A South Carolina man was found guilty Friday of killing a Black transgender woman in the nation’s first federal trial over a hate crime based on gender identity.
After deliberating for roughly four hours, jurors convicted Daqua Lameek Ritter of a hate crime for the murder of Dime Doe in 2019. Ritter was also found guilty of using a firearm in connection with the fatal shooting and obstructing justice.
A sentencing date has not yet been scheduled. Ritter faces a maximum of life imprisonment without parole.
“This case stands as a testament to our committed effort to fight violence that is targeted against those who may identify as a member of the opposite sex, for their sexual orientation or for any other protected characteristics,” Brook Andrews, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina, told reporters after the verdict.
Look at the photos. She was beautiful. She was a beautiful woman. Even he thought so or he wouldn’t have been sleeping with her. But apparently worrying that other people would think he was sleeping with a “man,” she had to die.
And now people know he was sleeping with her anyway.
I am so glad this monster was found guilty, but it won’t bring Dime Doe back. And it won’t fix the problem of someone panicking over being found out about enjoying their time with a “fake woman” and killing her because of it. Hate crime laws won’t fix that problem. Society has to change.
Vote
Definitely necessary, but not enough. People need to be convinced that:
Trans women are women.
If you have sex with someone who is either the same biological sex or the same gender as you, there’s nothing wrong with that in either case.
Because this murder wasn’t caused by government policy, it was caused by centuries of queer oppression and genocide. I’m not even sure the whole ‘younger generations are better’ thing is necessarily true, because, although it doesn’t say Ritter’s age, Doe was 17. Ritter might be into much younger women, but more likely, he’s not much older. I think that would have been included in one of the several articles I’ve tried to find his age from.
So I have no idea how to convince society of those two things. I really don’t. But it is urgent that we find a way.
There was a moment in my life where I walked around late night Baltimore and talked with the trans sex workers about how things were going. They had a remarkably (sadly?) complex system with how they communicate to each other up and down the streets to keep each other safe.
A week or so later, I found an older article from a local paper on microfiche about how specifically black trans sex workers in Baltimore have had ridiculously high murder and assault rates for a long time now and too many people just don’t care enough to do anything about it.
I don’t know how, but yeah. Something’s gotta change.