Acoff Murder Updates

As I continue to get details about this senseless killing from people in the area, I'll post them to the blog.

Thanks to several readers, have discovered that the femme name for our fallen Cleveland sister that will be used in TransGriot stories from now on was Cemia Dove.  Cemia was also called Ce Ce by her friends and the people whose lives she touched in her all to brief 20 years on this planet.

Cleveland DJ Zoe Renee Lapin (and girl like us) was in the process organizing a rally in memory of Ce Ce.   The rally will be tomorrow May 1 at Willard Park in Cleveland at 3 PM EDT, so for any further details about this event get in contact with Zoe. 

I'm asking if anyone has nice pictures of Ce Ce, please send them to me or post them somewhere like Facebook so we trans bloggers can use something other than a mug shot for her.   That article was bad enough.   I don't want to participate (and neither do my fellow trans bloggers) in indirectly heaping more disprect on her by having the only photo of her be a fracking mug shot.

And for you peeps in the Cleveland area still pissed about not only the murder but the journalistic hate crime that happened after it, what you may wish to do is what the New York and Los Angeles trans communities did after their papers of record printed jacked up articles about deceased transpeople and refused or were recalcitrant about retracting or correcting them.

New York and Los Angeles are media centers that have GLAAD offices in both cities, so meetings were set up with their local papers of record to express their displeasure with their trans news coverage in New York and Los Angeles and suggest concrete steps to correct them.  

My suggestion to you trans peeps and allies in the Cleveland area since you don't have a GLAAD office there like the New York and LA trans communities did to help coordinate the meetings is you get in contact with your local and statewide TBLG orgs, the local NAACP chapter, your Cleveland city councilmembers, Ohio state reps and Ohio state senators, US Congressmember Marcia Fudge (D), your US Senator Sherrod Brown (D) over Ce Ce's murder and have them help you get that meeting with the Plain Dealer.  

Once you get the meeting to discuss with the Plain Dealer's managers, editors and the stenographers Caniglia and Corrigan the horrible coverage of the Ce Ce Acoff story, you point out the problems and how hurtful and triggering it was to the local, national and international trans community. 

You also get the Plain Dealer to commit to from this day forward to making immediate and long term corrections in the way they write trans stories up to and including hiring an openly trans reporter.  

Following the AP Stylebook guidelines on covering transpeople would be a mandatory minimum standard so that journalistic hate crimes like the Acoff story don't happen again to another Cleveland area trans person.  

That would be one way to honor Ce Ce's memory and ensure something positive comes out of this for the Cleveland area and Ohio trans community.