Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about two shoplifting suspects who were shot over the weekend by a Prince George’s County police officer. The suspects were shot after they attempted to drive away with the officer’s arm lodged in the door of their getaway car. But the Post story was not concerned with the facts of this botched escape—the newspaper had already covered the particulars of the incident a day earlier. The follow-up amounted to a lengthy correction of one fact: the gender of the wounded suspects.

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Local transgender advocacy group the D.C. Trans Coalition will be honored with a “Distinguished Service Award” from the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA) on Wednesday.

Last month, I wrote about DCTC’s most recent victory: its campaign to change the D.C. Jail’s policy for housing transgender inmates. Admittedly: the new policy, which makes it possible for D.C.’s inmates to be housed according to their gender identity instead of their genitalia, could still use a little work. When the new regulations were announced, DCTC’s Sadie Baker called them “a step forward [when] what we really need is a giant leap”; I titled my piece the subtly ambivalent “Are D.C.’s Transgender Inmates Still Screwed?”

Still, without the work of the DCTC and other activists, there wouldn’t be any formal acknowledgment of the needs of D.C.’s transgender inmates at all. So that “step forward” is still worth a couple pats on the back: Just Detention International, which also helped to draft the new policy, will also be honored on Wednesday.

The full DCTC presser is after the jump.

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