By Gisela Romero, from La Paz (Entre Ríos) Photos: Pablo Merlo The Trial and Appeals Court of Paraná, based in La Paz (Entre Ríos), today sentenced Joe Lemonge, a trans man, to five years and six months in prison for attempted homicide. The reading of the sentence began shortly after noon and lasted almost two hours. Throughout the hearing, Joe was referred to with female pronouns, despite his self-identified gender as male. The crime he was charged with occurred on October 13, 2016, at his home in the Hipólito Yrigoyen neighborhood of Santa Elena. On that day, Joe was attacked by two men in his house, and in defending himself, he wounded one of them in the neck, according to his testimony before the court. Judge Cristina Lía Vandembroucke found Joe Lamonge guilty of attempted homicide and sentenced him to five years and six months in prison. Prosecutor Santiago Alfieri had requested an eight-year sentence. The full ruling will be read on May 11 at 9:00 a.m. The judge also ordered the confiscation of the weapon used in the incident and the clothing of the injured man. Additionally, she ordered that an air rifle seized during the investigation be held in custody for one year. The judge read the operative part of the sentence for one hour and 59 minutes. Joe, his defense attorney Fernando Báez, and Prosecutor Santiago Alfieri were present in the courtroom. The young man's mother, Genoveva Mendoza, sat in the front row. A group of students from a local school were also seated in the public gallery. Outside were members of the political group Sexualidades Disidentes who came from Paraná to accompany Joe.

[READ MORE: Joe defended himself against his attackers: he was accused of “attempted murder” ]

They referred to him using feminine pronouns "for legal reasons"

The silence was absolute as the judge outlined some of the grounds for the ruling, even when she explained to the defendant that he would be referred to as female due to legal reasons, specifically because his national identity document was not up to date, and even when she announced the sentence. “Beyond the identification that you have clearly stated before this Court throughout the hearings, legally you have not changed your gender, and therefore in the sentence I will refer to you as female, without this implying any disregard or in any way failing to respect the transgender status you have invoked. But for legal reasons, I must refer to you by the gender you legally possess,” Vandembroucke explained. When Vandembroucke left the courtroom, Joe's mother hugged him and confronted the prosecutor, warning him that they had convicted an innocent person.

“I told my boyfriend I was leaving freely and they gave me five years.”

When Joe came face to face with those who had come to support him, he spoke, in the rain, in front of the local courthouse. “I told my boyfriend I was going free, and they gave me five years. I want the whole community to rise up,” he told Presentes. “The judge is a monster. She can’t be called a woman. She doesn’t support women, much less a piece of shit trans person. My boyfriend is out of the country, my friend is in another city, and all of you, my comrades, are far away. I have nothing to lose. I can’t go on like this,” he said, crying. No one there expected the judge to dismiss the self-defense claim and sentence Joe. Amid the commotion, Genoveva Mendoza raised her voice and said, “We are alive, and we are going to fight. God is with us.”

A life marked by bullying

Joe told Presentes that since adolescence he felt singled out by many of his neighbors in Santa Elena. Jokes, teasing, and insults were part of his daily life. He said that when he walked through the neighborhood or went to the local kiosk, he knew that jokes about his sexual orientation and gender identity would be inevitable. As the years went by, the violence escalated, and around 2016, it began to affect his own home. Three men, always the same neighbors, would confront him face to face. Joe said he couldn't sit with his father or mother in the yard because they would constantly harass him. He always had to go out on his motorcycle or in his parents' car, escorted, "to avoid the hostility." "This fat dyke, this old macho, we have to kill him, I'm going to burn his house down," he recounted them saying. On October 13, 2016, as Joe told Presentes, around 7:00 a.m., two men arrived at his home shouting and confronting him. He said one of them tried to force his way inside. They struggled, and Joe was injured in the hand. He thought, "This is the end, it's over today." He recounted how he managed to run to a room where there were unused items. He tried to grab a metal bar to defend himself, but instead grabbed a gun, which ended up firing and wounding one of the attackers.

[READ MORE: Demands for justice for Joe Lemonge and an end to transphobia]

Minutes later, Joe said he went to the police station, but they wouldn't take his report. However, he ended up being charged for the attack and for alleged drug dealing. Police found no drugs during the search of his home. “From the first day the field was so dirty it was horrible, and the sequence of events made me end up as I did: with nothing. My father died a week after the events. I was detained at the La Paz police station and then spent 30 days under house arrest. I couldn't see my father again; I had to go to his wake in handcuffs and with a guard. A month later, the house was set on fire, and we know who did it because there were witnesses, but they didn't take care of me for a single moment, not even with psychological support. He recounted that in 2017 he moved with his mother for three or four months to a small country house "because the threats were that they were going to come back and finish what they started and kill me. My mother and I lost everything."

A process marked by transphobia

This week, LGBTQ+ organizations mobilized in front of the Entre Ríos provincial government building in Buenos Aires to denounce transphobia within the justice system and delivered a document. Among other things, the document states that Joe “was subjected to a process marked by transphobia, discrimination in his place of origin, and without any therapeutic support, assistance, or help (...). Defending himself in a context of systematic harassment and human rights violations cannot be treated by the justice system as just another act of aggression. The justice system cannot ignore that these attacks were due to his being a trans man, and it must also consider the context of social vulnerability of Joe and his family.”  ]]>