Is it the Divine he wanted to wipe out?

Is it this body that they hate? I’ve started asking myself this question looking in the mirror every morning ever since I was assaulted.

It is a man’s body, yet unassuming. It is queer. It is white and not poor. It is full of debts- to society, to their education, to the community, to the divine that lives in each and every one of us.

Is it the divine he wanted to wipe out?

I read something once by g. Spivak about “acts of terror” and how in wiping out others you are essentially wiping out yourself and bringing them to paradise, and I wonder if he saw it that way, or if I was simply something other to be terrorized.

This was no Fight Club, though he was destroying something beautiful. bell hooks talks about the ways in which men are fragmented and construct multiple identities for themselves to move and operate in the world. In this, perhaps emboldened by the new administration, he constructed an identity in which it was “okay” for him as a member of civil society to give unwanted touches and harass a person working remotely in the establishment where he was employed and, when confronted with the possible consequences, committed a criminal action against the body of the person.

I told him I would speak with his boss as a customer to check his behavior toward me so there would be no repeat actions. In a fit of blind rage, he yanked me up by my jacket, dragged me out the store, shoved me, and chest and throat punched me, and would not have stopped hitting me had I not threatened to sue. He attempted to trespass me, but it was him who was in the wrong, and he knew it. While I was in the parking lot emailing the owner, I overheard him saying on the phone, “I was scared,” and he had every right to be. Harassing a customer is at best a write up, but he should have just taken ownership for his actions and apologized.

Trans lives matter. Queer lives matter. We will not be physically bullied out of the public sphere.