On Being Punched in the Face

Thoughts on the Impacts of Stochastic Terrorism On Trans People

Content Warning:

Please be advised that the following essay contains references to physical assault, sexual assault, extreme transphobia and homophobia, anti-trans and anti-gay language, and explicit language.

Also note that the author is writing under a pseudonym in order to preserve a modicum of privacy. 

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I’ve been attacked three times in the last eighteen months.

The first time was at work, a little over a year into transition. I was behind the bar, getting ready to close up for the night, and one of the final drunks of the night took issue with being cut off. After a brief verbal altercation, I finally managed to get him to leave the bar, but this man refused to drop the issue and waited until I was outside on a quick break, smoking a cigarette, before confronting me with a single punch to the ear that caught me off guard and knocked me down. 

I have no proof that the drunk hit me because I’m trans; it’s entirely possible that my identity bore no relation to this man’s anger about being refused service. 

But I can’t help but believe that he took a little bit of pleasure out of getting a dirty hit on a weary trans woman at the end of a long bar shift.

The second time I got attacked was on the sidewalk in my old neighborhood, in plain view of dozens of people, about a month or so ago. I came across a verbal confrontation between a street performer and a pair of women and stopped to observe. It’s not entirely clear what they were arguing about, but the street performer the women were confronting has been known to harass people—especially femmes—on the street in-between bursts of very loud, very grating heavy metal guitar. A minute or so later, some young folks came by and stuck their noses into the mess; when one of the women told them to fuck off and mind their own business, one of the young men took a swing at her. This, naturally, sparked a sidewalk brawl among a dozen or so people. Half of them were actively fighting, the other half—myself included—were trying to separate people and break it up. In the midst of this scrum, I took a nasty punch to the jaw that sent me tumbling to the ground. The man who hit me loomed over me for just a moment before continuing on to swing at other people, getting a couple of blows in before the fight was finally broken up.

I have no proof that the man on the street hit me because I’m trans; it’s entirely possible that my identity bore no relation to this man’s desire to land a couple of good blows on someone, anyone, during a spontaneous street fight. He certainly seemed like the type–he had the build and the demeanor of an aspiring mixed martial artist.

But I saw a little flash of hatred in his eyes when he was standing over me, a crooked little smile on his face, and I can’t help but believe he saw a chance to punch a trans woman and took it. 

The third time I got attacked was just a few nights ago at a bar in downtown Los Angeles. I was having some drinks and catching up with old friends during a visit to the city where I used to live. Towards the end of the night, a pair of men approached our table and attempted to chat us up, showering us with compliments and the flirty little comments that drunk men make in bars at 1 a.m , not long after they realize they’re lonely and fear going home to an empty apartment. But these men picked the wrong table–our group of mostly lesbians, trans women, and other assorted queers were completely disinterested in their drunken overtures. 

Things went south quickly. One of my friends told one of the men that we weren’t interested and they should leave us alone. The man took issue with that — as men do. His friend was staring right at me. Then, the one cis-man among us told him to get lost, and that was enough to set the dude off. He lunged across the table and began hitting my friend, sending drinks and tater tots flying everywhere. While everyone went to break up the initial fight, his friend took the initiative and lunged at me, landing several solid blows to my chin, neck, and stomach before the bouncer pulled him off me and dragged him outside, where he spent a half-hour fuming and trying to re-enter the bar before his friends finally got him into a car.

This time, I had no doubt about why this man—a complete stranger to whom I had said and done nothing at all—attacked me. As the bouncer dragged him outside, he cursed and shouted all the slurs one would expect.  The moment he arrived at the table, his eyes were fixed on me, and I saw the lustful hatred I’ve come to recognize all too frequently in men’s eyes–his own insecurity and repressed sexuality manifesting as a confusing storm of emotions that he was clearly unequipped to handle. Given the chance, I have no doubt that man would’ve tried to kill me. Had I come across that man on a dark street that night, there’s a great chance I would’ve become a statistic, a tragedy, yet another trans woman taken from the world before her time, another name on a memorial post on your newsfeed that you scroll past without thinking too deeply about because it makes you sad. 

This is my life — and the life for all the women and girls like me. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

But it is.

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According to the Early Insights Report from the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, three percent of respondents reported being “physically attacked in the last 12 months because of their gender identity or expression.”

That may sound like a small number, but consider that 92,329 people responded to the survey, which means that 2,770 trans people reported being physically assaulted in 2022 because of who they are and how they present themselves. And, while there’s no way to know the true number, the statistics in the report are almost certainly a dramatic undercount–every trans person you will ever meet knows someone who’s been punched, or beaten, or assaulted, or worse. 

For more context, it helps to compare the 2022 survey with the results from the 2015 survey. With a much smaller sample size–27,715 people filled out the survey back then–nine percent of trans people self-reported being physically assaulted, or 2,494 people. So while the percentage of trans people surveyed reporting physical violence against them has dropped, the number of cases–and I cannot stress enough that these numbers are almost certainly an undercount–has overall increased in the last seven years.

And none of those numbers include instances of sexual assault, either, which the survey treats as its own category. The early report from the 2022 survey does not include specific data about sexual assault, but the 2015 survey found that ten percent of respondents had been sexually assaulted that year, and a whopping 47 percent of transgender people surveyed reported some form of unwanted sexual contact in their lifetimes.

I want you to sit there for a moment and dwell on those numbers. Roughly half of all trans people can expect to endure some sort of sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. 

Almost half. Almost 1 in 2 people. Almost every other trans person.

