I've had a few incidents. This is how I wrote about the worst one in a fictionalized version of my transition, although this account is pretty much word for word true, describing an incident in my local bar, where I'm a regular and everybody knows I am trans:
By the time their third round of songs was coming around, Ginger had closed-out her second half-pitcher, and used her bar tab from poker to buy a third half-pitcher that she shared with Rita. Tanith was the designated driver, and had already stopped drinking. After Tanith's and Rita's turns, Ginger excused herself to go to the ladies' room again, taking her purse, and intending to check her makeup and look her best when she came back to make her final push at getting somewhere with Tanith. However, it was pretty clear, and becoming clearer, that Tanith intended to take Rita home, and then go home herself, alone, that night. But Tanith said she was definitely coming to poker on Sunday. She'd taken Ginger's phone number, and without Ginger asking, had given Ginger her number. Ginger had said, only half in jest, "Are you sure you want to give this to me? Because if you wake up sober tomorrow and decide not to call me, I'm not going to be able to be too proud to call you, because I like you too much."
In the ladies' room, almost as soon as Ginger sat down on the toilet, the door thumped as some woman unfamiliar with the place tried to get in. Ginger had drank much beer, and peed for a long time, long enough to wonder if estrogen actually might help women hold it better. The door rattled again, and Ginger said, "I'm going to be a minute, hold on." Then she flushed the toilet and washed her hands. Under other circumstances than being about to go back to being with a woman she was already romantically involved with, a woman who seemed like exactly the kind of woman Ginger had dreamed about being involved with, Ginger would have forgone fixing her makeup in deference to the woman waiting to get in. But Ginger had been at the bar four hours now, and really needed to freshen her powder and redo her lipstick. Before she was done, the door rattled a third time, and Ginger said, "Almost done. Be right out."
When Ginger had repacked her purse, hung it over her shoulder, and checked her appearance in the mirror, she looked and felt great. She only wished she could freshen her perfume. Ginger opened the door and was confronted by an angry young woman, surely not twenty-five if she was even old enough to drink. The woman seemed to be of mixed African-American and Latino descent, taller than Ginger, and very lean, like a tweaker, a meth addict. The woman blocked Ginger's exit, and planted two fingers on Ginger's breastbone, as if to push Ginger back by intimidation, though her fingers could never actually be strong enough to push a grown woman. The tall woman said, in a very nasty tone, her words dripping with threat like she was used to having people be scared of her, "You should use the men's room, and then I don't have to wait."
Ginger said, "Maybe you should use the men's room, if you don't want to wait."
"Don't be telling me what I gotta do or what I outta do. You should use the men's room, because I know what you got between your legs, and it ain't no pussy. You a man."
"You don't know nothing. The most you can discern is what I was probably born with, not what I got now. And that don't matter anyway. Now get out of my way." With those words, Ginger used her forearm to knock the tall woman's hand off her chest, and bulled past her.
As Ginger pushed past the tall woman, the tall woman grabbed the strap of Ginger's purse. "Don't you be disrespectin' me, walking away from me when I talking to you. An' you don't be touching me neither."
Ginger turned to confront the woman and free the woman's hand from her purse. When Ginger turned to face the tall woman, Ginger's purse was hanging off her right shoulder and the tall woman had her left hand on the purse strap. Ginger suspected that the tall woman was trying to steal Ginger's purse, as the woman had a clear shot out the open back door from where they were, in a small hallway that had the restroom entrances on the right, a locked back door to the kitchen on the left, and the bar's back door at the end of the hallway. Ginger brought her right hand up to the woman's wrist, above where the woman was holding the purse strap, and Ginger brought her left hand across to take hold of the purse itself.
The woman yelled, "Get your hands off me!" though her yell would not have been heard in the bar over the volume of the music. Simultaneous with her yell, the tall woman delivered a right cross, hitting Ginger square in the nose. Ginger's grip on the tall woman's wrist was the lifesaving pain-control grip, and the tall woman had to release her grip on the purse strap, which allowed Ginger to step backwards out of the hallway towards the rearmost pool table, on which a game was in process. Ginger saw in the tall woman's eyes that the tall woman had enjoyed hitting Ginger, and that she was about to do it again. Ginger's hands were low, she couldn't get either one up in time to deflect the blow, but she was moving backwards already, and could slip the punch, by bending her spine backwards, to bring her head back in the same direction as the incoming punch, thus lessening the force of the blow, and increasing the distance it would have to travel before contact, also lessening it's impact. But in the rigid corset, Ginger's spine had no flexibility, and she took a second punch, pretty much square in the mouth, which knocked her into the man setting up for his pool shot. This man was another stranger, a young Latino, in a group with two other Latino men. These three men formed up around the tall woman who had punched Ginger, and Ginger realized that the four of them had come in together, most likely gang-bangers.
Ginger had been punched by men who weighed twice what this woman weighed, and had barely felt the two little girl-punches. Ginger thought for a moment that all four of them were about to come after her, and she stepped out of her pumps, in preparation to defend herself, with the pool table at her back.
But quicker than Ginger could have clicked her pumps together and said, "There's no place like home", there was a rush of bodies from every direction. A 4-1 disadvantage quickly turned into 12-4, 16-4, and 20-4. Each of the male gang-bangers was surrounded by three or four men, and the tall woman was ringed by half a dozen females. Carmen was right up in the tall woman's face, and Makara was standing right behind the tall woman. Burt, Frank, Snowman, Terminator, Rick, Lloyd, Chuck, Brad, Kirk and other men were crowding the Latino men in opposite directions to isolate them. Suddenly Jenny was in the thick of it, taking hold of Ginger's wrist. Jenny said, "Ginger, I need some help behind the bar washing glasses."
Ginger went with Jenny, and Jenny asked what happened. Ginger said, "She punched me twice. In the face. For taking too long in the ladies' room. Or maybe just for using it. Or maybe just because she's a tweaker."
