A Girl Like Me

Yesterday I was flipping through channels before I had to go to work and I found a movie on Lifetime that looked interesting. It was called A Girl Like Me. This film was about a boy who felt he was a woman in a male body and eventually began to live her life as a transgender. Throughout the film it shows how hard life was for Eddie when she was younger before she began to look like a woman. Her grandmother refused to let her be the maid of honor in her sister's wedding and her uncle tried to force baseball on Eddie to try to make him more of a "man." This film was based on a true strory and Eddie was eventually killed by three teenage boys when they found out that she was actually male. The movie was very disturbing but the worst part was the court convictions at the end. Although the three boys were convicted of murder (one for manslaughter), he court refused to consider the crime a hate crime. As this was based on a true strory it got me thinking about the way society views transgenders, especially male transgenders. If this had been a crime against a black woman or male because of their race, the perpetrators would have been convicted of a hate crime. However, because this was a male posing as a female, the jury did not feel it was appropriate to call it a hate crime. And the defense lawyer was very adamant when trying to place blame on the victim for lying about her biological gender. I would highly recommend everyone to try and watch this film and possibly even place it into the curriculum of the class because it is very relevant, based on true events, and really shows, albeit sometimes a bit disturbing, how society views transgender men both inside and out of their own family circle.