Three victims
A San Jose woman who once sued a school district for firing her after sex-reassignment surgery has been charged in the stabbing and shooting deaths of three people in Oakland, authorities said.
Dana Rivers, 61, a former Sacramento teacher, faces three counts of of murder, one count of arson and one count of possessing metal knuckles, according to a criminal complaint filed in Alameda County Superior Court. The complaint alleged the victims, who were identified as 57-year-old Patricia Wright and 56-year-old Charlotte Reed, were stabbed and shot. The third victim, 19-year-old Toto Diambu, was shot.
A lesbian couple and the son of one of them.
Someone called police at 12:21 a.m. after hearing multiple gunshots and saw Diambu lying in the street. He had been shot.
As the arriving officers tried to help Diambu, one of them heard a loud banging coming from the garage, Jimenez said.
Moments later, Rivers walked out of the home, he said.
She was covered in blood, so officers quickly detained her. As officers searched her, they found ammunition and knives in her pocket, Jimenez said.
As they detained Rivers, “she began to make spontaneous statements about her involvement in the murders,” Jimenez wrote.
Then officers searched the home and found Wright and Reed dead inside. A fire was also burning in the garage.
This goes into the crime stats as a woman murdering three people. MRAs are throwing a party.
Wright, a part-time teacher in Oakland, and Reed were married for more than a year, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Diambu was Wright’s son.
Maybe they were all TERFs.
This… seems like random news with no bearing on anything you normally talk about, frankly. “Random trans person does unpleasant stuff” seems logically identical to the “Random woman does unpleasant stuff” or “Random black person does unpleasant stuff” you see on Breitbart et al.
No, it’s not at all like that, Enkidum. It’s perfectly in line with the sorts of things Ophelia writes about, which, as you know, include her objections to contemporary trans activism.
There is a major propaganda idea that holds universal sway with liberals (I am a liberal, mind you): that trans women are no different from actual women, that they have never had and do not now have male privilege, and that it is an act of bigotry to even notice that trans women are capable of and do exhibit the same patterns of violence that we observe among men. Because they are men.
This is not in any way a suggestion that “all trans women are murderers.” In fact, it’s ridiculous that I have to make that explicit statement. Pointing out a story like this, rather, is about:
1. Male pattern violence is a problem, and it is a problem that does not disappear simply because the perpetrator has transitioned.
2. It is inaccurate and will have negative societal consequences to characterize such perpetrators as “women murderers.” Reasonable people can agree that accurate crime statistics are important, because they inform what we do, or do not do, to address that problem.
Objecting to calling this a “murder by a woman” is a reasonable, calm, and legitimate thing to do. It’s not outrageous or presumptuous. I strongly believe that you would agree with this if you were not primed (excuse my presumption, and I’ll gladly accept a correction if I’m wrong) emotionally to see such conversations as “transphobia.” That emotional priming is real, and it short-circuits our responses and causes us to see otherwise reasonable claims as akin to a moral sin—bigotry.
I am not accusing you of being a terrible person or anything like that. I too was emotionally primed to view articles like this through that lens. I changed my mind a couple of years ago after a lot of very serious thinking and conversation with a wide range of people.
Please reconsider the issue.
Frankly, to borrow your term, I think you have an obligation to come clean. If you know what Ophelia writes about enough to make a judgment about whether this post is in line with the norms, then you must confess that you do understand and know that she writes about these trans issues frequently.
Given that this is true, why were you so comfortable saying something that I know—and you know—is not true? Why did you feel confident making that accusation? On what basis can you justify that? I’m not buying that you truly believe it, because you are not a dim-witted person.
I can’t improve on Josh’s response but I would just add that I don’t consider the murder of a lesbian couple (the targets of persecution in many contexts, I think we’d all agree) and the black (ditto) child of one of them “unpleasant stuff.” I consider it more than “unpleasant stuff.” I consider it likely to be political, in the sense of being discriminatory. I don’t know that of course, but I see it as likely. I do sometimes share reports of crimes that have that extra element, like the Delhi gang rape for instance, or the murder of Qandeel Baloch.
Ah, ok, I owe you an apology. So, sorry for making that assumption, and especially sorry that it was the first post and hence may kill other discussions.
I definitely missed the thrust of the post. I’ve been doing that a lot today, to the extent that I shared a FB post saying that Donald Trump is evil but not bigoted. I think I’m very tired.
