History Repeats Itself
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008By Monica F. Helms
On December 17, 2008, the police found the lifeless body of Jennifer Gale on the streets of Austin, TX. They speculate that she died sleeping on a bench in the cold Texas night. The only woman’s shelter in Austin, run by the Salvation Army, turned her away because they didn’t want a transsexual woman in their shelter. If she wanted to enter a shelter, she had to strip herself of her dignity by using her old male name and dress like a man so she could be allowed in a men’s shelter. Austin has a both housing and public accommodation laws that include “gender identity.”
On December 17, 2002, a passer-by discovered the body of Alice Johnston near the Chattahoochee River in Georgia with a self-inflected bullet wound to the head. The day before, she sent out a final E-mail on her Yahoo account that said, “I will soon be homeless. Since women’s shelters in Atlanta don’t take transsexuals, I’m a goner.”