Brandon Teena and the failure of the authorities
Raped, mocked, murdered: in 1993, the case of Brandon Teena showed how the authorities failed trans people.
On 31 December 1993, Brandon Teena was murdered in a remote farmhouse near Humboldt in the US state of Nebraska. He was twenty-one years old and a trans man. Killed with him were Lisa Lambert, with whom he had sought refuge, and her acquaintance Phillip DeVine. Lambert's eight-month-old son survived.
A few weeks earlier, Brandon had moved from Lincoln to the rural area to make a fresh start. He lived as a man, fell in love and made friends. When two of these new acquaintances, John Lotter and Tom Nissen, found out that he had been registered as a girl at birth, they beat him up and raped him on Christmas Eve.
Brandon went to the police. What followed is now regarded as a textbook case of official failure. Only hours after the crime, Sheriff Charles Laux questioned him with lewd questions, doubted his statements and was more interested in his gender identity than in the crime. He had previously referred to Brandon as "it". The perpetrators remained at large, even though the authorities knew they had threatened to kill Brandon. Six days later, they carried out their threat.
Lotter was sentenced to death; Nissen received life imprisonment after testifying against his accomplice. Brandon's mother sued the county. In 2001, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that the authorities had breached their duty to protect Brandon. The judges described the sheriff's conduct during the interview as extreme and outrageous.
The story moved people far beyond Nebraska. The documentary "The Brandon Teena Story" and the feature film "Boys Don't Cry" made it known around the world, and Hilary Swank won an Oscar for the lead role. Together with the murder of Matthew Shepard almost five years later, the case gave a major boost to calls for hate crime laws in the United States. His name still appears today on the memorial lists of Transgender Day of Remembrance.