The Life and Death of Latisha King

Latisha may have thought magically about her own gender, but the myths of gender under which the adults in her life operated are much more pernicious and less attuned to the realities of gender than Latisha's fantasies. Those myths: that gender is binary, and that any deviation from that binary is wrong, and bad, and dangerous. And that it was Latisha who represented the danger and not those who sought to stop her, fully and finally.

This certainly wasn't an easy book to read. Both because of the heinous hate crime at the center of it as well as the philosophical concept that can be a bit challenging for someone like me who isn't very well-read in those things. It makes for a thorough and interesting analysis of human behavior though.

Gayle Salamon extensively analyzes a transphobic hate crime to recognize how the situation got to that point by following the philosophical thread of phenomenology which focuses on the structures of people's individual experiences and how our consciousness processes our world.
It might sound a bit abstract, as philosophy often does, but it basically looks at how something like unquestioned “common sense” can dictate destructive behavior, how the way we automatically project subjective meaning to neutral objects changes how we interact with them, and how the way we talk about things puts the blame on a victim faster than one might think.

The whole court case is pretty vile. Plenty of the quoted words from the court proceedings are shocking and makes you wonder how these teachers can even still hold a job at a school afterwards. There is unabashed victim shaming all around, sometimes under a thin veil of care. Gayle Salamon does a good job at taking their behavior apart, dissecting the biased contradictions, and showcasing how a non-existent threat can develop through biased interpreting of someone's neutral surroundings leading to a skewed attempt at “protecting” one party from another.

Rest in Power, Latisha King.

Some of the most remarkable things about Latisha King's short life was her resilience, the way that she persevered in her self-expression in the face of normative regulation and prohibition. She emerged, and persisted, in defiance of all the different forms of violence directed at her, with the aim of extinguishing her very being. She was not crushed into submission by the insistence, by family and teachers and peers, that she was impossible, that she did not exist - though all these forms of violence did exact their price.