Petition Calls On White House To Investigate Murders Of Transgender Women Of Color

A White House petition asks the Obama administration to investigate the deaths of more than a dozen transgender women of color.

When Barack Obama became president he established the White House petition website. Anyone can create a petition and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures the White House will respond.

Back in January, after the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, The New Civil Rights Movement highlighted a petition asking the White House for a nationwide ban on all conversion therapy. It needed over 32,000 signatures and had less than a week left to meet the 100,000 signatures threshold. 

NCRM readers pushed it well over the mark, and President Obama responded by calling for every state in the nation to ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors. 

This morning NCRM reported on the horrific murder of a transgender woman who was run over by an SUV multiple times. It’s at least the seventeenth reported murder of a transgender woman this year – the vast majority of them being transgender women of color.

A petition on the White House site calls on the Obama administration to investigate all these murders in an effort to “raise awareness and end the senseless killings of a targeted, vulnerable community.”

“For Transgender women of color, safety is a real and warranted concern,” the petition states. “We are asking the administration to raise awareness and take action to keep this community safe, by conducting a formal investigation of these deaths occurring across the county to the targeted community of Transgender women, particularly women of color.”

“Please take action to ensure this community does not have to live in fear of losing their lives to hate and violence,” it asks.

You can help get the administration to respond to this petition. And it needs your help. 

It only has 2312 signatures, it needs 97,688 more, but there are about three weeks left to push it over the bar.

Will you help?

Please sign: Formally Investigate the Transphobic Violence Leading to the Rising Death Toll of Transgender Women of Color in the U.S.

 

Image: Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Flickr