Outrageous! Transgender people attacked in gay bar

[Butterfly]

Outrageous! Transgender people attacked in gay bar
Peterson Toscano's A Musing
Ruminations of a quirky queer Quaker
April 15, 2009


http://petersontoscano.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/ending-oppression-of-trans-people/


When Mitch Graffeo entered Dupont's Fab Lounge shortly before closing on Feb. 28, he hadn't been to a lesbian club in more than a decade. Graffeo, 40, was only stopping in to pick up a friend, 29-year-old Jamie, at the conclusion of the gay bar's weekly lesbian night. Graffeo and Jamie, both transgender men, were two of only a handful of men in a club full of women. As the lights went up, a group of women took a sudden interest in Jamie. Slim and boyish, Jamie had only recently begun to transition from female to male, and they wanted to know what he was.

Graffeo watched the women surround Jamie. "They were grabbing him, saying, 'What are you, a boy or a girl?'" Graffeo says. "They were very interested and excited, grabbing his crotch and his chest," says Graffeo. When Jamie asked the women to leave him alone, they closed in tight around him. Jamie "wiggled his way out," and the two men funneled toward the door with the rest of the last-call crowd.