Cayla Calhoun was unconscious and bleeding near the National Mall early on June 29, her skirt torn and saturated in blood, her body battered almost beyond recognition. She had come to Washington, D.C., in January, seeking protection. Instead, three men on scooters surrounded her, yelled anti-transgender slurs, and beat her, leaving her for dead.
“I was living in Alabama, and it was becoming unsafe as a transgender person,” Calhoun, 43, said. “So I moved to D.C. because I thought it would be safer. Oh, no.”
She grinned. “Honestly, it crossed my mind maybe I need to reach out to Alanis Morissette in case she ever wants to do another version of ‘Ironic.’”
It had started out as a typical Saturday night. Calhoun, a sommelier and bartender at Annabelle restaurant, concluded a late shift, dressed in a skirt and rainbow pin, and left her job clothes behind. Around 12:45 a.m., she went to Golden Age, a bar about a block from Annabelle, for a quick beer.
Then she got on her Onewheel electric board and rode through Georgetown, following Rock Creek Parkway. She recalls taking a diversion near Filomena, a popular Italian restaurant in Georgetown, passing by the Kennedy Center, and emerging from a tunnel where the Washington Monument gleamed in the humid July evening.
Then, as she moved closer toward the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial, three men on scooters appeared out of the shadows. “They began verbally assaulting me,” Calhoun recalled. “They called me slurs. You know, as queer people, we’ve all dealt with that.”
She tried to ride away. But the men followed. “Somehow they pushed me off my Onewheel,” she said. “I remember falling into a tree and scraping up my knee and my elbow. But I gathered my Onewheel and tried to get away.”
It wasn’t enough.
“I don’t know how long it went on,” she said. “But I know there was a point where I was pushed off again. I remember thinking in my head, ‘I have to get away. This isn’t somebody making fun of me anymore. I have to get away.” That was the last thing she remembered.
According to a Metropolitan Police Department incident report acquired by The Advocate, emergency medical responders located Calhoun on the curb near 19th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. According to the report, she initially informed EMTs that she had fallen off her skateboard many times that day. She later told authorities that she remembered being attacked by three males roughly three-quarters of a mile from where EMTs discovered her.
According to the police complaint, the attackers made hateful and biased insults, prompting Calhoun to feel she was targeted because of her gender identification. The record states that her injuries were primarily on the right side of her body.
Emergency personnel discovered her about 6 a.m. and transported her to George Washington University Hospital.
Her injuries were severe: a concussion, many broken ribs, a fractured spine, a shattered elbow, seven fractures surrounding her eye socket, a broken palate, and a fractured femur. Sixty percent of her body was bruised, including fingerprint-shaped markings around her neck, which she claimed indicated she had been strangled.
Calhoun was aware of her identity since she was a toddler.
Growing up in upstate New York as the daughter of a clergyman, she recalls her family’s weekly grocery visits to town. When she was four or five, she started pretending to be sick so she could stay at home alone.
“I’d go to my sister’s room and look through her dresses,” she said. “I’d pick the cutest one, get some stockings, put them on, find my sister’s makeup, and put on some lipstick and eye shadow. I’m sure it looked ridiculous as a five-year-old. But I felt more like me in those moments than I ever felt at any other time.”
Her sense of self never left her. But being herself almost killed her.
When Calhoun awoke at the hospital, she found her skirt torn and bleeding. Many of her items had been thrown away by hospital workers, who she believes confused her for a homeless person.
“By the time police realized who I was, a lot of that initial evidence was gone,” she said.
Detectives visited her hospital bed four days later. “They said they were there on orders from the District 1 commander,” she said. “I was still foggy. I can’t remember every detail.” She says she hasn’t heard from the police since.
Calhoun’s supporters include both friends and strangers. Ellen Vaughn, a friend of Calhoun’s roommate, started a GoFundMe campaign that had raised over $19,000 as of Monday afternoon.
“Though her attackers tried to crush her body, they could not crush her spirit,” Vaughn wrote.
Calhoun’s influence has reached far beyond the capital. Nick Craig of Brix Cheese Shop & Wine Bar in Iowa City, Iowa, spoke out about the attack, describing Calhoun as a member of a close-knit wine and hospitality community.
“Cayla is part of my community, which, if you’re reading this, means she is part of yours,” Craig wrote. “While we have never met in person, we are colleagues connected through the wonderful world of wine and hospitality. I have had the privilege of witnessing her professionalism, passion, humor and strength for many years as a member of a special social media group for people like her and me — regular folks who love wine so much we make it part of who we are and use it to build the community around us.”
Calhoun said the attack provided one unexpected benefit: her parents finally recognized her identity.
“Last week was the first time in my life that my parents referred to me as Cayla or used my pronouns correctly,” she said. “It’s because of this.”
Physically, Calhoun faces a long recovery.
“Fine motor skills are horrible,” she said. “I’m like a two-year-old trying to use a really small iPhone. Grabbing things, picking things up, trying to drink or eat — it’s very arduous right now.”
Emotionally, she hovers between spiritual insight and deep fear.
“Part of me, spiritually, I’m awake. I’m as awake as I’ve ever been. But emotionally, I don’t know what it looks like,” she said. “As a sommelier, a server, a bartender, I can count on two hands how many times a week I hear right-wing people at my table talking about trans people. I don’t know how that’s going to work in the future.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “The narrative that has been written by the Republicans and by people like Donald Trump, the talking points, the sleight-of-hand disinformation, using blanket words to refer to a very specific class of people, it’s all deliberate.”
While recovering, Calhoun is working on a book about hospitality that combines personal memoir with Ram Dass and Thomas Merton’s teachings. Dass was a spiritual teacher who combined Eastern philosophy and Western psychology, whereas Merton was a Trappist monk and prolific author whose works focused on contemplation, social justice, and interfaith cooperation.
“One thing that’s been really prevalent in my head recently is the dichotomy between fear and love,” she said. “Even at work, how you treat your assistant who doesn’t speak English. People are mean because they’re afraid. Then they get bad help, then they’re mad. It’s an endless cycle.”
She believes the same fear fuels anti-trans violence.
“I’ve had friends tell me, ‘If you find them, let me know, I’ll kill them.’ I understand that perspective, but that’s living out of fear,” she said. “Especially as a trans person, I’d be so far from who I am if I’d spent my life living out of fear. When we live out of love, it’s different. Unfamiliar things aren’t dangerous anymore.”
Still, she accepts reality.
“This could be a tragedy, and it is a tragedy. It will be eight weeks before I’m able to work again. It’s terrifying,” Calhoun said. “But I hope it leads to people learning to be themselves, and other people learning to accept people for being themselves. That makes the load just a little lighter.”
Calhoun keeps thinking about another transgender woman. Dream Johnson, 28, was shot and died in Northeast D.C., almost exactly one week after her attack.
“Dream was dead a week to the day, 20 minutes difference in time,” Calhoun said. “She’s dead, and I’m not. It hurts.”
Johnson’s murder remains under investigation. Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information.
