The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Firewire News Case Study: The Hate that Kills at Tom Waddel Health Center

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

This is one Case Study of a series run by Firewire News about San Francisco cases.

(Firewire News) – WITNESSED: One late afternoon, a woman sitting alone in the waiting area at Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco was greeted by an arriving beautiful young woman. The health center was about to open, and the young arrival was very talkative with the woman, introducing herself, and admiring a pink butterfly pendant that the woman was wearing. "That's a beautiful pendant. I love butterflies.", the teenager told the woman. "Where did you get it?"

It turns out that the beautiful young woman was a teenager, and that this was her first visit – and she was nervous about it.

IIULA status:

Tom Waddell Health Center is known by the NCIDP to have had previous full notice of a standardized Survivor's Identity Information User License Agreement (IIULA) prior to this incident.

Every breach of law perpetrated in this case at Tom Waddell Health Center, as discussed here and noted in the IIULA, was well known by Tom Waddell Health Center, and all involved individual perpetrators to be felony violent assault crimes before those crimes were perpetrated upon the victim(s) of this case.

The perpetrators of this case may not claim any ignorance of these laws, and must be presumed to have perpetrated these violent felony assault crimes with the willing and willful intent to do violence to the victim, including against survivors such as to willfully precipitate homicidal assaults upon such victims.

The primary care services provided at Tom Waddell Health Center included a women's clinic especially for women surviving domestic violence, to which the woman had been referred, as well as a clinic for those who are often called "trangendered". The teenage girl reported that she was excited that she was there to begin hormone therapy. The girl went on to mention that she still lived with her mother, which raised the concerns of the woman greatly – she recoiled visibly.

The woman knew some women called "transgendered" [a term that the NCIDP regards as a misnomer for most to whom it is often applied as those uses run counter to legal, ethical and practical identity contexts], and knew of their stories: she knew that it was rare for a family to be accepting, let alone supportive, and the woman had been immediately concerned about the safety of the young girl still living at home with her mother.

The teen saw the woman recoil, and quickly reassured her that her mother was safe and supportive of her. She reported, "She's pretty understanding. She tries. She loves me."

The teenage girl went on, in her excited nervousness, to talk a little more about her life. She was going to a small party with some friends that evening, and she invited the woman to go to the party with her. The woman greatly disliked the idea of the party, but did decide that she wanted to give the pleasant young girl the inexpensive butterfly pendant that she had admired so much. The teenager went on to somberly admit that she had "a problem with drugs", and the woman hesitated in removing the pendant, consoling that she was sorry to hear of that problem.

Violence Arrives: At that moment, a nurse came out of the clinic into the waiting area calling out a name that was neither the woman's nor the names that the teenager had introduced herself by. It was, however, a name almost exclusively associated with males. The woman's eyebrows furrowed, while the teenager recoiled showing hurt and shock before calling out, "That's me."

The woman, a survivor of violence, having just witnessed the hurt of the teenager, was perturbed, and watched closely as the nurse spoke with the teenager. "Do you want us to call you by [male name] or [female name]?" The teenager identified the female name as her proper name of address.

The nurse responded, "Oh. You put [female name] down as your legal name, and [male name] as your other name. It should be the other way around."

The hurt returned to the teenager's expression, along with confusion and despair.

The woman witnessing the incident was, at this point, furious. She knew in law what the victim of the nurse had known instinctively but was too confused and vulnerable to assert: the nurse had just lied to the teenager about that teenage woman's own legal identity, falsely attempting to impose upon her an inappropriate identity that was NOT the teenage woman's contemporaneous legal identity. The nurse had just enacted a profound violent assault upon the very soul of this young woman.

The teenage woman's expression was one of grave defeat – she looked utterly crushed.

The woman watching this was visibly angry, gripping the armrest of her chair tightly as she resisted an angry intervention to tell the nurse that she was "full of shit" and that it was never okay to present oneself as a "helping professional" only to abuse that position and those relying on that representation.

The young woman attempted to put on a cheery face again as she was led into the clinic by the nurse, but the smile wasn't so bright any more.

This nurse had just perpetrated violence, indeed hate violence, against the teenage woman who had arrived so full of hope. It was not only an utter fabrication completely counter to the law when the nurse told the young girl that she had her own legal identity wrong: it was a violent assault as the law defines it; a brutal denigration of the victim's own person; and a direct attack on that young girl's sense of self and self-esteem.

