cw/tw transphobia, transmisogyny, and violent hate crime
I'm of two minds writing this since, to my knowledge, I think donations for the affected parties are now closed and the hateful accounts were suspended. But I figured considering so little is written about this outside of Indonesia, that I could share what I know to spread awareness.
Recently our president declared queer people a "non-military threat". This included an anti-LGBT education push as a religious prevention method among the youth.
With any systemic enforcement of bigotry comes people being emboldened to do horrendous things, and among many rising incidents of hate crime, a viral incident happened in Bogor. A hate account on instagram called bogorbersihlgbt uploaded videos of a vigilante hate group systematically attacking low income trans women on the streets. At least 15 trans women were attacked, beaten, doused with urine, and some even stripped naked.
Thankfully the community came together to pool money to support the victims affected, and last I checked it appears donations are closed. I myself reported the bogorbersihlgbt account yesterday, and despite the account having only 2 reels, they had upwards of 14.4k followers. I noticed another new account called bogorbersihl93t or something like that, which appeared to be their attempt to post again. Same hateful stuff, reported it too.
All this is to bring light to how comfortable people are to be hateful in this country. They felt so confident in their crime that they recorded it and posted it online. And why wouldn't they? The president is basically giving systemic support for this kind of cruelty. The only silver lining out of this being how quickly the community looked out for each other that the funds needed were raised before I could even share the posts myself. That's some gotong royong magic that I love to see, and one we'll need as things get rough for us.
This was nowhere near the first or the last incident of vigilante violence that will happen, and these hate groups always target the most visible and vulnerable of our community. In this case being low income transfemmes who work the streets. Let's look out for each other, always.
