On May 24th this year a video was shot in Milan of a Brazilian trans woman being beaten by three police officers. She’s on the floor, her hands raised to show complete submission, and yet the police continue to assault her. Voices are rendered inaudible by the blaring of sirens, but the transformation of thought into action is recorded with complete clarity as one of the officers raises his baton, pauses for a moment and deliberates before striking the woman on the head. As is the custom, this video circulated on the internet.
I cut my online teeth in pre-Gamergate gaming forums as a teenager. In the early 2010s I was transitioning from gamer kid to movie brat. The possibility that I was a trans girl hadn’t even entered my head because I had no knowledge of trans people beyond Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street, a portrayal of trans womanhood that was unthreatening to older cis viewers. In 2011 I saw a thread in one of these gaming forums discussing another video of a trans woman named Chrissy Lee Polis being assaulted in a McDonalds just outside of Baltimore. The video starts outside the toilets where two teenage girls are kicking Polis’ head as she cowers on the floor and ends with her having a seizure by the restaurant entrance. The guy filming encourages the perpetrators to run away because the police are coming. With the exception of one older woman, none of the bystanders in the video meaningfully attempt to stop the attack.
The responses in the thread started with immediate outrage over the assault. Because the perpetrators were Black and the victim white there was depressingly predictable racism in several of the comments. However, when the posters picked up on some throwaway lines by the person filming the video like “that’s a man” and “he’s bleeding out” the tenor of the discussion gradually changed. Speculation abounded and rationalisations were concocted about the girls being startled on seeing a penis in the women’s toilets. According to Polis in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, she was attacked because the boyfriend of one of the perpetrators tried to flirt with her on her way to the toilet. I remember constantly refreshing the page and watching in bafflement as sympathy shifted from the victim to the perpetrators. It was the first time I encountered transmisogyny.
The Milan video was also subject to speculation. Twitter’s relatively new Community Notes function – ostensibly brought in under Elon Musk’s leadership to combat misinformation – was utilised to attach links to far-right news sources claiming the trans woman had exposed herself to children outside a primary school. One such site is Reduxx, a publication which advertises itself as a feminist platform but is completely devoted to articles that demonise trans women. The narrative that the woman posed a sexual threat to children has been traced back to the local police union. However, according to the Italian news publication L’Espresso, that account was denied by the Milan prosecutor’s office, which states that officers had responded to reports of the woman making noises. This would seem to suggest that she was experiencing some sort of mental health crisis.
The details of this case are still vague and filtered from Italian language news sources, so it is not my place to speculate further. What alarms me is the eagerness displayed by far-right Anglophone sources to paint this woman as a sexual predator. That informal prejudice towards a trans victim of violence I saw back in 2011 has since transformed into a machine-like response, characterised by its rapidity and sophistication.
In their 2020 book, Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism, sociologist Laurel Westbrook utilises a theoretical framework in which violence is viewed as a form of productive power, drawing on Foucault’s conception of power as something that is exercised rather than held. For Westbrook, “violence produces subject positions and constructs identity categories, such as sexual identities.” They go on to say that “violence shapes ideas about some identities being especially vulnerable to, as well as appropriate targets for, violence and other identities as being likely, and proper, perpetrators of violence.” The power of such online videos of violence is derived from the discourses they produce.
The responses to the Chrissy Lee Polis video demonstrate how arbitrary such discourses can be. At first the commenters were able to reproduce racist notions of Black girls as “proper” perpetrators of violence against a fragile white woman. Yet when it became apparent that Polis was trans, a new discourse emerged to justify the violence. In 2018, when I had been out for several years, I read a Mumsnet thread discussing a story where a trans teenager was assaulted by a classmate in the girls’ changing room. The immediate consensus was that the trans girl had to have done something wrong to be stamped on the head, or that the perpetrator had to have been abused or traumatised, because no cis girl could ever commit such violence otherwise. These supposedly feminist commenters (this thread was on the forum’s infamous Feminism section) were unable to comprehend that they were engaging in the kind of victim-blaming that characterises dominant patriarchal responses to misogynist violence.
There is significant overlap in these videos of violence towards trans women and the more prevalent, farther-reaching viral videos showing Black people being killed by the police. The virality of these videos as driven by algorithmic engagement on social media prompt questions about their supposed function and their effects on both a societal and psychological level. Academic Tiera Tanksley conducted a study in 2020 interviewing nearly 20 college-age Black girls about their responses to “digitally mediated traumas” such as the video of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin. Tanksley found that the most common phrases used by her participants were “‘traumatizing,’ ‘exhausting’ and ‘PTSD’”. The virality of these videos on social media then function as a form of racialised necropolitics, producing the idea that this is how certain people are meant to die.
