Actress
Laverne Cox and a friend were attacked by an anti-transgender assailant in Los
Angeles’s Griffith Park over the weekend.
Cox and her
friend, whom she did not name, were having a socially distanced walk in the
park Saturday when they were approached by a man who “very aggressively” asked
for the time, she recounted in an Instagram video. After her friend answered,
the man said, “Guy or girl?” and her friend said, “Fuck off.” Then the man started
hitting Cox’s friend. Cox got her phone out and dialed 911, and the attacker
fled.
Cox’s friend,
apparently a cisgender man, recognized that she was the target of the attack
and that the assailant wanted her to answer, she said. Her companion has other
transgender friends, but the experience was a new one for him, although not for
Cox.
“This has
happened to me before,” she said. “I’ve been trans my whole life. I’ve been
harassed and bullied my whole life. None of this is new, but it’s still just
kind of like, ‘Who cares?’ and then ‘Why do you need to be aggressive?’”
She was
dressed in yoga pants and a hoodie, with a mask on, so she was likely
unrecognizable, but that didn’t stop the attacker, she noted. “It’s not safe in
the world,” she said. “And I don’t like to think about that a lot, but it is
the truth. It’s the truth, and it is not safe if you’re a trans person.
Obviously, I know this well. It’s just really sad.”
“It doesn’t
matter who you are,” the Emmy-nominated actress pointed out. “You can be
Laverne Cox, you know, or whatever that means. If you’re trans … you’re going
to experience stuff like this.”
The incident
brought back memories of other attacks, she said, and she also found herself
asking what she could have done differently — but, she concluded, trans people
should never fault themselves for being harassed.
“When these things happen, it’s not your fault,” she stressed. “It’s not your fault that people are not cool with you existing in the world. We have a right to walk in the park.”
SOURCE: ADVOCATE
That she feels the need to say those last few sentences? A sad statement re: this world. Everyone should be mad as hell about this stuff. When does it end?
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