I can see why you object to simply referring to this as a murder by a woman (I can also see why someone else might also object to simply referring to it as a murder by a man). I honestly just didn’t parse your second sentence about the crime stats in any sensible way. So I literally interpreted the post as being “trans woman commits murder, this is terrible”. Which it is, obviously, because it’s a murder. But there are a lot of murders, and Ophelia doesn’t write about most of them.
I don’t think I’m particularly primed to see the post as transphobic, because honestly I don’t spend a lot of time in the identity politics circles. Somewhat like Ophelia prior to the FTB exit, I think I would summarize my thoughts about trans/gender stuff as “confused, but doubtful that there is a simple account in which trans women are women FULL STOP”.
I do think it’s possible that the fact that the victims were lesbian and black means that the murder was a hate crime, but I’m not really sure I think it’s likely. But that’s neither here nor there.
Hopefully that’s an acceptable clarification. Again, sorry for commenting when the point clearly went WOOSH over my head and I didn’t bother to take the time to read more carefully.
And sorry for referring to you (Ophelia) in both the third and second person – some of this was written as a response to you (Ophelia) and some as a response to you (Josh).
As you may or may not remember, I’ve been reading your stuff since pretty much the first day you jumped on to FTB, and very occasionally commenting, so thanks for years of thought-provocation.
Quite all right! Thanks for the clarification. I wouldn’t want to see it described as a murder by a man either. I think it should be trans woman – which is accurate, and not pejorative, and reasonable.
I wasn’t even necessarily thinking the murders were hate crimes…more that some sort of inter-identity resentment might be in play. Some trans women are weirdly hostile to lesbians.
The statistics are that about 90% of homicides are committed by males (source). Let’s say that roughly speaking men are ten times more likely to murder. Then for every 100 male murderers, there are 10 female murderers.
Transgender people are about 0.6% of the population (source). Let’s say, generously, that trans women are 0.5% of the population (i.e. five out of six trans people are ‘mtf’). Let’s also assume (ludicrously) that trans women are typical “males” and murder at the same rate as cis men. Then, since males are 50% of the population, and trans women are 0.5% of the population, one out of one hundred males are trans women, right? So for every 100 male murders, 1 is a trans woman.
Our statistics then look like this: 10 females murderers to 100 male murders with 1 of those males being trans.
Now what happens if we stop counting trans women as “males” and start counting them as women? Then we have to move one murderer from the “male” column (which we will rename “men”) into the female column (which we will rename “women”).
Our stats are now: 11 women murderers to 99 men murderers.
The effect of this reclassification has been to reduce the percentage of murders committed by men/males from 91% (100 / 110) to 90% (99 / 110).
Hardly cause for MRAs to throw a party.
Meanwhile…
We can all agree this is “male violence”. But it seems to me that transphobia, fuelled in part by scaremongering about trans people, is a much greater social problem than some supposed hypothetical marginal increase in the number of homicides attributed to “women”, per se.
Idly curious: if, hypothetically, a careful & intricate study were done that found that the violent crime rate of trans women was lower than the rate of violent crime committed by women as a whole… how inclined would you be to bring the attention of your readers to that study?
The only plroblem here then is that this is an isolated item of news; making the case that trans women have the same level of violence as men requires aggregating such stories, i.e. statistics.
But to address #1 Enkidum, a problem with compiling statistics on biological relationships to criminality is that the person is genetically male, and might be trans [due to declaring herself female] or trans [due to experiencing body dysphoria and undergoing pre-puberty hormone replacement + surgery] or anything in between. It might be reasonable to record the latter as female in crime statistics, as that person is likely indistinguishable from female without a blood sample analysis, while the former should not qualify at all.
From the story, we see that the suspect is aged 61, and had sex reassignment surgery in 1999. Setting aside the specific month of birth and of the surgery, this means she was 44 at this time and thus had reached male physical maturity; the article further hints that she also presented and socialised as male leading up to that surgery. We are not privy to further medical information, such as whether she has ongoing hormone therapy or whether she is hormonally identical to a male.
And so, Ophelia’s point: to put this down as a female statistic is dubious, and potentially misleading to say… anyone trying to compile statistics on this subject.
(This is more or less the same thing Josh wrote, but a) I had half written this before seeing that and b) he did not touch on biology much.)
