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.