he hopes others do the same. On August 28, 2013, a black transgender woman, Tyra Hunter, 19, was shot to death in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. Her mother has said that the suspects were white males who were trying to break into her daughter's car. The Chicago Police Department investigated the case, but was forced to charge the shooters due to pressure from the Chicago Tribune and other local media. Hunter's death was reported as a hate crime by at least one media outlet; an LGBT activist group also labeled the killing a hate crime. However, Hunter's death wasn't covered at all by the national media, who did not report her death as a hate crime. Instead, they waited until after the case had been closed to inform readers of her identity and her tragic death. An editor's note was added to one of the more than 100 stories the paper reported on the murder in which the reporter was told by some who were there, "That could have been my daughter." The author of the notes, who asked not to be identified, said that the reporter and editors were aware that the person had been a trans woman before the report was written, but that no effort was made to contact family members. "It's as if she was the only young black trans person in Chicago," the editor said. The media does not always report on transgender-related violence as a hate crime, even though there's ample data to show that there's a very high rate of attacks against trans people, as well as very high rates of violence against black trans women. In a 2012 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, which advocates for the rights of LGBTQ people, researchers found that 22 transgender people were murdered between October 2008 and December 2009. Most of the victims in the report were African-American. None were labeled as hate crimes, and a few were not even named, because it would have put their name out into the public. According to Deena Guzder, the director of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in Chicago, which tracks the news about violence against the community, there's little the police department can do to investigate a crime if they don't know it's a hate crime. There is no national database of hate crimes. Many states, such as Illinois, do not record hate crimes at all. "We as a country have done a disservice to the people of color who are being killed for who they are," Guzder said. The lack of attention on gay people has had a serious effect on the city. When police were called to the scene of a deadly gay bashing, they responded within minutes, according to Guzder. But that kind of response isn't happening when gay and lesbian people are killed. "There's no rush to the scene when we have a violence against a transgender person," she said. "We're not even at the table of justice. There's no sense of urgency that they will be there on the scene." Guzder's organization reported the attacks that do get media attention, such as the case of Jaron Louis Jones, who was killed after leaving an apartment in his boyfriend's car. In that case, witnesses to the killing said that the attackers seemed to know the victim, and after his death they reportedly made gestures about his sexual orientation. "The media does not put these cases out there," Guzder said. "They don't know how to write about us." One of the most violent attacks occurred in November 2012, when a gay man was beaten with a baseball bat by a group of teens in a suburban Chicago park, and left naked in a frozen lake. The same night, four teenagers tied a gay man to a chain link fence and beat him with wooden handles and leather belts, sending him to the hospital with broken ribs and facial lacerations. They did this after calling him names and screaming, "This is for the family of the little boy," then kicking and punching him. In May 2013, three gay men were attacked by teenagers, two of whom were 14 years old. In fact, there were only two articles mentioning the name of the victims in The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times after the attacks. The Tribune ran a story about gay bashing in November 2012 and another in April 2013, as well as coverage of the beating of Jeffrey L. Dye. The Times ran a story about the gang attack in April 2013. According to Guzder, reporting of violence against the LGBTQ community is a relatively new phenomenon. "A few years ago, it was a non-issue," she said. "Now we're at a stage that's unacceptable for our community." But when the media does cover these cases, she said, they almost always frame them as gay bashings. "The gay bashings are the most egregious of the violence," Guzder said. "Transgender people are not mentioned at all." When I spoke with a gay reporter in Chicago's alternative weekly, The Windy City Times, who chose to be identified only as Ryan, he was quick to point out that the newspaper included the names of all victims in articles about violence against people who are gay, lesbian or transgender. But when it comes to coverage of gay-bashing cases, only the names of LGBTQ victims who are teenagers were reported on. For this reason, many transgender people won't go to the police. "It's about perception of being gay," Ryan said. "It's about this idea that we're not as worthy as other people." Ryan also said that the LGBTQ community was not as connected to each other, either in terms of personal relationships or political connections, as other groups were. "In the LGBT community, we don't connect," he said. "We don't have support networks like families and friends." When the hate crimes law was being debated in the Illinois Senate, it was unclear how the state's largest newspaper would report on it. I asked then-state Sen. Michael Robbins, who sponsored the legislation in order to give people the legal means to defend their rights, how he would respond if he received a hate crimes law as a gift, and he told me, "It's probably a good gift because they don't have one in their state." Robbins sponsored the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and said that many LGBTQ activists were against the state law because it had a narrow focus on just sexual orientation and gender identity, not gender expression, which led to what he considered "a very small group of people being targeted" under the legislation. But those people are what gets the media's attention when it comes to covering the law. The same night as the Illinois Senate debated the hate crimes law, LGBTQ activist groups—including Illinois Equality, which lobbies for gay and lesbian rights, and the Human Rights Campaign—voted for a boycott of the Chicago Sun-Times for not reporting on the hate crimes bill. The group's action was in response to an article the paper published in December of last year. The story was about an Illinois House member, Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago, who was trying to introduce a bill that would expand the definition of hate crime to include gender expression and sexual orientation. Mitchell's bill did not go anywhere. State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago, believes that the paper's report was motivated by a lack of knowledge about the law, and wasn't done maliciously. "I think that there's a lack of attention paid to these issues by journalists," he said. "There aren't journalists on the scene like there are in New York City with the violence against gay men, so I think that it's a matter of not knowing about it, not having the connection." The bill was a priority for many in the LGBTQ community, according to Cassidy, but it still didn't seem to hold enough weight for the newspaper to cover it. "As a member of the queer community, it's an important topic to us," he said. "It's an important story. There's obviously a lot of murders that are happening and not reported as such, and that's a huge issue. We're not just fighting with gay-bashing." When the Sun-Times reported on the law, the Chicago Tribune did not. The Tribune is owned by Chicago businessman and philanthropist Richard J. Daley, whose son is running for mayor of Chicago in April. Daley also ran for mayor in 1989, the same year that the last police incident report on a hate crime in Chicago was made. I can only speculate that Daley has more important things to worry about than media coverage of hate crimes, given his family's history of corruption, most notably during his father's reign as mayor, as well as the fact that his son has been recently indicted. But he might be able to do more if he were so inclined. When I asked why the Tribune didn't report on the law, an editor's note in the sports section told readers to "keep it in perspective." While the editor's note did mention that the story about Rep. Mitchell's bill was "breaking news," there was no mention of violence against LGBTQ people. The Tribune's silence on the law extended to its social media account. When I searched for "#hb5," which stands for "hate crimes bill," there were more than 7,000 tweets under it, many of which condemned the paper for not reporting on the issue. Some even cited statistics on gay and lesbian bashing. A Twitter user with the handle @zefmike