I clicked through the news section of Google and was met with a horrible yet unsurprising, story.

Colorado teenager Angie Zapata was found beaten to death a few days ago by her date. Allan Ray Andrade became suspicious when Zapata refused to let him touch her sexually but was willing to perform oral sex. He grabbed her gentiles and discovered that Zapata was born a man. Andrade beat her first with his fists and then with a fire extinguisher, according to abcnews.com, saying that he thought “it” was dead until she tried to get up, and that’s when he reached for the extinguisher.

It’s the first transgender murder in Colorado that will be tried as a hate crime.

The motive for this murder is sick. Yet somehow I’m not shocked that it occurred, which I think is even sicker because it speaks volumes about the society that we live in today. People are so very afraid of things that are different that they are now willing to bludgeon their date to death for a reason like this. I’m not saying that Andrade should overlook the fact that Zapata has male reproductive organs, marry her and live happily ever after. Reactions of anger, embarrassment or even a little disgust would be normal for a man who just discovered that he had engaged in sexual activity with essentially another man, and that he had been misled the entire time. But to beat “it,” as he called this poor 18 year old kid, to death? Who in their right mind could ever feel that this would be a justified response?

Decades after the Civil Rights Movement we still hear of horrifying hate crimes against black people, particularly in the South. In 2007, a Georgia town finally had their first integrated prom. We’re still dealing with nonsense like this, and now we have found a new wave of people to hate and frighten, murder and mutilate. Hate crimes have been committed as long as there has been humanity, but in a modern setting, a setting that we generally consider to be civilized in most ways, it seems particularly loathsome. It’s incidents like this that make me ashamed to be a member of what so many consider to be a superior society.