I do think that Silentbob is correct to point out that this won’t actually affect statistics at all – speaking as someone who looks at data for a living, this is noise, unless there’s a sudden rash of trans murderers (as opposed to murders of trans people, which are of course appallingly common). To the extent that there’s a problem with the classification here, it’s more of an abstract one. While I agree that this abstract problem is genuine, it has no real impact on anything.
It does have an impact on societal *perceptions*, even if it doesn’t have what you would accept as a statistically significant effect in a purely abstract, scientific sense. I object to media reportage that simply states “woman”, on those grounds. Even if you believe it’s not statistically worth noticing. People get to object to that. It’s OK and not insane to note it.
For me, the point of flagging up crimes like this is to refute the (again, I said this very clearly above, I wasn’t abstruse) claim that “no trans woman has ever done anything like that.” This claim is used to characterize women as hysterical when they object to new laws that allow anyone, even men with male plumbing, to access female-only spaces. That is happening, it is what the discourse is like today. That too is reasonable to object to.
I dispute the HRC’s claim that a fixed number of transgender people were murdered. Why do I dispute that? It’s not cussedness, SilentBob, no matter how badly you need to believe that mere bigotry alone motivates me.
There is no consistent definition of transgender. We cannot agree that we’re speaking about the same thing, because questioning what we’re speaking about itself as treated as an act of bigotry.
Are we referring to male-bodied people who sometimes wear dresses? Are we referring to people who’ve had full sex reassignment surgery? Or, are we also including people who would call themselves “transvestites” and would not claim that they, actual men, are “truly female”?
These are not the same motivations. So what does it mean to say they all represent “transgender people murdered”?
What about the notable connection between prostitution and drug sales that many of these victims have? Simply stating that “being trangender makes you more likely to be murdered than being any other kind of person” just doesn’t make sense under this rubric.
Enkidum—thank you for clarifying above. I appreciate that, and it also shows how my own prior priming informed what I supposed your motivations to be. I’m sorry about that.
I do not extend this charity to SilentBob, however, because I do know him to be consistently dishonest (usually by pretending that he doesn’t understand what his interlocutor has said, or pretending that they said something else) and untrustworthy.
Kevin Kirkpatrick is also consistently unable to argue about this without well-poisoning, innuendo, and disingenuous questions and displays of shock-horror.
@Josh
Let’s talk well-poisoning and disingenuousness. You attribute to the “major propaganda idea” three claims:
* that trans women are no different from actual women
* that they have never had and do not now have male privilege
* that it is an act of bigotry to even notice that trans women are capable of and do exhibit the same patterns of violence that we observe among men
I know of no transgender activist organization nor any propaganda therefrom to which these would apply. The first claim is an incoherent logical contradiction. The second is blatantly false. And for the third; I’d accuse nobody of anything – though I’d point out that claims of “pattern” are what people generally present alongside statistics, not anecdotes (lest we find ourselves reduced to discussing “patterns” such as “Mexico sending us their rapists”).
But you did say it was propaganda, and the nice thing about propaganda is that it is a widely publicized message – so it should be very easy to point to examples that back up your descriptions of it.
Kevin, I’m not having a bullshit session with you. Complain all you want, but I’m not engaging you. You’re a confabulator.
@Josh
Re-read the comment section. You just did engage me. Not the other way around.
That said – I’m disengaging from our exchange (unless/until next time you wish to pull me in).
The split between OB and multiple FTB authors was directly caused by friction over the first item – that that trans women are no different from actual women – had you forgotten that? Or merely omitted it? It’s such an obvious example that I’m not confident you are engaging here in good faith.
I was wondering that. I don’t have the energy (or the time to spare from trying to follow all the Trump news) to tangle with Kevin all over again, but I did wonder about that. “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” That was the question put to me, and my refusal to say a flat “yes” without any qualifications is what led to the eruptions of hostility toward me from many FTB colleagues. It’s ludicrous to claim that’s not a thing.
Nobody is claiming, or has ever claimed, that transgender women are “women”, where womanhood is taken to describe those
1) born with a vagina
2) raised in a patriarchal society
3) maturing to an adult who menstruates, can be impregnated, can give birth, experience miscarriage, or opt to terminate a pregnancy, and experiences menopause
4) and must endure the discrimination, prejudice, and violence solely reserved for female adults in this patriarchy.
