Two years after male sex worker Wesley Holder was murdered, the group Guyana Trans United (GTU) continues to seek justice even though members said they have experienced fierce discrimination from the police.
Holder’s body was found in an open lot behind the Carnegie School of Economics on the morning of January 11, 2013. He had suffered multiple stab wounds.
Quincy McEwan, a member of GTU spoke at a memorial held for Holder aka Tiffany at Red Thread on Princes and Adelaide Street yesterday. He said it is very hard for gay and transgender persons to find any sort of justice in Guyana. Justice will be hard to find because a lot of persons think that transgender people should not have been born, McEwan added.
McEwan said the many protests that were held after his friend’s death were fruitless. The fact that there were no results shows evidence that the life of a transgender person is insignificant to the police, he asserted. McEwan noted that since Holder’s death, there have been seven other deaths in the transgender community.
He said that GTU will have to come together as a community and look at new strategies because protesting alone is not giving the transgender community a voice.
“Two years pass and I still grieving,” Holder’s aunt Paula Niles said. “You don’t get justice in this country and it so sad,” she lamented. “He didn’t do nobody nothing, if you see how they bore up this boy,” she added.
Niles related that a lot of persons in her neighbourhood had threatened her because she supported Holder’s lifestyle but that did not stop her from loving her nephew. “Only God in heaven knows who do it, but one of these good days, I gonna know who do it,” she asserted. She was not optimistic that a thorough investigation has been carried out. “I believe in God and I gonna leave it up to he,” she reiterated.
The executive director of Rainbow House, Namela Baynes-Henry urged GTU members to work together. She said that GTU should align themselves with other organisations because the police treat the lives of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people with scant disregard. “Once you are a member of the LGBT community your life is worthless and it means nothing, but there can be power in numbers,” she stated.
After the memorial service, a candlelight vigil was held for Holder at the spot where his body was found.
Holder was found in a green fishnet dress and his autopsy revealed that he died from hemorrhaging and shock as a result of stab wounds and blunt trauma from a blow to the head. Persons who were close to Holder believe that he was killed because of his sexual orientation.
