Gainesville TV News Calls Bias-Motivated Shooting ‘Mistaken Identity’
The “mistake” was that the shooter didn’t realize the woman he approached at a bus stop was trans.
by Evan Urquhart
stock photo of a bus stop
A neglected story about a daytime shooting in Gainesville, Florida has raised red flags for anti-trans bias because of the bizarre characterization of a potential hate crime the local TV News. Reports in both the Gainesville ABC affiliate and an independent local news site, Mainstreet Daily News, describe a trans woman who was waiting at a bus stop on Monday, August 14, being approached and spoken to by a male suspect. The victim and a witness report the man took out a gun and shot the victim after he realized she was trans. (The bullet only grazed the trans woman, who does not seem to have been badly hurt.)
If true, this would seem to describe a transgender woman being shot for no other reason than the fact that she was trans. In other words, a violent, anti-trans bias-motivated, hate crime.
However, Ryan Wyatt Turbeville, writing for the local ABC affiliate WCJB, bizarrely characterized this instead as “a mistaken identity”:
screenshot from WCJB
Mistaken identity typically refers to a situation where someone thinks another person is somebody else. A shooting based on a mistaken identity would be said to have occured when one person shoots another person believing the victim to be a third person with whom they had a dispute. It is not typically used in bias-motivated crimes where a person suddenly realizes the victim is the member of a group they violently hate, motivating a sudden unprovoked attack. This second thing is what seems to have been described as having happened at a Gainesville, FL bus stop last week.
Neither WCJB nor Mainstreet Daily News’ story mentioned bias or hate crimes at any point in their reporting, and the story doesn’t seem to have been picked up by any other outlets at this time. WCJB’s story actively misgenders the victim, while Mainstreet Daily News avoids pronouns but includes a quote from police misgendering the victim.
