A 21-year-old trans man was stabbed in the face by thugs who tore his underwear off in an attack that has been met with alleged indifference from Bournemouth authorities.
Ruan Filipe, a Portugal native who moved to England three years ago, was assaulted last Friday night (18 June) while smoking by a car park.ADVERTISING
Sharing photographs of his injuries on Instagram, his face and neck lacerated with cuts, to Filipe, the incident was the upshot of years of abuse and bullying he has faced for being trans, he wrote in the caption.
At around 11:35pm, Filipe was smoking a cigarette in the coastal town in southern England when a group of men allegedly approached him.
The men, he told Portuguese daily national newspaper Público, derided him for his “feminine voice” before asking: “How do you have a beard on your face?”
“Because I’m trans,” he replied. Then they became “aggressive”.
“They pulled me to the ground,” Ruan Filipe claimed, who began to pummel him with punches while slashing him with a knife on his face, stomach and legs.
As the group pelted him, they crammed a cloth in his mouth to stop him from screaming, the victim claimed. Writhing on the ground, Filipe said his attackers tugged off his trousers and tore his underwear as they sought to drag him into their car.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said on Instagram.
He only managed to flee, he said, when he bit into one of the men. “I started running and hid behind a supermarket,” he said, “I came home about an hour later.”
Filipe added that such acts of hatred and brutality are all too common for him, having suffered transphobia in both Portugal and England.
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But he alleged that when he sought to file a report about the incident, officers brushed him aside. There was a lack of witnesses or surveillance camera footage, they reportedly told him, so there would be “no point” in filing a complaint.
“It is a lost cause,” they allegedly said, Filipe recalled.
The attack comes at a daunting time to be trans in Britain, where transphobic violence has soared to such perilous rates that four out of every five trans people has experienced some form of hate crime in the last 12 months, according to data.
Luan Tiófilo, a finalist on Secret Story Seven, the Portuguese spin-off of Big Brother, shared Ruan Filipe’s post on his own Instagram. “It’s sad, it’s shocking, it’s unbelievable, it’s unacceptable that this continues to happen,” he wrote, according to A Televisão.
“No one has the right to hurt someone just because [they are LGBT+].”
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