Unabashed Whoa-Oh-Oh: What's Trans Got To Do, Got To Do With It?

Ohio Transgender Woman Pleads Guilty to Homicide

Ohio Wo-Man Kills Husband With Exercise

"Woman" Exercises Husband to Death

"A sex-change woman has pleaded guilty..."

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for female killers. The lovely ladies featured on the Oxygen network's, Snapped, for instance. Aileen Wuornos--love her. Lorena Bobbit--she didn't kill but she might as well have--adore her. And now I can add Christine Newton-John to my list.

Last week, Mrs. Newton-John (more on her name in a second) , 41, pleaded guilty to reckless homicide of her 73 year-old husband by forcing him to swim in the pool of their apartment complex past exhaustion, resulting in a fatal heart attack. Security cameras caught the entire episode and police counted 43 times that Mrs. Newton-John prevented her husband from leaving the pool. Swim at your own risk, girl.

Many major media outlets played up the fact that Mrs. N-J is transgender and ran that as part of their headline. The fact that she had sexual reassignment surgery in 1993 is much less fascinating to me than the fact that she changed her surname to Newton-John in honor of Olivia. That is fierce (and not in a Tyra kind of way). Even more interesting is that she "exercised her husband to death." That's a headline. That we haven't heard before. If anything, she's creative.

People love to hate on a tranny. In a piece for the Advocate entitled, "My Sisters," Patrick Moore eloquently states that trans people are at the core of the queer struggle because they "challenge both gay and straight ideas of respectability."

The media seems to be perpetuating an idea that trans people are cuh-ray-zee and freakish. Unlike my last post about the transgender mafia boss, while it may be an interesting factoid, Mrs. N-J's gender is inconsequential to the story.