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• The One Orlando Alliance, a coalition of more than 30 LGBTQ organizations, is convening a forum on Thursday evening that is aimed at combating racial and gender-based violence. Nearly 80% of anti-LGBTQ homicides in 2016 involved people of color, according to the Anti-Violence Project, a national LGBTQ group.
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• Orlando nonprofit Come Out with Pride is hosting an educational conference for groups who plan Pride festivals throughout the South.
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• 2018 has been one of the deadliest years ever for transgender people. The Human Rights Campaign says that so far this year, at least 24 have been killed violently. And no state has more recorded murders of transpeople than Florida. It started Feb. 4 with Celine Walker, shot dead in a Jacksonville hotel room. Four months later Antash’a English died in the hospital from gunshot wounds after she was found lying between two abandoned houses. In June, deputies found Cathalina James, gunned down at another Jacksonville hotel. Less than a month later Sasha Garden’s beaten body was discovered behind an Orlando apartment complex. In September in North Port, Londonn Moore was found lying in a road, shot to death. As …
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• This activism continues in November with a special campaign to highlight transgender violence in the local community.
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• Last week, a transgender woman was found dead at the back of an Orlando apartment complex. Orange County Sheriff’s deputies found the body of 27-year-old Sasha Garden at the Reserve at Lake Buchanan Apartments on Holden Avenue around 5 a.m. on July 19. Investigators said her body had signs of trauma and described her death as a “homicide.” No suspects have been identified so far. Garden is the fourth black trans woman to be murdered in Florida within the span of five months. Like the other three women, Garden was initially misgendered in an offensive way by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and local TV news stations. Hours after Garden’s friends and family called them out, the Sheriff’s Office finally …
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• A form of a controversial North Carolina bill that stops transgender people from using bathrooms for the gender they identify with, has now made its way to Florida. The Marion County School Board voted 4 to 1 to pass a measure that restricts students’ access to school bathrooms based on their birth sex, according to the Ocala Star-Banner. The newspaper reports the issue arose after a local parent complained his son’s right to privacy was violated because he had to share a bathroom with a transgender student. The resolution says “male and female users of Marion County Public Schools’ single-sex facilities reasonably expect not to be exposed to persons of the opposite sex while using those facilities.” Before the board’s …
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• North America’s largest Jewish community approved a resolution Thursday that is the most far-reaching in support of transgender rights of any major religious organization.
Some 5,000 members of the Union for Reform Judaism are meeting this week in Orlando.
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