The gay panic defense is a legal defense, usually against charges of assault or murder. A defendant using the gay panic defense claims that he or she acted in a state of violent temporary insanity because of a little-known psychiatric condition called homosexual panic. Trans panic is a similar defense applied towards cases where the victim is a transgender or intersex person. This defense often fails, and has been ruled inadmissible in many jurisdictions because of a complete lack of scientific research to support it.
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Famous quotes containing the words gay, panic and/or defense:
“The terrifying message of gay liberation is that men are capable of loving their brothers. It should be sweet news to every woman in the world, for, if the capacity of men to love whom they have been taught to treat as competitors and enemies can transcend their education, the world can begin to heal.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people’s identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)