The contention is over whether that is the best, or solely-valid definition of womanhood. The yes-no question I see as meaningful isn’t, “Are trans women, women?”, it’s, “Does “womenhood” only describe those who can check #5, ‘All of the above'”? The more accepting society becomes of the mantra “just be yourself”, the greater numbers there will be of people, born with penises, who adopt and cling to female identities from age 4-5 and thereafter. And I’d argue that anyone who insists that such nearly-full-life women aren’t *really* women (or, nearly-full-life transgender men aren’t *really* men), is a kindred spirit with those who’d claim, “marriage is one man one woman because tradition”.
A total aside – I have been GLUED to your coverage of Trump. In the heat of the last entanglement, I’d sunk so low as to level the charge of “Google alerting on ‘cis'”. That was uncalled for, and I am sorry for going there. But I don’t think an apology alone conveys just how much that comment short-changes my appreciation for the work you do on this blog.
Most of them probably weren’t hate crimes in the legal sense. I’ve looked into this a bit. In 2015, some of the murders were motivated by domestic violence, some by robbery; the motive was unknown for less than half. Three of the “unknown motive” murders I read about looked like straight-up hate crimes; of course others could have been hate crimes as well. But it’s a bit misleading to imply that all trans murder victims are victims of transphobic violence. Most of them are poor people of color victimized by the same evils that threaten other poor people of color.
@Lady Mondegreen, If you apply the same scrutiny to the three deaths reported in the OP, what does your anti-TERF hate-crime-o-meter register?
^ That they are three murders by a trans woman, which will be marked as female despite living 44 years as a male.
Wikipedia says only 17 states have hate crime laws that cover sexual orientation and gender identity. Why would a crime be reported as a hate crime if there is no relevant hate crime statute in that jurisdiction?
Kevin @ 22 – Ah, thank you. I keep uneasily wondering if I’m driving everybody up the wall (or driving them away) with the focus on Trump, so I’m particularly glad to know that. For the record, I don’t have any such Google alert. I don’t have any Google alerts, because I have enough overload already without adding more. I do however read a lot of news and commentary on the subject.
I think the way you put your claim is misleading. People don’t argue it that way around. They don’t argue that if women are defined as people 1) born with a vagina 2) raised in a patriarchal society 3) maturing to an adult who menstruates, can be impregnated, can give birth, experience miscarriage, or opt to terminate a pregnancy, and experiences menopause, 4) and must endure the discrimination, prejudice, and violence solely reserved for female adults in this patriarchy, then trans women are not women. They argue that 1-4 have nothing to do with being a woman and that it’s only how you “identify” that counts. They argue that it’s transphobic to claim that 1-4 are relevant to being a woman. They abuse feminist women who say that excluding 1-4 is harmful to women and feminism.
Again, I refer to my experience in summer 2015. I tried very hard to make the kind of careful delineation you offer there, and that is what ignited all the explosions. I was not allowed to argue that. Colleagues attacked me viciously on their blogs for arguing that. So no, the claims are really not as limited and careful and reasonable as what you claim there. If they were the shunning would never have happened.
(I left out a crucial “not” in the above and then amended it, so if you read it via email notification it will be missing the crucial “not.”)
Kevin @ 22 postscript –
But it’s not apology alone, is it. You did something else very soon after that comment, that had me deeply puzzled at the time. I debated emailing you to thank you & ask about it but hesitated. Now I understand. Thank you. :)
What Holms said.
Notice that nobody has claimed that Dana Rivers committed a hate crime (in fact, as with a number of the murders Silentbob referred to, we don’t know the killer’s motive.)
And I’m baffled by your hostility. Trans activists regularly trot out these sad statistics (“X trans murder victims so far this year!”) as though they were evidence of an epidemic of murderous anti-trans hate. Yet looking for actual evidence is worthy of mockery?
@29 – yes – that was action based on the same reflection: aside from our disagreements, realizing I was way overdue in showing appreciation and lending support for your blog’s rich content and the work you put into it.
Looking back @22 and @27 (I was off-line much of the weekend, so coming in with fresh eyes this morning). I do think there’s probably more linguistic than epistemological differences in our vantage points. Not just over the words “man”, “woman”, and “gender”, but even “transgender”. Because in a descriptive sense, the pre-transition, transition, and post-transition experiences of early-life-transitioning and late-life-transitioning individuals (roughly speaking, pre-pubescent and post-pubescent – though even that is perhaps too coarse) is vastly different.
By a strange statistical glitch in the cosmos, a younger cousin of mine, in her early 20’s, recently underwent a male-to-female transition. This is in a context where the knits that once held my extended family together have frayed enough that this is one of several cousins with whom I’d had virtually no prior interaction. And yet, my immediate family’s experience of navigating through our son’s transition over the past 3 years was broadly known, and served as grounds for both my cousin and aunt to reach out to my wife and I for insights/advice.