Sometimes the video itself does not show violence, yet its productive power encroaches onto these images and irrevocably transforms their meaning. I remember becoming overwhelmed by that same smiling photo of Brianna Ghey being endlessly reposted in news articles and on social media, ossifying this image of a happy child into a grim monument to her murder. Ghey had been active on TikTok, and even though her account was deleted shortly after her death, some clips she had produced were captured and used by grieving users to create video tributes. I don’t doubt the sincerity of this, but the shadow of the algorithm always hangs over them. In the context of why these clips are shared, we don’t see a happy girl in those clips, but a victim forever in stasis.
Ghey was the “ideal victim” of anti-trans violence. She was a white child. When I spoke with another white trans woman a few weeks after Ghey’s death, she told me that she had never heard of Naomi Hersi, a 36 year old Black British trans woman who was murdered in 2018. Hersi’s race, her age, the fact she had done drugs and had casual sex with her killer meant that the loss of her life was not viewed as grievable in the way Ghey’s would later be. In a desperate attempt to exert productive power, her killer Jesse McDonald falsely claimed that Hersi had raped him. Thankfully, this defence was rejected by the judge, but the racist and transphobic assumptions that McDonald had sought to exploit continue to be used as a justification for violence.
Westbrook is critical of identity-based anti-violence activism in their analysis of transgender activism, in part because placing such emphasis on identity can obscure other causal factors in that violence, but also because it can produce unnecessary fear and distress in people who find themselves in that identity category. However, as I wrote earlier, violence has a way of seeping its way into the images that precede it. D Smith’s documentary Kokomo City (2023) interviewed Black trans sex workers, achieving an unparalleled intimacy with its subjects that showed them as real people rather than as statistics or symbols of hardship. It’s a film that, when I watched it, engendered an affection for the women, a quality I value highly when watching films about other trans women. When interviewed in January after the film’s rapturous world premiere at Sundance, Smith said the following: “I really want people to understand how magical trans women are. We don’t get the opportunity to really show that natural aspect of us as true trans people because we’re so busy defending ourselves throughout the day and protecting ourselves and looking over our shoulders.” In April, one of the women featured in the film, Rasheeda Williams, also known as Koko Da Doll was murdered. As of writing I haven’t had the chance to see Kokomo City since Williams’ death, and I find myself wondering what effect it will have upon rewatching the film, how the productive power of violence will alter what I found so marvellous the first time I saw it.
By the time this piece is published, it will have been eight years since I realised I was trans. I have spent most of my twenties as an out trans woman, and the violence we face has never been far from my mind. I am unable to forget the footage of Chrissy Lee Polis writhing on the floor of a McDonalds in 2011, captured by an unsympathetic camera, held by an unsympathetic hand. If my emotional response to these videos of violence has come across as vague, then it is because after all these years I am still unsure how to describe those feelings. Writing this piece was a failed attempt at working that out. For years I have absorbed countless stories of trans women across the world being assaulted and killed. It has damaged me forever. And yet, if I shut myself off from these stories for my own health, if I don’t learn the names of these women or see their humanity, then am I not also contributing to the system that has taken their lives? I know that I have built up large stores of anger over the deteriorating political situation for trans people and expressing that anger as a trans woman has earned me threats of violence, some of them extreme. This in turn has had a significant impact on my day-to-day life. The productive power of violence is indeed far-reaching.
As a film critic, my job is to look beyond the images I see onscreen and search for something that others may not otherwise see. Whether I intend to or not, what I find says as much about me as it does about the image. When I look beyond a cowering woman in a fast-food restaurant, or another woman raising her hands in submission to a towering police officer, I see rows of people who have developed a long-simmering hatred of trans women into a political and money-making machine. There are the washed-up academics who turn their prejudice into lucrative careers as public intellectuals. There are the right-wing grifters looking to make easy money by nurturing the worst impulses of a reactionary public. There’s the billionaire whose own trans child can’t bear to be in his life. There’s the multi-millionaire author unable to tolerate a world in which she is not universally adored. I see all these people, and more, lined up against a wall and I wonder: when will it be our turn to use that productive power?
This was originally published during my time as an editor and contributor at Cinema Year Zero. Due to certain events this year, I no longer feel comfortable with this piece in particular being read on the Cinema Year Zero website.