This article includes descriptions of anti-transgender violence.
Kendall Stephens, a 34-year-old Black trans woman who was the victim of a violent transphobic assault in her Philadelphia home earlier this year, discussed the incident and her experiences with the police in a new interview.
According to Stephens, who is a student at Temple University and an activist, she was studying in her bedroom when she heard “what sounded like fighting” outside her door in August. When she and her 12- and 16-year-old goddaughters went to investigate, they found a crowd of people outside her home fighting and throwing liquor bottles, as was previously reported by them. Stephens said that one of the women started cursing at her, and Stephens told her that she was calling 911.
“The next thing I remember, the woman charged at me and hit me square in my face with a closed fist,” she told the Human Rights Campaign in an interview published last week. “She forced her way into my home, followed by her friends who joined in the assault.”
Stephens said she was suddenly surrounded by four women who misgendered her and called her transphobic slurs, one of whom hit her head and face with a wooden planter, which caused her to become concussed. She was also beaten and verbally abused by several men who also entered her home. The attack resulted in a “broken nose in two places, bruised right ribs, head contusion, facial swelling, busted lip and gums and broken gum vessels that caused two of my teeth to become necrotic,” she said.
The police who responded to her attack were “very unhelpful,” Stephens recalled. Before attempting to attain care for her injuries, the police refused to confirm the identity or arrest one of her attackers, who Stephens says was nearby “continuing to hurl transphobic slurs” while the cops were there.
Stephens and her husband went directly to the police district to attempt to enhance the charges, which the responding officers initially dismissed as “a simple assault.” But Stephens alleged that the commanding sergeant “harassed me, trivialized my injuries, and cracked jokes with his subordinates while I bled onto the floor.” She even went so far as to call a representative from Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s office to speak on her behalf, but to no avail, as she claims he was equally disrespectful.
Ultimately, Stephens and her husband gave up and drove to the hospital.
“In many instances like mine, the police harm the transgender community in irreparable ways, especially in terms of investigations into the times when we are attacked and murdered, as they often misgender us in the media and on police reports and fail to put forth the same energy and effort into our cases than that of the general public,” she said.
Stephens also addressed what she called the “unfortunate crisis” facing the trans community this year. 2020 has been the deadliest year on record for transgender peopke, the murders of six transgender women reported in the past month alone.
While there’s little ongoing documentation regarding non-fatal assaults of transgender people, the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey reported that 9 percent of respondents had been physically attacked or being trans in the year prior to taking the survey. Fourteen percent of Black trans women said they had been physically attacked.
Stephen, who recently spoke to a Pennsylvania Senate Committee in a hearing on the passage of LGBTQ+ inclusive crime legislation, said the reality is that Black trans women “were never safe outside of our homes.
“[B]ut now we are not even safe inside of our own homes, and though that may be impossible to fathom for the typical American, this is our reality,” she added. “Although some laws exist that protect people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, those laws are often not followed.”
In the wake of the attack, Stephens launched a GoFundMe to cover the costs of her medical bills but also pledged to donate half of the proceeds to the Trans Resource Center at Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Community Center. A September update also stated that $5,000 would go toward a reward in the hopes of finding the individual who murdered Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, a Black trans woman from Philadelphia killed in June. Anything left over, she said, would go toward continuing her education.
At the time of publication, the GoFundMe campaign was still active.
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