On Dec. 22, Nizah Morris, an African American transgender woman, was found unconscious with head wounds on Walnut Street in Center City. She died two days later.

Although the city medical examiner classified Morris' death as a homicide, it took a month for the police to classify it as a murder.

As a transgender person, I find with Nizah Morris' death the same frustrations and official indifference (especially among the police) I've seen with other crimes against transgender people. When Anna Francisco, a transgender Filipino nursing student, was stabbed to death in 1990 in Center City, I asked homicide investigators how many murders of transgender people were committed each year. They said they had no idea; murders are categorized according to how the murder is committed, not the gender status of the victim. Former police commissioner John F. Timoney claimed to be unaware of any especially high murder rates involving transgender people.

But take it from me: Transgender people are frequently the victims of harassment and violence for doing nothing more than living their lives and minding their own business. Transgender hate crimes data is not kept by law enforcement agencies and transgender people aren't encouraged to report incidents of violence. Many of the murders of transgender people involve "overkill," a term used to describe a heinous murder where the perpetrator continues to severely attack the corpse long after death. An example of this is when two African American transsexuals, Tanya Moore and Tina Rodriguez, were found murdered in Bucks County in 1986, their bodies cut up and set on fire.

Kylar Broadus, an attorney, a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, and a former legislative manager and counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said that while he was working at HRC there was an average of two murders per month within the transgender community: "This is of the number that are reported, and I think very few hate crimes against transgender people are reported, for various reasons. First, most hate crimes are misreported because the individual victim is not identified as transgendered - because [authorities] will ignore the victims' transgender name and identity and state, 'It was a man,' or say, 'It was a gay man in drag' that was killed."

GenderPac, the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (www.gpac.org), published The First National Survey of Transgender Violence in 1997. In the survey, 402 people reported 403 violent incidents. Sixty percent of respondents reported being a victim of violent assault. One notable feature was that 95 percent of the worst incidents involved two or more perpetrators.

Lee Carpenter, the Antiviolence Project attorney at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights in Philadelphia, said, "Gay and lesbian people are already at great risk to be victims of hate crimes, and I think that transgender people are even more vulnerable to hate crimes than lesbian and gay people." She gives two reasons: (1) there is even less understanding of transgender individuals in our society than lesbian and gay people, and consequently greater tolerance for bigotry toward that group; and (2) police, sharing this lack of understanding, "tend not to take, in my experience, crimes against transgender people as seriously."

Our entire society suffers from Nizah Morris' murder. It suffers when boys are bullied in school and women are abused by men who need to prove their masculinity. How can Eminem have any positive feelings for women when the worst insult he can hurl at Moby is to call him a "girl"? If we allow people to be abused and murdered for their gender presentation, how can we pretend to be bringing the values of freedom and democracy to the rest of the world?