Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

On June 29, Cayla Calhoun a 48-year-old white trans woman, was violently assaulted after leaving her DC workplace in the early hours. Calhoun, a transplate from Alabama, described leaving work on her hoverboard only to find herself contending with three men on scooters physically and verbally assaulting her. Her last memory was being shoved off her board.

First reponders found her on the curb near 19th Street and Constitution Avenue NW around 6 AM. She was disoriented and rushed to a nearby hospital. The Advocate reports

Her injuries were devastating: a concussion, multiple broken ribs, a fractured vertebra, a shattered elbow, seven fractures around her eye socket, a broken palate, and a fractured femur. Sixty percent of her body was bruised, some of it in fingerprint-shaped marks around her neck, evidence, she said, that she’d likely been strangled.

Metro police response seems uneven given the nature of the crime. Friends have set up a GoFundMe to help Cayla recuperate.

I don’t often get to smile in this work, but the update to this GoFundMe did the trick.

Reaching $20,000, her friends wrote “In the words of Cayla, “Talk about understanding the assignment.”