Sexual abuse affects any group and society, including the LGBTQ+ community. According to estimates, bisexual, lesbian, and gay people experience sexual harassment at comparable or greater rates than heterosexuals. According to studies, about half of transgender and bisexual females will experience sexual harassment at any stage in their lives. LGBTQ+ persons encounter increased rates of poverty, shame, and marginalization as a group, putting them at a higher risk of sexual harassment. LGBTQ+ persons are often subjected to a high incidence of hate-motivated abuse, which may take the form of sexual harassment. Hence, this paper will discuss the violence against the LGBTQ+ community, derived from a far deeper source, like race. This problem is a concern that must be resolved to put an end to hatred and abuse.
LGBTQ+ individuals are frequently hyper-sexualized, stigmatizing their marriages, and can lead to intimate partner abuse resulting from internalized oppression and guilt. Transgender individuals and bisexual females suffer the highest proportions of sexual aggravation within the LGBTQ+ society. Sexual abuse begins early, mostly during puberty, in all of these marginalized groups.
The work of Erdely (2014) illustrates the struggle for justice within the LGBTQ society. Cece’s altercation with Dean Schmitz illustrates the prevalent hate and violence directed to the LGBTQ community. CeCe McDonald was out with a group of friends and minding her own business when she was violently assaulted outside of a pub. She fatally stabbed her aggressor in the heart while defending herself. Although a scenario like this does not normally merit a full-length documentary, CeCe’s story stands out because she is a trans woman of color. The way she was handled in her legal case demonstrates that America has a long way to go in the struggle for LGBTQ equality.
Of what many observe as a direct hate crime, the justice system did not share those sentiments, and CeCe was considered a criminal rather than a survivor (Erdely, 2014). Since serving nearly three months in solitary confinement, she was sentenced to time in a male jail, which is a substantial risk for a trans woman. Friends, relatives, and activists fought to focus on Cece and the wider question of representation for all, regardless of gender orientation, color, or nationality.
From CeCe’s story, she experiences violence from her peers at a young age due to her sexual orientation. Kids began to ridicule her womanhood, and their teasing turns vicious. She is beaten up, pursued around the neighborhood, and during seventh grade, CeCe is assaulted by high school students chanting “kill that faggot.” They brutally kick her in the face that her incisor rips through her lip’s skin. Bullying is a common experience for transgender children, with almost nine out of ten being bullied by their group mates and forty-four percent physically attacked.
Living with a queer sexual orientation (a phenomenon that is believed to impact one person in every ten thousand people) reveals that trans women are constantly afraid of being identified as trans since responses can be cruel to the extreme (Erdely, 2014). While transgender people comprise about 10% of the LGBT population, they represent many hate-crime figures, with trans people almost twice as likely as their LGB counterparts to be victimized. Additionally, transgender people are all too often killed violently. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, transsexual people comprised more than half of the fatalities of the 25 confirmed anti-LGBT murders in 2012. All victims of the transgender homicide were transgender women of color.
Transgender murders are frequently horrific, involving mutilation and torture, as witnessed in the killing of Brandy Martell, who was shot in the genital, or the vicious hatchet dismembering of Diamond Williams in Philadelphia, where he was hacked into pieces (Erdely, 2014). Islan Nettles was also allegedly beaten to death in Harlem by a catcalling admirer who turned vicious, and the case went unresolved. The lack of resolution to violent cases against the LGBTQ+ community appears to be a constant reminder of disposability to transgender women.
Omar Mateen killed forty-nine people and injured more than fifty others dancing at the Latin Night in Orlando, Florida (Chávez 2016). The media immediately commented on Mateen’s links to Islamic extremism and “jihadist” tendencies. The gunman’s father revealed that the incident was not about religion. A while ago in Miami, Mateen became outraged after witnessing two men kissing. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss what similar acts of violence imply about how we think of racial justice and queer politics in our cultures.
The Orlando massacre seems to have nothing to do with public discussions of anti-black racism since the mass perpetrator was Arab American, with most casualties being gay, non-black Latinx people. However, what this experience highlight is the numerous tensions that exist between and within groups of color. From this incident, Arabs are often perceived as heterosexual, if not extremely heteronormative, and queer societies, often shrouded as Caucasian and U.S. citizens. In the age of LGBTQ rights, this implies that “predominantly Caucasian queer lovers” are mostly pitted against “black and brown hateful others,” as opined by Jin Haritaworn.
Many would argue that trans phobia and homophobia are more dreadful in colored communities, especially Muslim and black communities. The perceived prevalence of such dogma serves as a rationale to target colored communities in various ways to police, chastise, sanction, or execute them in the iterations of various versions of the war against terror. Many groups of color turn against each other at times like this. Hence, it is not merely an issue of Caucasian versus colored communities. Therefore, it is evident that this shooter was motivated by homophobia.
South Asians and Queer Arabs, including most transgender people of color, have persisted in fighting trans phobia and homophobia in their own cultures (Chávez 2016). These same activists fiercely defended their groups against the xenophobia and bigotry that has been directed at them in the context of LGBTQ freedom. These philosophers refuse to allow their groups’ challenges to serve as excuses for further brutality against them, which has some of the worst consequences for LGBTQ persons in such societies, who are then more vulnerable to violence and marginalized.
This tragedy, and how it can be used to excuse various acts ranging from barring Muslims to gun control, hate crime control, and advocacy for the LGBTQ society, has much to do with how humans ought to critically think more about the fraught connections between queerness and race. Hence, we need to resist participating in additional aspects of interpersonal and systemic violence. It is an important issue because whenever powerful state agencies, such as the justice system, security departments, or the entire United States government, take up the suffering of queer people to ensure that what occurs under these institutions does not also inflict human suffering.
