The Star Newspaper Dishonours Murdered Transwoman.

I was feeling low the past couple of weeks with some deaths around my life. But I could not let this news pass by without saying something: Another transwoman has been murdered a couple of weeks back. The article was written again with indignant attitudes towards a transwoman who is already dead. I made some correct adjustments. The original poorly written article can be read here.

Transsexual woman dies after fight with customer

GEORGE TOWN:
An Indonesian transwoman died 12 hours after a fight with her “customer” who had refused to pay for services rendered.

The 27-year-old transsexual, whose identity was withheld, was found in a pool of blood by a security guard at the ground floor foyer of Komtar at 4am on Thursday.

She died at the Penang Hospital due to head injuries. Police said the post-mortem revealed that the victim, who had undergone a sex operation, died from multiple blows to the head with a hard object.

George Town OCPD Asst Comm Azam Abd Hamid said the transwoman was also robbed of her valuables and personal documents.

The Star, as NST had done before, once again displayed a total lack of journalistic integrity by calling an already post-operated transsexual woman with male pronouns and identified her as a “transvestite”. The least they can do if they are too ignorant to learn about the correct terms is to use the word transgender. But no, they had to antagonize an already dead woman by identifying her as a crossdresser.

It is like calling The Star, a national paper, out as a tabloid paper, which apparently would still be true considering they had shrunk down to the level of one; by over-obsessing over her “services”, keeping silent on her identity, pool of blood talk, her surgery, how she died, was robbed of everything important to her… hey, what about the murderer? No mention of how the killer look like? No leads? Or it is okay that the murderer got away…. And based on the style of this article, we can safely conclude that The Star lacks English vocabulary, have some confused general knowledge, and discriminates minorities.

It saddens me to add one more item to the list for Transgender Day Of Remembrance. This is the second reported murder in Malaysia. I shudder to think how many of us died unreported, and unknown.