Analysis of Hate Crimes in Transgender Communities

"Either/Or" and "Both/Neither": Discursive Tensions in Transgender Politics -- TEST

A young man, JT, arrives at the clinic to establish care. The front desk staff is confused because his gender is listed as female in the chart. After several minutes of discussion, your assistant walks out and calls for “Ms T.” When you walk into the room, he is clearly upset with the process. Transgender describes a person whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth. Gender identity is a person's inherent sense of being female, male, or an alternative gender.1 To adequately treat gender nonconforming patients, healthcare providers should recognize that not all patients fit into a binary gender description. In Louisiana, transgender people represent approximately 0.6% of the population, or 20,900 people.2 Transgender individuals experience a high degree of homelessness, violence, abuse, and hate crimes.3 Furthermore, transgender individuals have a suicide attempt rate of 41% that far surpasses the national average of 4.6%.4 In addition, transgender individuals battle extensive healthcare disparities, but aligning the treatment of transgender patients with the ethical principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, benefice, and justice can help eliminate these disparities.

Unveiling Koovagam

transgender, discrimination: Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, brought the limelight to transgender issues last year during her transition.FigureFigureFigureFigure“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., letter from a Birmingham Jail, AL, 1963 Transgender patients, because they are more likely to lack adequate health insurance and access to basic medical care, are also more likely to need emergency medical services, but their fear of discrimination and prior negative experiences also make them more likely to avoid seeking care. One study reported these poor experiences as high as 21 percent for all emergency department encounters for the transgender community in Ontario, Canada. (Ann Emerg Med 2014;63[6]:713.) The authors attributed bad encounters to health providers' lack of experience with transgender patients and insulting behavior. These issues place transgender patients at risk from inadequate emergency care, and merits the need for emergency departments to place heavier emphasis on improving the experience of transgender patients. Transgender individuals, those whose gender identity differs from their sex, is a subgroup of the gender nonconforming community, individuals who do not follow other people's ideas or stereotypes about their looks and behaviors based on their sex. Transgender topics have been covered more in the news and on social media in recent years, and efforts to destigmatize the transgender community have been supported by research suggesting that genetic variations, hormones, and brain structures were causes of disharmony between gender identity and phenotypic sex. (Gynecol Endocrinol 2004;19[6]:301.) This research also suggests that gender identity is not a dichotomous male or female designation, and argues that it may be a trait that lies along a spectrum. Society's use of physical characteristics to define gender identity can lead to emotional distress for those who disagree with this definition. For some individuals, this distress leads to gender dysphoria, a new DSM-V term aimed at eliminating the stigma attached to the former term, gender identity disorder. The psychiatric and medical conditions associated with the transgender community are just as important to understand as the conditions associated with other minority populations. This population also has a higher rate of suicide, potentially related to their higher rate of anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, these patients are also more likely to be victims of hate crimes, sexual/physical assault, and intimate partner violence. (Ann Emerg Med 2015;66[4]:417.) All of this information means transgender patients are more likely to need emergency medical services. Building Trust The first step toward improving the transgender patient's experience is to educate emergency physicians and staff on issues pertaining to their health. Studies have shown that a barrier to providing adequate care is physicians' lack of knowledge on specific gender nonconforming medical issues. That study from Ontario, Canada, reported that 54 percent of transgender patients had to educate their physicians on transgender issues. This void in knowledge can dismantle the patient's trust in health care. Emergency departments can remedy this by including gender nonconforming topics in their cultural competency curriculum, such as paying attention to laws surrounding single-sex bathrooms, health insurance, and spousal rights and how they may influence patient encounters. Emergency departments can also consider recruiting and hiring physicians and staff from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGTBQ) community to show the gender nonconforming population their commitment to diversity and inclusion. These efforts should also address prehospital care and be supported by the greater hospital administration, working toward creating a safe space to treat transgender individuals and discuss social and medical issues affecting these patients. Improving the emergency department encounter for the transgender community will not be an easy task. Some embrace the conversations and changes, but others may not fully engage in the movement due to personal beliefs. There will also be resistance because the rights of the transgender community are wrapped up in national and state legislation, which may limit the changes an emergency department can make. Regardless of the personal convictions of emergency physicians and government regulations, emergency departments must address the factors that lead to poor patient experiences among transgender patients. Ignoring the deficits in emergency health care delivery to transgender patients will only set a precedent to ignore deficits in care for other at-risk minority groups. Share this article on Twitter and Facebook. Access the links in EMN by reading this on our website or in our free iPad app, both available at www.EM-News.com. Comments? Write to us at [email protected].