It was also, as the law perceives it, tantamount to an accusation that the young girl had been criminally convicted of adopting her chosen legal identity for the intent and purpose of committing fraud, the ONLY grounds for invalidating a person's contemporaneous chosen identity as less than or other than a legal identity.

There was nothing whatsoever appropriate in the actions of the nurse in making such unfounded accusations, nor in assaulting and denigrating the victim's person so horrifically in a clinic purporting to serve survivors of violence, or in any clinical/medical setting whatsoever. Indeed, the very nature of the victim's chosen identity relative to her former identity virtually precluded any supposition that the new identity had been adopted for fraudulent intents and purposes: it was easily recognizable as of a much higher intent and purpose, psychologically; of a much more deeply personal, internal, and intense, intent and purpose.

Violence Returns: Later that same night, at the very party to which the woman had been invited by the younger girl, that teenage girl encountered exactly that same vitriolic hate violence that she had encountered at Tom Waddell Health Clinic.

It was that teenage girls grave misfortune, however, that at the party that night, instead of pen and clipboard, the perpetrators at the party that evening had blunt objects and shovels.

Her body was found in a shallow grave several months later when one of her killers led police to that grave.

EDITORS' NOTE: Hate violence revisited this young teenager a third and fourth time, posthumously.

Third: When the young girl's grave was uncovered, an avalanche of newspaper articles covering the story were published – all denigrating the murdered young woman's legal identity, and wrongly stating her former identity to have still been her legal identity. Shockingly, disturbingly, this posthumous hate violence included even newspapers published for, and purportedly by, the LGBT community.

Fourth: This was followed by a posthumous court proceeding to seek a court-ordered identity change wherein her purported legal representatives erred grossly on the petition, wrongly listing her former identity as her legal identity. Had the teenage girl been alive and responsible for that petition, she could have been charged with perjury for that (although unlikely). Her legal identity change had been effected prior to arriving at Tom Waddell Health Clinic, and was reasserted with legal effect by her proper assertion of it on her intake documentation at that clinic. The representation of her former identity as her legal identity by her own legal counsel was tantamount to that counsel stating to the court that the girl had been convicted of adopting her chosen legal identity for fraudulent purposes, with fraudulent intent (the only cause for disregarding a chosen identity as a proper legal identity "as if from birth") but now wished to carry it forward into a proper legal identity by a court order – an order made necessary by, and only by, that previous conviction (a fiction about their own client that both denigrated the girl's legal identity and accused her of a past crime).

Besides that, it just plain denigrates the girl's identity, the very core of the being that she was.

Whether the young girl's mother had been 'trying' or not, she permitted and likely internalized the San Francisco area's "normalized" hate toward her daughter, here at the hands of attorneys themselves actively perpetuating that hate. It would have been difficult not to.

When that mother permitted that legal counsel to misfile an identity change petition, the mother patently acquiesced to that hate: that same perpetration of hate violence that had so devastated that young girl hours before her death; that same hate violence that had caused that young girl's death. That is to say that the mother may have meant to do well by her daughter in the identity change proceeding, and may have been doing as well as she knew how. But, because the bigoted hate violence toward her daughter was so "normalized", and the mother was additionally misinformed by attorney's purporting to represent her daughter's interests but likewise reinforcing that normalization of hate violence, the mother would be hard pressed to overcome the internalization of that, let alone take a stand against it. Those attorney's did the violence, and the mother was disempowered in it.

ALL FOUR perpetrations were precisely the same violent assault, all the same identity based hate. The legally distinct element of (fatal) battery differentiated these four perpetrations against this young girl. But the utter finality and totality of the "mischief upon", the impairment of, her rightful autonomy, her right to her own self-determination and self-identity, and her right to live in that identity, as she determined it to be, safely and unimpaired in it – that is murder, and merely a fundamental, even logical, extension of the violence of these three other violent assaults.

It is this kind of normalization of violence, in this case the sociopathology of hate, that chronically disempowers its victims, keeps those victims stuck in cycles of violence and chronic victimization, deprives them of access to resources and empowerment, and drives them strongly toward the self-medication that becomes "a problem with drugs". Indeed, remembering that violence is a victim's emotional and psychological experience of the acts of others, the normalization of violence increases, rather than decreases, the gravity and depth of harm in that violence.

A revolution was fought, a nation was founded, a constitution created, to preserve the social and legal gravity of any violence, any impairment of right.

Perhaps most tragically of all, the young woman probably never got to take a single dose of those hormones that had so filled her with hope.

See the legal distinctions between batter y & violent assault - The Distinction of Battery & The Heart of Violence and the Law.