Aphrodite Jones - All He Wanted

Copyright 2016 by Aphrodite Jones, AphroditeJonesBooks.

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The idea of changing the title of an existing book is something very foreign, yet in this case, I feel its justified and even necessary. The story I told in All She Wanted is a chronicle of one of the first known transgender hate crimes in America and though Im not sure I realized how important it was at the time, I did understand that in Falls City, Nebraska, a movement was being born. Still, it took me over twenty years to get it through my head that this book should have been entitled All HE Wanted, because Brandon was a transgender person and was always a he on the inside, even though he had female parts on the outside. These days, with the transgender movement in the spotlight, I finally had to admit to myself that I really did not get it. Twenty years ago, I didnt understand the truth behind being transgender, and for that, I sincerely apologize.

The funny thing is that back in time, in 1995, not many people cared to get the notion of being transgender. It was something that was being ignored by the public, and the national news didnt cover this transgender murder casenot really at all. It was amazing to note that Falls City was Ground Zero to transgender activists who descended there from all parts of America, yet at the time that Teena Brandons killers were convicted of triple homicide and a transgender hate crime, not one national TV news source reported it. I was stunned that there was no coverage on CNN, no coverage on any broadcast network. Locally, the convictions hit newspapers in Lincoln and Omaha, but national TV news coverage was focused on the O.J. Simpson trial and all the antics it entailed. The tabloid show, A Current Affair, did a short piece on the Brandon case, and that was about it.

I am thankful to know that if an LGBT murder happened today, for sure it would be headline news and covered non-stop. Lets face it, being transgender has become a hot-button topic. If nothing else, it shows weve come a long way in our efforts to understand and accept different forms of sexual identity. Even if we havent come far enough, people today have a more sincere concern for the LGBT community. Its a start.

But back then, when I was researching and writing about the world of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon in the mid-1990s, Brandon was actually considered to be perverted or perverse instead of transgender. For Falls City folks, the idea of someone being transgender was not a concept people could wrap their brains around. I say this because I heard people shouting lewd things to the transgender people who came to the courthouse during the murder trials. I say this because Falls City officials held press conferences stating that this is not a hate crime. In fact, local law enforcement completely denied that Brandon was a transgender person and one called him an it before the homicides went down. To be fair, this intolerance was not shared by everyone in the area, but it certainly was prevalent.

When I wrote All She Wanted, I now look back and realize that in some small way, I myself had become a part of the story. I had become so outraged by the hate crime, and yet I could not tell it in a way that was unbiased by my traditional views of gender identity. To others around me, the attitude was that I could not, or would not, get the Brandon story right. Especially to activists, because I was not one of them, I was deemed unfit to tell the tale. I was living a conundrum, and I sometimes thought maybe they were right. I had a struggle on my hands.

As I took notes and observed, as much as I tried to understand the nature of a transgender/transsexual person, I was considered an outcast and not given access to transgender peoples thoughts or feelings. People from the transgender activist movement treated me like an unwanted outsider and most of the trans activists even made it a point to show they despised me. Why? Because I was telling the story from the perspective of Teena Brandons family, because I was calling Teena a SHE and not a HE. To them, it was the ultimate insult. To me, it was the physical fact. Teena was in transition when she was murdered. She had taken no hormones. She had had no sexual re-assignment surgery. Teena Brandon was logged as a female in all the police reports that involved her murder and rape, so, on a practical level as a crime writer, I had to deal with the facts from a legal perspective.

For me, the thing that made the case particularly difficult to cover was that Brandon lived as both sexes. Brandon may have been known as Brandon Teena in Falls City, but back at home in Lincoln with her family, she became Teena Brandon again. It became a problem in the narrative of All She Wanted because I had to refer to Brandon as a she and also as a he. As I wrote the book, I felt like I was always walking on eggshells to keep all the necessary elements of the story in check. I researched this book for almost two years and as time moved on it became painfully clear to me that each group didnt trust me as a writer. Whether it was the local townsfolk of Falls City, the law enforcement officials in Nebraska, or the transgender activists of the day, people felt I didnt know what I was doing. In the end, I hope I proved them wrong.

* * *

People may not realize that back when Brandon was killed, on December 31, 1993, the concept of being transgender did not exist in the minds of the mainstream public. In fact, the word transgender was not yet a part of our cultural vocabulary, and the phrase LGBT did not exist in America at all. Instead, what did exist was a gay and lesbian community that did not accept transgender people as being a part of them. It was a very strange time in the world of sexual rights. Perhaps thats why I dedicated my book to Brandon, and for all those sisters and brothers out there who deserve sexual freedom.

The fact is, when Brandon was unmasked as a female, when Brandon was raped and degraded by two young thugs, she was warned not to report the incident, or she would be killed. But she reported it anyway. Brandon was still in transition, and had no choice but to report being raped as a female, which in the end, became the impetus for her murder.

So it was Teena Brandon who went to the police. Not Brandon Teena. It was Teena Brandons homicide, along with the homicides of Lisa Lambert and Phillip Devine, that were chronicled in the court transcripts and in the few newspapers that covered the murders. Only in death did Brandon become known as Brandon Teena, a transgender person. And years later, it was only after my book, and the subsequent film, Boys Dont Cry, that Brandon became widely known and accepted as the victim of a transgender hate crime. Its tragic that in life, Brandon was never accepted as a male by anyone other than girls he fooled. No one really understood that he was always a HE not me, not his family, not anyone in his world.

How could this be? Well for starters, back in the early 1990s no one other than activists really talked about such things. At worst, Brandon was considered a freak. At best, Brandon was considered a person with a gender identity crisis. The idea of being transgender was a fuzzy and vague concept to the mainstream. I recall vividly how confused I was when I met with a group called Transgender Menace, which was an organization involved in fighting gender oppression at a time when Gay and Lesbian literature did not include the word transgender. To be sure, this was still the dark ages of the transgender revolution.