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Thoughts and opinions about fertility preservation and family building from the transgender community—an interview-based approach

Value of a community pediatrics rotation for residents

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals face social, economic, legal, health, and health care–related disparities amid evolving threats to sociopolitical advances made in the last decade ([1][1],[2][2]). In response, organizations, including the National Institutes of

Misogyny is often evident in women’s experiences of (hate) victimisation. Debates are ongoing about whether to extend legal protections to recognise this accordingly in hate crime legislation. If successful, this would emulate feminist efforts to criminalise violence in which men disproportionately target women, such as sexual assault, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. However, as with these laws, the prevention or prosecution of such gendered violence may be impeded by cultural and structural patriarchy. Including misogyny in hate crime policy and legislation may help evidence the myriad ways in which men harm women, but it would be disingenuous to extol it as a preventative or prosecutory measure within this pre-existing patriarchal framework. In this chapter, we offer a critical feminist perspective on misogyny and its positionality with the contemporary hate crime paradigm. We revisit core feminist theorising on men’s violence towards women which highlighted the importance of a gendered analysis which demarcated the agentic male in women’s victimisation. Using this analytical framework, we explore a crucial victimisation paradox: misogyny both manifests in and is often integral to women’s experiences of hate crime, yet gender remains curiously overlooked in hate crime analyses. Offering new insight, we suggest that while male violence towards women is the original and most long-standing ‘hate crime’, the masculinisation of hate crime ideology foregrounds male experiences in a way that renders (women’s) gender insignificant. Our examination of women’s experiences of hate crime highlights the importance of an intersectional focus that also centres on misogyny.

In England and Wales, Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 made disability hate crimes legal. This advocated for increased sentencing for perpetrators whose crimes were motivated by or demonstrated hate against a person with a handicap or a perceived disability. Currently, this additional sentencing provision is the only legal option for prosecuting disability hate crime perpetrators. This thesis explores the experience and aftermath of hate crimes committed against England’s cognitively challenged senior victim group. The cognitively challenged elderly victim group is far more likely to face bias and violence; they have a greater likelihood of re-victimisation and suffer significant suffering as a result of hate crimes. To date, the voices of cognitively deficient elderly victims and survivors have been mostly absent from scholarly research and hate crime policies. As a result, the purpose of this article is to look into present policy barriers and how the cognitively challenged senior victim group might best receive support, justice, and interventions following discriminatory hate crimes. There has been little examination and discussion of intersectionality in disability studies and hate crime research. Common ideas fail to adequately reflect the multifaceted, overlapping, and complex experiences of danger and victimisation. This paper builds on studies on hate crimes against the cognitively deficient elderly victim group. It noted the challenge of categorising individual encounters as one type of hate crime. Victims and their relatives recognised that they were targeted for a variety of reasons, including their inability to care for themselves and their age. The study contends that the present strand-based approach to hate crime conceals a multitude of cross-identity characteristics that, when combined, might raise the danger of victimisation while decreasing a victim’s chance of reporting their experiences. To address vulnerability, safety, and hate crime against disabled people in England and Wales’ criminal justice, health, social care, and refuge systems, barriers to including the cognitively impaired senior victim group in the policy process are presented, allowing for targeted suggestions and changes on relevant issues.

