A LAVINGTON woman verbally vilified and hit a wheelchair-bound transgender woman with a garden shovel, a court has heard.

Christie Keighran, 22, was yesterday convicted for assault occasioning actual bodily harm and maliciously damaging property over the January 15 incident.

Her victim Donna Macklan, 41, was left with several injuries, including fractured vertebrae. The court heard the attack was unprovoked.

Ms Macklan had been intending to visit the Kentucky Avenue residence to have a cup of coffee with a friend when she was attacked by other people at the home.

Ms Keighran will be sentenced next month.

- The Border Mail, 31 October 2011 

I didn’t hear about this at the time, how awful. I don’t think I’d ever read The Border Mail before - it seems to be a local paper for the Albury-Wodonga area (on the border between Victoria and New South Wales).

In referring to Ms Macklan as a “transgender woman” (relevant because the attack seems to be a hate crime) without discussing her transition, this coverage is more sensitive than I think is typical for Australian newspapers. It’s common for stories about binary-gendered trans people to include previous names and medical transition status within the first few lines or to give “transgender” or “transsexual” as a gender (sometimes modified by “female-to-male” or “male-to-female”). 

Unfortunately the story is titled “transgender attacker convicted”, proving using an adjective as a noun is as problematic syntactically as it is politically.