"I don't see them as being a strategic use of our movement's resources."Īccording to LGBT-rights advocacy groups, 21 transgender people have been killed in the United States so far in 2017 - all people of color except for Steinfeld and one other woman. "I worry that what hate crime laws do is narrow our focus on certain types of individual violence while absolving the entire system that generates the violence," he said. One of its transgender rights lawyers, Chase Strangio, said he no longer considered hate crime laws to be effective. It's about looking at the big picture of why is this happening."Īnother group signing the letter was the American Civil Liberties Union. It's not just about adding on to the sentencing. "But we need to get at the root of these horrific murders. "It does send a message that transgender people's lives matter," he said. Transgender rights lawyer Dru Levasseur of Lambda Legal, one of the groups that signed the letter, said Lambda and its allies still believe that LGBT-inclusive hate crime laws are valuable. "The department's work in preventing, deterring and responding to hate violence cannot be seen in isolation from its recent counterproductive and discriminatory actions," more than 70 advocacy groups said earlier this month in an open letter to John Gore, the acting head of the civil rights division.
However, major LGBT and civil rights groups have been skeptical of Sessions' pledge, noting that the Trump administration has taken other steps to erode transgender people's rights, such as proposing to ban them from military service and rescinding guidelines that would allow transgender students to use the restrooms of their choice at school.
A few weeks after Vallum's conviction, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly vowed to protect the rights of all transgender Americans and said he had directed the Justice Department's civil rights division to review some other cases in which transgender people were killed.