The body of Marcal Camero Tye, a 25-year-old trans woman, was found on Highway 334 in Arkansas yesterday morning. It sounds, well, awful according to Sheriff Bobby May: “We’re going to be, of course, waiting for the lab results, the pathology reports, but it appeared to be that he did have a head wound and also that he had been drug by a car.” A witness reported hearing two gunshots. What might have happened?
Jennifer Bohannon considered Tye a good friend and had seen Tye just a few hours before the murder, “He had just left away from one of my other cousin’s house last night around about twelve something. He said he was on his way going home.” Bohannon says Tye didn’t hide the fact he was a transgender woman and she thinks he was picked up by someone “high” on drugs and looking for sex, “And when they brought him down here they probably figured out, you know, noticed that he was a “dude” and probably took it from there and shot him and killed him.”
That’s complete speculation at this point. But not unfathomable.
Mad Hominem
I’ve no clue if any newspapers have policies on handling pronouns (like if they use whatever matches your legal gender), but a) they really ought to, and b) those policies ought to reflect how their subjects actually identify. Nothing like reading about a possible hate crime and reading “he was a transgender woman.”
Holy Shit!
I know. One would think they’d at least honor the sense of self of the woman whose BRUTAL MURDERr they are reporting.
Shannon1981
This is just awful, and the way the cop and the “friend” were talking, with the wrong pronouns, and calling her a dude, that is just beyond disrespectful. May she RIP.
rhen
senseless and heartbreaking
Biff
I am in the Memphis area right now. The story is being reported in the local media. I saw it on the 6pm news on WREG last night. The reporters are having some problems with pronouns. More disturbing is that they kept saying things like “the body of a man in womens clothes was found on the side of the road.” They also referred to the victim as “a well known cross-dresser.”
Devon
That’s what I’d call a drag race.
EdWoody
In this particular case, I don’t they’re being deliberately disrespectful with the pronoun business. I imagine the Sherriff simply didn’t know what pronoun to use, and went for what he thought was probably the safest option. It’s just a lack of experience with these kind of situations, not a planned attack. I’m not saying he’s not wrong, just that he doesn’t know he’s wrong. Let’s not make the Sherriff the evil one in this situation, when that title learly belongs to the murderer.
Oprah
Dude. lol
Francis
Devastating. Hopefully we hear what happened, and the murderer is caught and, if Arkansas has the death penalty, executed.
John
A person is brutally murdered and the most are seemingly more concerned about the use or misuse of pronouns by police and reporters?
Forest for the trees…
Mad Hominem
John, the thing that bugs me about it is that it just reflects how badly society understands trans people (and crossdressers, for that matter). And on the extreme end of misunderstanding you find the fearful/disgusted reactions that provoke murders like this.
missanthrope
“A person is brutally murdered and the most are seemingly more concerned about the use or misuse of pronouns by police and reporters?
Forest for the trees…”
Words have their importance and can hurt, if you were killed somewhere would you feel that your memory would be dignified if news reports started out “A flaming f%^%ot was murdered down on 10th St. today……”
I doubt you’d like to see that despite being dead. There’s only so much that we, as anon people on the internet, can do about the murder (do you expect personally hunt down the murderers?), but we can do the rather simple thing of sending an email to the TV station to tell them how they’ve disrespected her.
And I don’t see anyone saying that the pronouns matter more than the horrific crime in the first place, so what are you talking about?n
John
You’re insane if you think calling someone a ‘flaming faggot’ and misusing pronouns is the same thing when it comes to this story.
Are we even certain the victim would’ve prefered the feminine over the masculine?
Different strokes for different folks. The only frame of reference we have is a ‘close friend’ of the victim who makes the same supposed mistake the officer and anchors did.
Not everyone will fit into your view of gender and how it relates to self-expression.
Jeffree
@John: Who was your comment directed at? Can’t tell by your post. Try again.
Sarah Rawlinson
I know it’s probably unnecessary for me to comment, but I just wanted everyone to know that I did NOT mean to “LOL” this story. I’m not familiar with this site and I was trying to view the “LOL” that was there, and see why someone would click that for this story, not realizing that clicking it would make ME “LOL” it…I didn’t think it even could since i don’t have an account. So I’m sorry about that, because I don’t think this is the least bit funny.
missanthrope
@John:
I believe John’s post was aimed at me.
John, read the full story as linked.
It says:
“Bohannon says Tye didn’t hide the fact he was a transgender woman and she thinks”
It seems that Tye was a trans woman, I think it’s better to go on what the friend says than the word of a sheriff in rural Arkansas who is probably not really receptive to gendering people correctly.
And yeah, calling a trans woman a man is every bit as hurtful as being called f%^&ot, I was called that a f%7^ot when I was living as a man and I’ve gone through a whole life of misgendering while living as a man and sometimes while living as woman.
Who knows, maybe Tye did identify as a man or was a drag queen, but by all indicators she identified as a woman.
And that reveals a blind spot to cis privilege here, if she were presumed to be a cis woman and found in women’s clothes, nobody would’ve even questioned her identification as a woman. But here her found in woman’s clothes, she was known to present as a woman in the community, and her friends said she identified as a woman.
Yet you continue to question her gender where you would probably not question anybody else’s gender. If that isn’t cis-sexism in operation, IDK what is. Even if you’re trans, I don’t care, it’s a very cis-sexist attitude you have.
mark snyder proud sissy
@Mad Hominem: The AP has rules/guides on this, but they too fail to use their own guides sometimes. So frustrating.