According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, there are roughly 2.6 million transgender people living in the United States (again, that’s probably a low estimate, but we’ll work with it). Using those numbers and extrapolating, that would mean that a whopping 1.2 million trans people can expect to be victims of physical or sexual violence in their life. That’s roughly the population of San Diego, California. That’s roughly the population of Dallas, Texas. That’s roughly the population of the entire metropolitan area of Richmond, Virgina.

And that’s the low estimate.

Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Can you hear the desperate cries of the trans people in your community as we watch ourselves become second-class citizens in real time, as we listen to talking heads, well-heeled pundits, and elected officials publicly question whether we have a right to live and exist as our true selves? Do you understand–truly understand–what’s at stake for us?

Are you listening?

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I hope you’re horrified. You should be horrified by these numbers. You should be struggling to wrap your head around entire cities worth of people being deeply–and often irreparably–traumatized by a society that’s becoming ever more hostile toward trans people.

But statistics only go so far. After a while, it’s easy to become desensitized to numbers, figures, tables, and percentages. The U.S. Transgender Survey is important, but it doesn’t–and cannot–put faces to the sort of violence and hatred we trans people are facing.

That’s why I feel compelled to remind you of all the trans people of color who are being murdered at disproportionate rates to their white counterparts but rarely see their stories told or justice dispensed in their cases. Thirty-five trans or nonbinary people of color were killed in 2023. (And, again, that’s only the number compiled and publicized by the Human Rights Campaign–the true number is almost certainly higher.)

That’s why I feel compelled to highlight the growing phenomenon of interstate queer refugees–people fleeing states that are enacting discriminatory laws against trans and nonbinary people and moving to less immediately hostile states along the coasts. 

That’s why I feel compelled to remind you of Nex Benedict, who was killed after a fight in his/their school bathroom and yet still cannot get the police or the nation’s paper of record to use the correct pronouns when referring to him/them or acknowledge that Nex was attacked by his/their classmates at school for being trans–despite Nex’s own testimony. Weeks after the attack, the medical examiner ruled Nex’s death a suicide–which was enough for every major media outlet covering the story and even the President of the United States to wash their hands of the tragedy. Never mind that Nex’s school was rife with anti-queer bullying or that Nex’s home state saw fit to give stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik a job on a panel overseeing state library standards. As far as anyone is concerned, it seems, this is just another example of a depressed trans teen taking their own life rather than the more terrifying truth. 

And that’s why I feel compelled to share with you my experience of being attacked for simply existing in my daily life.

This is what transphobia looks like. This is the goal of the narrative being peddled by the fascists and hate traffickers in our world. All of this–from Chaya Raichik’s social media accounts to testimony on the floor of the United States Senate–is stochastic terrorism. This is what the fucking lunatics on your newsfeed want to see happen, even if they won’t always come right out and say it. I have no idea where the men who’ve attacked me in the last year and a half–and they were all men–land on the political spectrum, but that’s irrelevant, because they wanted to hurt me. I don’t care about the color of the boot on my throat, nor do I care about the voting habits of the men who cannot discern whether they want to fuck me or kill me.

And that is what they want: they want us dead—all of us, whether by their own hands or through the sort of vile discrimination that leads us to take our own lives. They’ll kill me, they’ll kill my friends, they’ll kill every single one of us if they get a chance. 

And when they’re done with us, don’t think for a single second they’re not going to come for you, too.

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You might read this and think I’m being extreme, hyperbolic, dramatic–but that’s on you. You may recognize that things are bad and scary out there for trans people, and perhaps you’re horrified by the news of institutionalized anti-trans hate coming out of Red America. But if you’re living in the cities on the coasts, you might believe that your bubble is protected from the worst of the hatred.

But let me tell you a little secret that the trans people in your communities have known for a long time: nowhere is truly safe for us.

While cities like Portland and Los Angeles are objectively less hostile than, say, Owasso, Oklahoma, it doesn’t mean that we’re still not at risk every single day. I was attacked in the middle of a busy bar on a Friday night in the second-biggest city in America, surrounded by some of my dearest and most supportive friends. If it had happened anywhere else, at any other time, I may not be writing this today. If I had not managed to get out of my own backwater hometown, it very well could be me getting deadnamed by the cops and misgendered in The New York Times. 

It could be me next week, or next month, or next year, or in another five years. It could be any one of us.

So, no, I don’t think I’m being extreme, and to be quite honest, I don’t give a fuck what you think about my language or how I express my anger and rage and fear and sorrow for my sisters and brothers and siblings. None of us trans people do. We are being attacked, we are being murdered, we are being targeted for fucking extinction–not just by right-wing extremists with social media followings, but entire states.

We tried to play nice, and we tried to play by your rules. Doing so brought us nothing but grief and pain and tragically short lives in the shadows. What we trans people have today, we’ve earned through an unbelievable amount of blood, sweat, and tears. We’ve done it all while carrying the unbelievably heavy baggage of personal and interpersonal trauma; what we have won, we have won with the memories of our dead friends, our dead relatives, our dead comrades, our dead lovers in our hearts.

We’re not going back. 

So wake the fuck up and do something—anything—to stand up and protect your queer and trans friends and family members–and, hell, even the complete strangers you see in your cities and towns. We’re so desperate for your help. We are not asking anymore—we’re begging. The way things are going, we may very well have a fascist in the Oval Office working to eradicate trans people from existence this time next year. When that happens, you may have the luxury of looking back and wondering where it all went wrong. 

My friends and I will not have that luxury. We will be far too busy fighting for our lives.

I’ve been attacked three times in the last eighteen months. If I have anything to say about it, there will not be a fourth time. If it were up to me, I would not know violence, I would not know fear, I would not have to mourn any more lost friends, lovers, and comrades.

But it’s not up to me now, is it?