Novel Research Methods Prescribed for LTC

Acts of hostility against people with disabilities remain largely overlooked by academia and the UK government. Despite this, between 2014/15-2016/17 the known incidents of disability hate crime in the UK increased by 249% with hate crime reports on Britain’s railways increasing by 23% between 2015/16-2016/17. Although estimates suggest that 19% of the global population has a disability and whilst public transport is a recognised trigger-environment for hate attacks against disabled people, no dedicated research existed, until now, to understand the victim experience. The key aims of this thesis are to transform academic understanding, methodology and theoretical frameworks.Public transport providers have an equality duty to protect all passengers; if not undertaken, minority groups remain susceptible. This thesis explores victim experiences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 56 participants. Public transport staff members were interviewed and policies explored to understand how diligently authorities, providers and staff meet their legal obligations to protect susceptible passengers as obliged by the Public Sector Equality Duty. To enable engagement with people who possess a range of physical and mental disabilities, specific ethical considerations and adaptions were employed and diverse communications facilitated.Findings reveal everyday abuse, distress and violence affecting disabled passengers and fuelling aversions to using public transport often results in social isolation. Conflicts can be triggered by occupancy of priority spaces with most abuse occurring on buses. Staff members hold little awareness of the problem or confidence to manage it. Most authorities do not discharge their safeguarding obligations, consequently providers are not incentivised to safeguard. The thesis outlines the implications of these findings for scholarship and policy offering recommendations which are designed to raise awareness of the problem and improve access to justice.

Hate crimes (or bias crimes) are crimes motivated by an offenders’ personal bias against a particular social group. Modern hate crimes legislation developed out of civil rights protections based on race, religion, and national origin; however, the acts that constitute a hate crime have expanded over time, as have the groups protected by hate crimes legislation. Anti-LGBT hate crimes, in which victims are targeted based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBT people are highly overrepresented as victims of hate crimes given the number of LGBT people in the population, and this is especially true of hate crimes against transgender women. Despite the frequency of these crimes, the legal framework for addressing them varies widely across the United States. Many states do not have specific legislation that addresses anti-LGBT hate crimes, while others have legislation that mandates data collection on those crimes but does not enhance civil or criminal penalties for them, and some offer enhanced civil and/or criminal penalties. Even in states that do have legislation to address these types of hate crimes, some states only address hate crimes based on sexual orientation but not those based on gender identity. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act gives the federal government the authority to prosecute those crimes regardless of jurisdiction; however, this power has been used in a limited capacity. Hate crimes are distinct from other crimes that are not motivated by bias. For example, thrill seeking, retaliation, or the desire to harm or punish members of a particular social group often motivates perpetrators of hate crimes; these motivations often result in hate crimes being more violent than other similar crimes. The difference in the motivation of offenders also has significant consequences for victims, both physically and mentally. Victims of hate crimes are more likely to require medical attention than victims of non-bias crimes. Likewise, victims of hate crimes, and especially anti-LGBT hate crimes, often experience negative psychological outcomes, such as PTSD, depression, or anxiety as a result of being victimized for being a member of an already marginalized social group.

Background: The Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach is recognized in the field of health promotion as a way to optimize intervention for promoting health by taking into account specific social, economical, and institutional situations of the community. However, the CBPR approach has not been applied in the field of community-based rehabilitation. Objects: This study was conducted to explore the self-perceived satisfaction of therapists and disabilities on the Short-term Intensive Home-based Rehabilitation (SIHR) program developed using the CBPR approach as well as determine the points that need improvement. Methods: This research was conducted through in-depth interviews. The SIHR program was developed, applied, and evaluated by both the researchers and four therapists on the basis of the CBPR approach. The SIHR program was administered to four disability for 1 hour a day, 2 or 3 times a week, for 8 weeks, and their self-rehabilitation was monitored once a week for 4 weeks. After all intervention periods, in-depth interviews were conducted by using a semi-structured questionnaire for the therapists and disability. Results: The therapists were satisfied with the contents of the SIHR program, such as behavioral change technique and goal-directed training. They were also satisfied with the process of developing the program through a community network. Disabilities were satisfied with the therapists' persuasive and emotionally interactive way of delivering the SIHR program as well as the individually customized rehabilitation training and physical improvement. The short period (8 weeks) of the SIHR program was noted by both therapists and disabilities as the part that needs improvement. Conclusion: The SIHR program developed using the CBPR approach was feasible and satisfying to therapists and disabilities. However, a longer SIHR program should be developed. Community networks could help therapists effectively utilize community resources and thereby provide more rehabilitation program for persons with disability.

Integrating community-based participatory research and informatics approaches to improve the engagement and health of underserved populations