And while our hearts went out to both of them for the struggles and hardships they were enduring, ultimately, we had very little tangible guidance to give. In most respects, we were simply out of our element: my cousin showed me jaw-droppingly hostile and threatening texts from anonymous sources that began arriving within days of her coming out as transgender at work. She relayed stories of assault at bars – “heh, grabbing you like this would get me in trouble if you were actually a chick” – met by amused reactions of bystanders “hah, yup, he’s got point there!” (and having to wonder: would LEOs in her area really disagree?) We learned how a decade of her efforts to suppress her longing to live as a girl had translated into deeply-rooted symptoms of depression and various forms of addiction that she was battling on top of such grotesque sexism & transphobia itself.
Truth is – though there were certainly similarities in their respective hardships, (particularly in some of the “driving forces” behind them), my son, wife and I had virtually nothing to learn&apply from my cousin’s experiences, nor vice-versa.
And if my son, now just a year away from having lived the majority of his life as a boy, of his own volition and supported by his health-care professionals, does opt for a path that takes him through suppressing female puberty, undergoing testosterone replacement therapy, and perhaps even full SRS over the next 5-15 years… would it really be useful, linguistically, to use the same label to encapsulate that life of a transgender 23-year-old and that lived by my present-day 23-year-old cousin?
And yet, that is the lens through which much popular discourse and commentary on the subject of transgender rights & trans activism is conveyed. No hard point here, just my own present meanderings on the subject.
@ Lady Mongreen – not explicitly, no; but the juxtaposition of a Ophelia’s previous article, “Is TERF a slur”, and her trailing thought on this article, “Perhaps they were TERFs.”, to my eye, amounts to an equivalent implication.
My overarching point in my response to you and my earlier hypothetical: on the question, “Is there a hate-crime pattern of violence from trans activists towards women?”, there’s an air here wherein anecdotes seem to suffice for a resounding “Hell yes there is. Here’s an article about a murder. And here is another article about a serial rapist. And here are some horrific/threatening tweets”. But on the question, “Is there a hate-crime pattern of violence against transgender women?”, the reaction seems to be “Whoa… hey, slow down. We’re all skeptics here, so let’s take a closer look at the actual statistics…”
I really don’t mean to say or imply that there is a hate-crime pattern of violence from trans activists towards women. I don’t know that at all, and I don’t really think it or suspect it either.
I do decidedly think there’s a pattern (and an easily-discovered record) of verbal violence, or violent rhetoric if the first is too strong, from a minority (I hope) of trans activists towards women and especially feminist women. But literal violence? No.
But I think rhetorical violence and literal violence are linked, and I think the link makes rhetorical violence very worrying. I think the ragey activists are working up hatred against feminist women in just the same way Trump worked up hatred against many types of people during his campaign. I think working up that kind of enraged hatred can motivate violence.
Also, my “trailing thought” on this article (I’m not entirely sure what that means – unstated thought? veiled thought? half-formed thought?) isn’t that perhaps the victims were “TERF”s. It’s more that perhaps the chronic rage at lesbians as such might have played a role. Obviously I don’t know that. But the violent rhetoric aimed at lesbians is a very bad thing, and it should stop.
That’s not a question I was answering. I don’t doubt there is violence against trans people that is motivated by hatred of gender nonconformity.
Really? Where are you seeing that reaction? Honest question, because I haven’t seen much skepticism about the numbers at all, at least not in the mainstream media, and certainly not from the left. Even the absurd “1 in 12” claim was accepted by a lot of people who should have known better.
And exaggerated claims are used to silence and to justify hatred directed at those who question the narrative. They have “blood on their hands” because “people are dying.” Ophelia got plenty of that last year.
Speaking of narratives:
Oh, dear. How inconvenient. I thought it was because trans women inexplicably hate lesbians?
Totally off topic, did anyone hear of the cisgender woman who stabbed three victims in separate incidents? (And then went off on a bit of a spree to stab a few more.) “Male socialization”? Obviously not.
Perhaps we should be more cautious about drawing conclusions that affirm our pre-existing biases? (I mean, if we want to be rationalists, rather than ideologues, and avoid fashionable nonsense, and shit like that.)
Perhaps we should be more cautious about confusing musings with conclusions.