Three filed cases of the New York Police Department chaining transgendered women to jail bars are all being investigated. One of the victims, Temmie Breslauer, says she was arrested for illegally using her father’s senior citizen subway card, ridiculed, asked inappropriate questions about her genitals and chained “to a fence for 28 hours.” Breslauer is one of the many cases of the police department being accused of taunting and handcuffing transgendered individuals for long periods of time. And, according to attorney Andrea Ritchie, the police department has been unnecessarily strip-searching, groping, and making false arrests on trans people for years.

The New York Anti-Violence Project volunteered to work with the department to make officers more respectful to trans detainees, but the NYPD hasn’t rushed to the offer. Other major cities like San Francisco and Portland have created guidelines for the transgendered, including a ban on strip-searching purely to look at their genitals (a common practice), but New York has yet to do the same although it claims LGBT equality in the system. When asked, the NYPD did not comment on the issue.

Does society take discrimination of transgendered people less serious than when other minorities are discriminated against?