The case of slain Filipino transgender Jeffrey “Jennifer” Laude may have attracted attention here in Cebu but didn’t impact as much outside of the local lesbian gay bisexual transgender (LGBT) community.
The Cebuano LGBT community held a rally last week to condemn Laude’s death and appeal for public support and condemnation of violence committed against their ranks, even citing the death of Cebuano florist Daniel “Jun” Cañete as an example.
While Cañete’s death is still being investigated, initial results of the police investigation showed that the murder was far from being a hate crime.
Jennifer’s case calls to mind an episode of the popular TV series “Crime Scene Investigation” (CSI) in which a transgender was killed by a man who mistook the victim for a woman.
Enraged by the revelation that his date was not a woman, the suspect, who feared ridicule from his male friends after they goaded him into pursuing her, brutally killed the victim. In place of the CSI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is investigating Laude’s murder.
Sadly, the agencies investigating Cañete’s murder aren’t that sophisticated as shown by the rejection of the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office of the warrantless arrest of a minor suspect on grounds that it was made three days after the crime was committed.
The circumstances surrounding the murders of both Laude and Cañete are as different as day and night. Not a few even blame Laude for her fate because of her deception as well as the fact that she had a German boyfriend. But neither Laude nor Cañete deserved to be killed.
Cañete’s murder appeared to be more about money than a crime of misguided passion.
Yet the murders of the two victims are being identified by the local Cebuano LGBT community as a collective assault on their ranks. Their empathy is admirable even if they do draw snickers or a lukewarm response from a mostly heterosexual populace.
They’re not even linking their awareness campaign on their rights to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) to avoid being politicized. The largely conservative Catholic Filipino majority still has to internalize rights issues being lobbied by the LGBT such as same sex marriage and adoption of same sex couples.
But what all Filipinos should get behind is the call to stop violence against gays as members of humanity.
Regardless of one’s gender mindset or sexual preference, unjustified violence should not be tolerated or go unpunished.