Wild Alchemy in Baltimore

By Jeff Brunell

April brought some wild alchemy to suburban Baltimore. A cascade of bad news for transgender activists coalesced into an outpouring of civil rights support. The grisly impulse to film and broadcast a hate crime instead of stopping it triggered an inadvertent and rare swell in public awareness. And an ordinary McDonald’s parking lot became a venue for human courage, beauty and love.

Perhaps you missed this piece of news, tucked as it was somewhere behind the royal wedding and bin Laden assassination: a 22-year-old transgender woman was attacked and beaten by two teenage girls on April 18 at a McDonald’s in Rosedale, Maryland. The incident allegedly sprang from accusations that the victim, Chrissy Lee Polis, was intruding in the women’s bathroom and had spoken to the boyfriend of one of the attackers. A cell phone video of the attack, filmed by a McDonald’s employee, went viral before being pulled by YouTube. Over the sickening course of minutes, it shows Ms. Polis kicked repeatedly, dragged across the floor and sent into convulsions while the staff stands in complicity and the cameraman lends macabre commentary.

For a couple of days, the story took wings. Before it was widely publicized that the victim was transgender, bloggers suggested a racial motive in the attack. Polis is white; the girls who attacked her are black, and so out spun the backward vitriol from internet threads. Then, the victim speaks out. She’s transgender, she’s not irreparably brutalized and she speaks more for peace than for conflict. The story’s hook as a good middle-of-the-road scandal loses its heft and potentially divisive mass-appeal. Outside of Baltimore, an emblematic moment in the alternating violent oppression and invisibility of transgendered individuals was widely under-reported.

The situation as portrayed both on film and by the victim and her lone rescuer provides an apt metaphor: the attack lasts long enough to leave a viewer dumbfounded, continuously thinking that surely, someone’s about to step in. But until 55-year-old Vicky Thoms steps between Polis and her attackers some minutes into the now-disappeared video, several employees and patrons pass through the frame, and none do a thing. More, the impression is distinctly of people attempting to look the other way.

In human and civil rights aberrations of every size, this seems like the boiling point-moment when the cognitive dissonance wrought by looking away outstrips the gain of non-involvement. Viewed that way, it sounds positively economic, and perhaps it is. This may be the juncture beyond which ignoring the rights of the transgender community becomes bad for business.

McDonald’s seems to think so. The Rosedale location closed at 4 pm on April 25th, in advance of a rally and vigil for Ms. Polis. McDonald’s posted a marquee reading “In Support of Peace” and opened their parking lot to a surge of activists and supporters. We walked onto the property a few minutes into the rally, amazed at the rock concert-scale parking issues suddenly descending on this quiet neighborhood. The crowd, which police estimated at 250-plus, obscured the speaker as we approached, but her words set the perfect frame: 20 years ago, she was saying, this could not have happened (a peaceful, public pro-trans rally) and hopefully in another 20 years, such will be unnecessary.

The distance toward civil rights already traveled by the trans community was underscored by speakers like Brenda Roberts, who told the crowd, “this is something, this hatred, we’ve been fighting for a long time. I transitioned in ’78… when I was attacked, it didn’t make the papers.” Other speakers echoed this sentiment, one noting that history has necessitated far too many candlelight vigils for victims of senseless violence.

The small contingent of Baltimore County Police present stood in respectful support of the assembly, and the contrast was noted by Roberts, who was present for the Stonewall Riots. “I could have been arrested anytime I walked out of the house back in the ‘60s. The only [gay bar] I ever went to was the Blue Hippopotamus [still extant as the landmark Hippo]. They wouldn’t let me in because I was cross-dressed, unless there was a drag show going on. They never told me the reason, but I believe it was [the risk of arrest].”

On this day, supporters of the most basic protections for transgenders — against attack, for assembly — were joined by a coalition representing a cross-section of the region’s community organizations, clergy, labor, media and politics. Said Washington, D.C. talk radio host Anthony McCarthy, “You and I can be the person who stands in the gap. For too long, we’ve refused to stand with our trans brothers and sisters. When it’s okay to beat our trans brothers and sisters, it’s okay to beat you and I.”

He continued by addressing Maryland’s gay and lesbian community: “We went to Annapolis and said it’s okay to leave them out of the legislation,” and urged LGBTQ to act as a more united front toward civil rights for all concerned. Presently, transgendered individuals are protected under a 2005 expansion of Maryland’s hate crime statute, but this stopgap against outright abuse falls far short of equality. Civil rights advocacy group Equality Maryland has called upon the state’s General Assembly to extend to its transgendered citizens protections in housing, jobs and public space commensurate to those taken for granted by the cisgendered [those whose gender identity matches their birth sex].

Pending Maryland legislation, HB 235, however, includes no public accomodations provisions. In a statement before the General Assembly, Jenna Frischetti of the advocacy group TRANSMaryland stated:

“HB235 departs from our long standing tradition of protecting our citizens completely. It leaves the most vulnerable among us without our most needed safeguard, the notion that violence and discrimination of any sort will not be tolerated. For when we remove public accommodations from our standards of protections, we condone the continued abuse and in fact encourage more of the same.”

In the same address, Frischetti referenced a landmark study released earlier this year, Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, a collaborative effort between the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality. Compiled from print and digital surveys of 6,450 respondents nationwide, the study, in its own words, “brings to light what is both patently obvious and far too often dismissed from the human rights agenda.” The 122-page report documents outsized rates of suicide, sexual assault, groundless firings, extreme poverty and homelessness amongst transgender and gender non-conforming respondents. Also described are high rates of verbal harassment (53%) in places of public accommodation, with some of these encounters culminating in a physical assault.

Here is where three pieces of very bad news can bring about needed social change. The voyeuristic cannibalism of the attack on Chrissy Lee Polis demonstrates how the hostility faced daily by transgenders is compounded by an uncomprehending and too often unsympathetic public. Ms. Thoms, who was punched as she came to Polis’ aid, asked, “Why was it me when there were big strong men — and why did they let her [the assailant] go back in, to keep kicking her? And why, when she was having a seizure, did the manager step over her to retrieve the attacker’s cell phone?”

The grotesque absence of empathy in both the video’s content and its very production register at least one tally in the positive column: they cannot be ignored.

More, they illustrate viscerally the systemic and cultural disadvantages faced by transgender citizens; the titular injustice at every turn. The public accommodations debate is demystified out of the legalese and into the universal language of righteous outrage. The urgent need for comprehensive legislation is plainly evident.

Legislation’s role in the toddling evolution of human kindness and understanding is described by Sandy Rawls, who founded and directs Baltimore’s Trans-United. “Those protections should have been in the legislation — as you can see, if the law was passed, maybe the two young women would have known by law. Transgender people are just coming into their rights and most people don’t really know yet.”

This is consistent with the rest of our American civil rights story. First, and at long last, a given shade of brutality is formally outlawed. Sometime later, the mass of us begin to see why. Somewhere between these points is the tacit message — so often misread by bigots as an endorsement or power play — that you have the right to exist. You have the right, and finally the space and security, to claim a history, an evolving identity and a voice under the law. It’s only from such a space, ever imperfect and ever moving toward a more even footing, that true exchange can hope to occur. And it’s only from this very ongoing conversation that we the people ever learned the first thing about ourselves.