A Tennessee court ruled last week to re-try a manslaughter case, allowing the defendant to make a trans-panic defense. In June 2022, Samuel Ward Jr. killed Paris Lee, a trans woman, in her home by shooting her six times after she repeatedly asked him to leave. He then proceeded to take a thirty minute drive home before calling the police. In the ensuing court case he claimed self defense. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025.
Following the case, Ward appealed the ruling, arguing that the trial had been unfair to him because his defense had been disallowed from disclosing that the victim was trans. The panel of judges hearing the appeal agreed, saying that the jury had been ‘misled’ and that the victim’s identity as a trans woman would have bolstered his defense.
In essence, what the defense successfully argued to the appeals court was that the jury thinking Lee was a cisgender woman biased them against Ward, because the defense felt that jurors would be more prejudiced against Ward for killing a cis woman than a trans woman. Further, the defense argued that, since the victim was trans, she was more threatening to Ward than if she had been cis, and, had the jury known this, then they would have found him innocent.
Ordinarily, the trans panic defense is used when a person was or was about to engage in sexual relations with someone and claims to have learned their partner was trans and killed them in a “panic.” While this is not the typical use of the defense, the main argument is the same: that a killing became an act of self defense based purely on the fact that the victim was trans.
While the panic defense is widely condemned in the legal world, including by the American Bar Association, Tennessee is one of many states in the US that still allows it to be used. Of the twenty states that do ban the defense, nineteen of them only instituted that ban within the last decade.
Besides the invocation of the trans panic defense, the Tennessee ruling would also undermine trans people’s safety in their own homes. By all accounts, Lee had told Ward to leave her property and only pulled a gun on him when he refused.
Following the killing, Ward drove thirty minutes before calling a “trusted officer” at 12:22 AM to admit to the shooting. It took another 30 minutes for police to arrive at the scene where Lee was reportedly still alive. Lee was pronounced dead at the scene at 1:33 AM, an hour and a half after the shooting, and over an hour after police were first called.
Per Tennessee law, Lee would have been within her rights to threaten the use of force in her own home if she had “a reasonable belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” which, given the facts of the case, it seems reasonable to assume. This alone should undermine any case of self-defense on Ward’s part, not to mention his lack of injury and that the angle of the bullets did not match his account of that incident.
For the defense to argue in this case that the victim being trans supports Ward’s self-defense claims, Lee would need to have been not acting in self defense. This line of argument implicitly suggests that, because Lee was trans, her right to self-defense against a serious threat in her own home was somehow void.
This is not the only time recently that a trans person acting in self defense has been argued as the aggressor. In September 2025, a trans woman was assaulted in front of her workplace in Laramie, Wyoming. After being shoved to the ground by a group of men, she drew a gun and the men dispersed without her firing a shot. A short time later, police arrived and arrested her for aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent, in spite of the state’s open carry and stand your ground laws. The woman, Rhianna Kelver, lost a hearing for qualified immunity and will have to face felony charges in court.
The anti-trans rhetoric that trans people, especially trans women, are inherently violent has escalated significantly over the last two years. With every recent mass shooting and every attempted or successful assassination of a right wing figure, the right has been quick to point the finger at trans people. The DoJ has even looked into options for eliminating trans people’s coverage under the second amendment.
Now we are seeing even our right to self-defense being attacked, and I have to ask, if we aren’t even allowed to defend ourselves from violence in our own homes, are we allowed to at all?
Valorie Van-Dieman (they/she) is the Associate Editor of Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social
