Reverend BobbieJean Baker, 49, of City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco and Oakland had officiated at a New Year's Eve Watch Night worship service in Oakland, along with Bishop Yvette Flunder from the same church.

Baker moved to the Bay Area in 1992 from Memphis, TN. She served as west Coast Regional TransSaints Minister of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries and Lay Minister at Transcending Transgender Ministries at City of Refuge. She was also lead singer of the all transgender member Transcendence Gospel Choir. She also worked at San Francisco's Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center as a substance abuse and transgender health counsellor.

My purpose is to help you break whatever it is that had you bound so that you can move to better yourself. I'm willing to hold hands and walk you through every phase, but I am not willing to be your babysitter. There comes a time when you need to really step up and do the work for you.

--BobbieJean Baker, to her clients

At the service Bishop Flunder says Baker seemed to know she didn't have much time left.

She gave best wishes to everyone, wonderful, kind words. She went way out of her way speaking to everyone and wishing them the best for the coming year. It was incredible the space that she was in.

--Bishop Flunder

After the service Reverend Baker went to the home of gay deacon Bobby Wiseman where there was to be a traditional meal of corn bread and black-eyed peas.

[It was almost as if she knew] that something was coming, because she was so unusually specific in many of the ways she was going around talking to different people and encouraging them through their own struggles.

--Bishop Yvette Flunder

Wiseman says that at about 2:30 am he was driving his Ford Expedition west on I-580 in Oakland to take Baker home, "remembering the good times and the friends that we've lost over the years" when a silver and black car bumped his SUV on the left before swerving away. Wiseman's vehicle fishtailed and then rolled two or three times before landing upside down at the Park Boulevard exit. Wiseman managed to crawl out of the vehicle through the window, but he and a bystander were unable to free Baker. Both of them had been wearing seat belts.

Baker died at the scene.

Earlier this month, those opposed to California's new law AB1266 (who call themselves Privacy for All Students), which would provide transgender students with equal access to academic programs, submitted 613,120 petitioner signatures in an attempt to qualify repeal of the bill as a November, 2014 ballot initiative. Initiative rules stipulate that 504,760 of those signatures have to be valid for the initiative to take a place on the ballot.

Simple math shows that calls for 82.3% of the signatures to belong to registered California voters. Not so simple reasoning says unless the number of valid signatures required is actually 95% of the 504,760, which would be 479,522, the bill would fail to qualify for the ballot.

Currently the the signatures are averaging just 75% authenticity, which would only garner 459840 valid signatures, nearly 20000 short of the number necessary. Thus the appeal referendum currently appears unlikely to qualify.

The Executive Director of Equality California, John O'Connor, says that"it's unlikely, [but] not impossible" that the measure will come up for referendum.

Richard Thomas' mother is defending him. According to her, the 16-year-old Thomas is not homophobic and didn't mean to hurt anyone last Monday.

My son is not a hateful person. He's not homophobic. He was joking, and he didn't know it would go that far.

I am very sorry, very sorry for my son's actions. I did not raise him that way.

--Ms. Jackson, Thomas' mother

His mother says Richard is very sorry and is writing a letter of apology to his 18-year-old victim, Sasha Fleishman. Fleishman identifies as gender-neutral…which is sometimes called neutrois. Fleishman made the mistake of dozing off on a public bus in Oakland. Thomas thought it would be funny to set fire to Fleishman's skirt.

The intentional and callous nature of the crime is shocking and will not be tolerated in our community.

--Nancy O'Malley, Alameda County District Attorney

Assumptions can be dangerous to people who are habitually marginalized. One of the big assumptions that people make about the concept of "transgender" is that transgender is a subset of homosexual. It is not. I do not have data to turn to, but I have heard, as I shared in a diary last week, that about 1/4 of transgender people are gay or lesbian, 1/4 are heterosexual, 1/4 are bisexual and 1/4 are asexual.

What exactly that says about the influence of the normalized control of gender and sexuality by our culture is something I'll let other people discuss.

But the assumption has a large impact on the everyday lives of gender-variant people. Even scientists studying sexually-transmitted diseases jump to the conclusion that transgender women are "men who have sex with men." And even direct evidence to the contrary often does not dissuade people from adopting the assumption.

Tonight I have two cases in point.

On the afternoon of September 9 Leticia Alvarado, cashier at a motel in the 13900 block of Francisquito Avenue in Baldwin Park CA, discovered the body of her friend Melony Smith in her motel room.

Alvarado says that Smith had been staying in the motel on and off for three years.

We became very close. She called me sister. I was her sister.

Before I go to work, I always stop by her room and we have breakfast. That day she wouldn’t answer her phone.

--Alvarado

So Alvarado went to the room and had the maid open the door and found Smith's body lying on the floor.

She was all bruised up. She had blood on her head. She was lifeless. I could tell she was dead.

--Alvarado