LGBT News Colorado Man Faces Hate-Crime Charges in Assault on Trans Woman

Good for her for stepping in to help someone else, shows an awful lot about the kind of character she has! Sad she was harmed, sad there is people out there like that at all.

 

That's so brave! She could have been killed, but she decided to risk her safety to help a stranger. It's awful of that Wettengel guy, to do anything like that. Hopefully he'll go to prison, for that.

 

Well isn't he a charmer. You can tell he's a douchebag just by the look on his face.

 

Hopefully we can bend the arc of state violence in the correct direction. I approve...

 

Ok, he needs to be charged with the assault, but this type of case is where the hate crime law is getting its negative feed back. I dont think this qualifies for it.
She stepped in and tried to help someone else that he was pushing. She was not involved up until that point.
this tells me that he went after her because she stepped in, not because she was a trans.
Now once she stepped in and he turned his attention to her, then he made the comments in reference to the transexual aspect of her being. But that is not the reason he initially went after her.
I think this one fails the hate crime test, it falls back to an assault, and honestly, his assault is on the first person, if she touched him first in an attempt to help the first guy, what he did could actually be twisted by a good lawyer to look like self defense.
It would be interesting to see how this plays out. But in any case, it does the hate crime legislation more harm than good.
In order for it to be a hate crime, he would have had to been standing there, she walks up, he notices her, calls her names then attacks based on her being a trans, that is a hate crime.

 

If premeditation can be formed in the blink of an eye (such as in first degree murder cases such as when Michael Dunn murdered Jordan Davis in the "loud music trial"), how come a hate crime also cannot form in the blink of an eye? If this wasn't a hate crime, the slurs would have never been said and the trans woman would not have been sexually assaulted. This was definitely a hate crime, and it only harms the notion of hate crimes if the person who thinks it harms it already has a preconceived negative notion of a hate crime.

 

There is poor reporting on this story from all sides, but we can't be entirely sure that this person is a trans woman.

from Boulder PD: "The victim is a 21-year-old female, who identifies as a male."
https://bouldercolorado.gov/police/may-13-2015-assault-suspect-faces-bias-motivated-crime-charge

It might be more appropriate to refrain from using gender-specific pronouns and terminology in order to avoid misgendering this person as we await more information.

EDIT: The Advocate as well as several other outlets changed the title to "Trans Man" suggesting they might be a trans man after all.