The faces of oppression: Oppression is when individuals scale down the capability for other persons to be wholly human (Young, 2011). The violence against the LGBTQ community manifests oppression with five faces: Powerlessness, violence, marginalization, cultural imperialism, and exploitation.
Powerlessnes: Powerlessness is derived from Marx’s approach to socialism, where some individuals have power while others don’t. Some of the inherent injustices against the LGBTQ community linked to powerlessness include being subjected to disrespectful treatment, the inability to improve one’s capabilities, and a loss of decision-making power due to their undermined orientation.
Violence: Violence is often the most visible and evident type of injustice. Members of certain communities are aware that they are vulnerable to random and unprovoked assaults on their persons or. Such attacks do not always have a purpose, but are meant to humiliate, harm, and destroy the victim. The LGBTQ community lives under the fears of violence.
Marginalization: The act of confining or relegating a group of individuals to a lower social status or the edge or outer fringe of society is known as marginalization. It is generally an exclusionary mechanism. In America, the LGBTQ community is expelled from constructively participating in social life.
Cultural imperialism: Cultural imperialism entails creating a class of capitalist ethos and making it the standard behavior. The groups who wield authority in society have sway over how the individuals in that society behave. The Judeo-Christian faith and traditions, along with an Anglo ideology originating from Britain, form the foundation of American culture, which does not embrace the culture of LGBTQ.
Exploitation: Exploitation is the practice of using a person’s labor for gains by not fully compensating them. In America, the transgender population that may be pushed to prostitution is exposed to an increased peril of exploitation.
Queer sexuality policing has arguably become the most prominent and known point of interaction between the LGBT community and the criminal justice system (Mogul 2011). It is witnessed from scenes in Milk, the 2008 film on gay San Francisco employee Harvey Milk, of Caucasian gay men fleeing from surveillance as police officers, arrest them in the 1950s, to the historical confrontation with police in the early 1970s and late 1960s. The repression of law enforcement officers and the opposition to it are key issues of gay life in America.
The Marttachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two pioneering gay rights groups, have voiced grave concern about police brutality during bar raids. According to a survey commissioned by the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) in the mid-1980s, thirteen percent of lesbians and twenty-three percent of gay men reported being abused, violently intimidated, or physically assaulted by police due to their sexual identity (Mogul 2011). It is also a regular phenomenon for many LGBT people. According to the 2008 data presented to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), law enforcement personnel were the third-largest group linked to perpetrating anti-LGBT abuse. Between the years 2007 and 2008, there was a one hundred and fifty percent uptick in recorded police brutality against LGBT persons. The figure of police officers reported having participated in violent harassment of LGBT people soared by eleven percent. According to the NCAVP, private security officers and the police perpetrated half of the bias-related abuse reported by transsexual females in San Francisco in 2000.
As the Power plant incident revealed, queer policing had not improved dramatically from the days when it sparked resentment and opposition from LGBT groups. However, its scope has been reduced to some extent. Bisexual girls, active street youths, the homeless, and young queer persons of color are more susceptible to police violence (Mogul 2011). A review of AVP’s data further indicates that transgender people are more likely than non-trans individuals to be police brutality and harassment victims. ” In 2003, the National Center for Transgender Equality estimated that one in every four transgender persons in San Francisco had been assaulted or harassed by law enforcement. Police abuse against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people is still prevalent and far from declining.
With the exclusion of sodomy in law enforcement, opposition to violent surveillance of the LGBT community has been overwhelmingly absent from the objectives of established LGBT organizations from the mid-1970s, as police officers have steadily limited their attention to parts of LGBT populations with no voice or influence within and beyond those institutions (Mogul 2011). Comparably, while conventional police oversight and civil rights groups have advocated for transparency in a small number of incidents affecting LGBT people, policing of queer and gender sexualities has not been integral to their evaluation of the problem. It is important to put the ongoing police brutality against the LGBT population at the forefront of these protests to guarantee that the Stonewall shadows do not follow in the preceding years.
Social constructs of misconduct and deviance pervade the plethora of everyday activities and policies. Law enforcement officers determine who to intercept on the roads or streets, who to interrogate, arrest, search, and who to exercise brutal force on (Mogul 2011). The statistics demonstrating systematic and widespread racial profiling are both common and perplexing. Behind the statistics are narrations of regular abuse and unfair police behavior based on criminal presumptions that apply to specific individuals and not to others. Additionally, police officers often assume that transgender women are prostitutes, especially non-Caucasian transgender women. Transsexual women are often intercepted, harassed, and physically or sexually assaulted, irrespective of what they are doing at that moment. Gender nonconformity is considered sufficient to indicate “intended prostitution,” regardless of whether there is evidence to justify such a conclusion. When paired with hailing a taxi or the possession of more than a single condom, it becomes a concluded case.
In conclusion, the LGBTQ+ community is at risk of unprovoked violence due to their sexual orientation. This paper has also highlighted incidences where LGBTQ groups are violently victimized and murdered. Additionally, systemic discrimination is witnessed in state institutions like the police department, where police officers handle queer people with excessive force.
References
Chávez, K.R. (2016). Refusing Queer Violence. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3(3), 160-163.
Erdely, S. R. (2014). The transgender crucible. Rolling Stone, 1215, 48-66.
Mogul, J. L., Ritchie, A. J., & Whitlock, K. (2011). The ghosts of Stonewall: Policing gender, policing sex. QUEER INJUSTICE: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF LGBT PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES, 45, 53.
Young, I. M. (2011). Five faces of oppression (pp. 39-65). Princeton University Press.
