Letter to the editor, the Boston Globe, December 3, 1998:

I found your characterization of Rita Hester ("Stabbing victim a mystery to many," Metro/Region, Nov. 30) degrading and potentially misleading.

Throughout your coverage of the incident you refer to Hester as "he" and a transvestite. If Hester was known socially and to neighbors only as a woman, it is not likely that she was a transvestite but rather was probably a transsexual and should have been referred to using female pronouns.

A significant number of people live as the opposite gender and are socially perceived by all they meet as that gender. To reduce Rita Hester's life and dignity to the level of "a man in women's clothes" is disingenuous and disappointing.

A little more sensitivity to the hardships these people face would have reflected far better upon your journalistic integrity than the rather voyeuristic portrayal that did appear.

—George Kierstein
Cambridge

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