To paraphrase an old Kermit the Frog ditty, ‘It Ain’t Easy
Being Gay.’ See, we’re often told, by many more people than we’d like, that we’re
an abomination, a sin against nature, a destroyer of marriage, a pedophile. It
gets old.
But then we have days like we had earlier this week when
Jason Collins comes out as a gay man, and most, most, of the responses are lovely and accepting and kind of ‘so
what, who cares.’ Those days I like; and then we have days like this, and headlines like this from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Oddly Dressed Body Found in Olmsted Township Pond Identified
Oddly dressed? The title
originally said ‘Oddly Dressed Man.’ See, it was a transgendered body, born
male and named Carl Acoff, who, after what I can only guess was a lifetime of
struggle and questions and pain, began identifying herself as Cemia Acoff.
And it was Cemia Acoff who was murdered; she was stabbed to
death, tied with a piece of rope to a block of concrete and her body was thrown
into a pond. But, almost as disturbing, and disgusting, as the murder
itself, was the way the story was reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
See, even before Cemia Acoff’s body was
identified, the newspaper reported that the ‘oddly dressed man’ was found
wearing a red Betty Boop tank top, three black bras on top of one another, and
a light black hooded jacket, and was naked from the waist down.
The body was never identified as male
or female, and because, I’m guessing, of the odd outfit, the paper first took
to calling the body ‘it.’ It. Not even human; of course, once the outrage began
to stir, the paper suddenly changed its tone and began referring to Cemia Acoff
as ‘the body.’ Not male, not female; the body.
It was almost like being murdered
twice. And then she was murdered again, by the
same paper:
Brutal Slaying Marks the End of Clevelander's Fight for Acceptance
That was their next headline, sort of implying
that, by being stabbed and tied to a block of concrete and thrown into a pool
of water, somehow Cemia Acoff’s ‘fight for acceptance’ was over. The fight for
acceptance wasn’t over, life was
over.
The fight might never be over.
I
understand that people, some people, have a kind of icky reaction to a discussion of transgendered people. I understand that people, some people, think that if you’re
born with a penis, you’re male, and vagina automatically makes you female.
But, how would those people feel, being born with a
penis, but a brain and a heart and a soul that says to you, each and every day,
each and every moment, that you aren’t male; that you are somehow born ‘wrong’. And
how might any other transgendered person feel, reading a story like Cemia Acoff’s
and seeing the words ‘it’ and ‘oddly dressed’ and ‘the body’? We need to get over the 'icky' factor and realize that transgendered people are people, and they deserve the same dignity, in life and death, that anyone else deserves.
But the newspaper didn't stop there. As if to sort of make it okay
that this body was stabbed and tied
to concrete and drowned, the paper decided to publish any and every little run-in with
police that Cemia Acoff ever had, as if that somehow had anything to do with
the story, or with her murder.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer is a
newspaper, and an online source of news. News, generally speaking, should be
factual, and the facts are that Cemia Acoff was brutally murdered. The facts
aren’t helped by describing her in a derogatory manner, and they aren’t served
by a discussion of her wardrobe or any kind of criminal background she may have
had.
A human being was murdered and the Cleveland Plain Dealer
didn’t have the decency to tell us the story without their own snickering
commentary.