Gwen Araujo & trans panic
• Gender Outsiders: Transgendered & Others
The trial of the murders of Gwen (Eddie) Araujo ended in a mistrial.
Not all of the jury members were wiling to buy into the trans panic defense: that murder was a natural outcome of a normal man's surprise that the girl whose favors he had been willing to enjoy had a boy's body beneath the dress.
The "trans panic" defense wasn't such a legal longshot, said professor Robert Bradley Sears, executive director of the Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
"It has worked in other jurisdictions -- this is always going to be a matter of state law, and to some extent up to the trial judge and the jury hearing the case," he said.
"It's obviously extremely offensive, and I think the existence of that defense in our law today is a result of a larger defense that was created to protect a traditional notion of masculinity," Sears added.