Photo Credit: 13abc News
A 36-year-old transgender woman from Detroit, Kelly Stough, was murdered in the city's Palmer Park neighborhood and the Wayne County prosecutor's office charged a preacher with her murder. Albert Weathers, a 46-year-old preacher, was arrested on charges of open murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony (according to NBC News) and woman's gender identity was probably a motive in her murder. Weathers lives in Sterling Heights with his family and rents space at a church in Detroit, where he has a small congregation. It is unclear what relationship the woman and the preacher had.
Kelly's family and friends remembered her as a loving and courageous woman who was well known in the Detroit's ballroom scene. “I want people to know that because she was transgender doesn't mean that she was not loved, that she was not cared for,” Jessica Chantae Stough, Kelly’s mother, said in an interview with NBC News. “She has a family who cared about her, who loved her, and I want them to know that transgender ladies — expressly those of color — they're just not throwaways; people care about them.” A couple of years ago Kelly raised her voice against violence directed towards trans persons only to became a victim of that violence. She talked about trans residents not feeling protected by Detroit’s police.
Violence against transgender people has risen in 2018, with at least 25 trans people murdered in the U.S., according to the Human Rights Campaign. The majority of victims are young women of color. Unfortunately, this murder is just another example of dangers which transgender people face every day. "This case reflects the excessive brutality that members of Detroit’s transgender community constantly face," said Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general-elect and president of Fair Michigan, a program that assists in solving crimes involving members of the LGBT communities — as Metro Times reports. "We thank the Detroit Police Department for their efforts to investigate the facts of this tragic crime."
Besides transgender people, lesbian, gay and bisexual people are very often victims of hate crimes like this. Actually, LGBT people make up more than 16 percent of all hate crime victims, according to the FBI's report. This is a huge percent and it clearly shows that LGBT people are not only discriminated in today's society but also they are in real life danger. If this can be prevented in the future, it will require society seeing LGBT people as equals.
