Two transgender women were attacked at a Minneapolis light rail station — and onlookers cheered on the perpetrators rather than helping the victims, advocates say.
After overhearing a group making derogatory remarks toward them at the station at Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis, the pair “confronted” the group, which led to a “physical altercation,” Minneapolis Police told The Independent in a statement.
Community organizers held a rally at the site on Sunday in solidarity with the two transgender women, Dahlia and Jess.
Dahlia and Jess were leaving the station when a man started yelling transphobic slurs at them, Amber Muhm, a rally organizer who spoke to both of them after the incident, told The Independent. Jess asked him to stop talking to them that way, prompting the man to “sucker punch” her. Dahlia then struck the man with her cane, Muhm said.
Although the man was “knocked out,” four or five other people ran up and began to “mercilessly beat” the two transgender women, Muhm said.
“People were cheering the attackers on,” Muhm said. Both of them were knocked unconscious and Dahlia was left with a broken nose while Jess suffered “multiple contusions” on her ribs.
“No one would help them,” Muhm added, noting that her blood from their non-life-threatening injuries was still visible on the concrete during Sunday’s rally.
“It was a traumatic event and they are both still dealing with the physical consequences of that very acutely but the community is kind of what’s keeping them grounded right now,” she said.
The investigation is still ongoing and no arrests have been made, police said.
The pair moved from Iowa to Minnesota under the 2023 “Trans Refuge” law, which prevents out-of-state laws from interfering in the practice of gender-affirming health care.
“A lot of people are moving to Minnesota and have moved since we passed the trans refuge bill but I think we’re going to see a real spike after the election outcome,” DFL Rep Leigh Finke, who sponsored the bill, told CBS News at Sunday’s rally.
When asked if she predicts transphobic attacks will “absolutely” become more prevalent under a second Donald Trump administration, Muhm said:
“People are so emboldened now. There’s so much false data, so many false narratives about trans people,” she said, adding that at the rally people were screaming that “they were performing surgeries on 10-year-olds,” which is “not even close to being medically true.”
Trump’s campaign vowed to use the federal government to “stop” gender-affirming healthcare for minors and labeled the care “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” He has also baselessly claimed that children go to school and undergo “brutal” gender-affirming operations.
After he was re-elected, The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention among queer youth, revealed it saw “a nearly 200 percent increase in conversation topics related to the election across our 24/7 crisis services,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, in a press release.
“While alarming, we are not surprised to see that the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ politics of the past few years continue to harm young people’s mental health,” Black added.
“People are talking to me about erasing their social media presence, going back in the closet,” one speaker at the rally said, according to the outlet.
The Minneapolis trans community is preparing for a potential uptick in attacks by taking self-defense classes while others are attending classes on how to get a permit to carry handguns in public, Muhm said.
The day after Trump’s re-election, “we were flooded with inquiries. We’re still getting a ton of requests,” Kimmy Hull, founder of Sequeerity, a company that specializes in de-escalation work, including offering classes that grant permits to carry, told The Independent in an email. “Our course is geared towards our marginalized communities and we talk about whether a firearm is actually the right tool for them, the mental health side of ownership, and the need for support systems and self-care.”
There’s also an “urgency” for these self-defense classes right now, Muhm said: “People are about to get a lot more hostile and emboldened in their transphobia, so what do we do to protect ourselves when we’re out?”
