twice with a steak knife while calling Hulsey and her friend "faggots".

On November 15 a San Francisco couple, Dewayne Edward Kemp, 36, and Rebecca Louise Westover, 42, were arrested near Eighth and Mission for allegedly assaulting transgender resident Samantha Hulsey.

In court Friday afternoon, Kemp and Westover pleaded not guilty to the charges, contending that they were acting in self-defense when Westover threw a cup of hot coffee an Hulsey and her girlfriend, Daira Hopwood and Kemp punched Hulsey four times in the face while uttering transphobic comments.

All over the world people are in universal agreement that the solution to the endless, horrible wars in the middle east is to escalate the levels of violence. All the Republican presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, leaders from both political parties, foreign leaders such as Putin, Presidents Cameron and Hollande, news media pundits and former generals are speaking in one voice.

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.

...from nearly 23 years of writing about transgender issues on the Internet...

...is that cisgender people who deign to write about trans issues (overall, a rarity) are likely to have their voices heard by a much larger audience than transgender people. It is just so easy to write off anything that arises from our mouths or pens or keyboards as self-serving claptrap...because, you know...

...we're trans.

We're the voices that don't actually exist in the minds of too many religious fundamentalists and their ilk. A recent study of Fox News by Media Matters showed a concerted effort to villainize our community. People don't listen to the words of villains.

So it is with heart felt gratitude that I welcomed Wednesday's ope-ed in the Detroit Free Press by Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign and Judy Shepard, cofounder of the Mathew Shepard Foundation, End epidemic of violence against transgender women.

I'm supposing they published this in Detroit because that has been one of this year's hotbeds of anti-trans violence. Other hotbeds...over the past few years...have been Washington, DC, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Houston.

...cause the vandals stole the handle.

A group of graffiti artists (BlakCollectiv), led by Kalkidan Assefa, created an impressive, and legal, mural during Ottawa's Pride Week honoring transgender women of color who had been murdered during the past year.

On Wednesday night an unknown person or group who were offended by the memorial spray painted over much of the mural and added these sentiments:

RACIST BULLS--T

ALL COLORS MATTER

ALL LIVES/NO DOUBLE STANDARD/YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

"Terrors Reign, The Streets of Chicago Given Over to Howling Mobs of Thieves and Cutthroats."
-Chicago Times headline, 1877

The 2015 US Conference on AIDS was held September 10-13 in Washington, DC. On the opening day dozens of transgender and gender-nonconforming people seized the stage at the lunchtime plenary session to draw attention to HIV+ gender-variant people.

The group was chanting, We are not gay men! to protest the inclusion of trans women in gay male research and statistics.