Amanda Milan

Amanda Milan (1974 – June 20, 2000, originally born Damon Lee Dyer) was a pre-operative transsexual prostitute who was killed by two men in front of a New York bus terminal at the age of twenty-five. Amanda worked as a prostitute to gain the money required for sex reassignment surgery to give her the physical body of a female.

Early life

Amanda grew up in Chicago as a young boy named Damon Lee Dyer. Not much is known about her childhood years. Approximately eight years before her murder, at the age of eighteen, Amanda came out to her friends as transgendered. Since then, she had been living in a Central Park apartment with her dog. She traveled often to Europe, where she worked as an escort and had dreams of becoming a fashion designer.

She sometimes spent time with a group of fellow transsexuals at McDonald's. She and her two closest friends, Kim and Simone, also transsexuals, were inseparable for nearly ten years until Kim went to Australia and was found mangled at the bottom of a cliff. Half a year later, Amanda's other friend Simone left town to live with a boyfriend in San Francisco but was found dead soon after, thrown out of a fifth-story window.

Murder

At 4 a.m. on June 20, Amanda was waiting to catch a bus after leaving a get-together with her friends when a man by the name of Dwayne McCuller walked up to her and began to harass her. He yelled sentences ridden with expletives at her and phrases such as "I know what you have between your legs!" [Siegal, Nina. "The Crying Game." http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2001/06/20/milan/index.html] Amanda attempted to retort and challenged him to a fight. He threatened to shoot her so she began to walk away when another young man, Eugene Celestine, told McCuller that he had a knife. McCuller grabbed it, chased her down the street and stabbed her in the neck.

A passerby attempted to stop the bleeding and an ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital; however, despite their attempts, she died in less than an hour at St. Vincent's Hospital.

A man named David Anderson allegedly helped McCuller escape from the scene, but all three men were eventually caught.

Aftermath

Dwayne McCuller was charged with homicide. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seventeen and a half years to life in prison. [ Transgendered victims of hate crimes by state. http://www.gpac.org/press/victims-state.html]

Transgender activists, particularly in New York, have been fueled by the crime, notable for its extremely graphic nature.

In June 2006 the poet Christian Ortega published "I Know What You Did In The 80's", a book of confessional poetry written when the author was in his teens. It is dedicated to Amanda Milan who was the author's friend. More info at: http://www.ikwydit8.com

ee also

* Gwen Araujo
* Transsexual
* Transphobia
* Hate crime
* List of transgendered people

ources

* Siegal, Nina. "Watershed of Mourning At the Border of Gender." http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/072400ny-victim-milan.html

References