(Washington, D.C. is) a tough place to grow up, especially when you're different. Especially when you're convinced that you're a girl with a boy's anatomy. Especially when the other kids taunt you and throw bricks at you and you have to quit school because you can't stand it anymore.
Especially when you're determined to live openly as a transgendered woman, considered by many the lowest of the low.
Stephanie Thomas could have told you all about it. Until last Aug. 12.
Around 11:30 p.m. the night of the 11th, 19-year-old Thomas and her best pal, 18-year-old Ukea Davis, reportedly told friends they were going to a nearby gas station for cigarettes. Nobody can say for sure where they actually went.
But just about everybody in the city knows that a little after 3 a.m., the friends were sitting in Thomas' Camry at a stop sign on the corner of 50th and C. Almost home. Then a car came up beside them, and the two were pelted with fire from a semiautomatic weapon. ...
Much, much more, from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=149Long piece, well worth the read.
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