While I tend to have the same issues as you with 'making people good by act of parliament' and would tend to agree with _heleninwales_ that murder is murder and cannot in a sense be intrinsically worse because committed upon a member of a given minority, I also happen to be a member of one of those minorities and one of the smallest. The issue is more about protection for groups perceived as being 'at risk'. If the murder rate of cis woman was statistically equivalent to that of trans women, we'd be in the middle of a moral and social panic right about now. Making hateful garbage like 'before and after' photos, operative status and the 'trans panic' defence inadmissible (as the latter now is in the UK) would in many ways be far more effective that increased sentences.