What Effect Did Brandon Teena's Death Have On The Trans Community?

I constantly find myself re-evaluation my feelings concerning all that surrounds the Brandon Teena incident.  I say feelings as my mind sees this incident for what it was, violence against a member of the LGBTQI community.  My feelings on the other hand do not always match what my mind tells me and that is not always a good thing.

As Mara Keisling notes, what is important, the Brandon Teena incident "pushed advocacy forward."

"It's not, I think, lost on most of us today that this was a white, trans, masculine-identified person, and that's still not the most common story about violence in our community. But it did become a focus of activism," Keisling said. "There were a lot of folks from places like Transexual Menace and GenderPAC and others who went to Nebraska and then took that message and took that organizing to other places. And it was really a seminal moment in a lot of ways in our organized trans movement that still exists today."

A lot of the recent momentum around protecting the trans community has been in support of trans women of color who experience disproportionate rates of violence, according to Lourdes Hunter, the national director at Trans Women of Color Collective. She gave HuffPost Live a chilling first-hand account of her own experience.

 What Effect Did Brandon Teena's Death Have On The Trans Community?