Warning: This story contains descriptions of violence.

“Go to Pony, go to Pony, go to Pony—there’s more people there,” said a frantic woman as she approached Madison Carstens and her friends next to the Maserati dealership on 12th and Union Street. Six or seven young men followed close behind her.

It was September 2, about 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Tuesdays are unofficially “dolls night” on Capitol Hill, when trans women hop between Pony and other bars in the city’s queer neighborhood. The frantic woman the men had followed is trans, as are Carstens and her friends, Michelle Caywood and Denise Throckmorton.

The men fanned out on the sidewalk. “Bitch, bitch, bitch” one of the men shouted repeatedly. “Tr—y,” another yelled. To the side, one danced like a boxer before a fight. He grabbed at his waistband, Carstens said. It could’ve been a nervous tic, but she worried that he had a gun.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to, like, run away from this,” she remembers thinking. Sidling up to her friends, she withdrew the pepper gel canister on a keychain in her purse.

Caywood was trying to deescalate the situation as a man got in her face.

“What’s going on, what’s the problem, we’re just hanging out here,” her friends remember her saying. For her, the details are fuzzy. Carstens clearly remembers the man who was dancing on the sidewalk lunging forward.

The pepper gel hit his face, then his eyes. He flinched, wiped at it, and began throwing wide, wild punches.

Caywood was knocked to the ground. A different man came at Carstens with a running punch, and she fell, her head smacking the wall and landing on the pavement with a “gnarly” thud, says Throckmorton. Sensing the man would pummel Carstens while she was on the ground, Throckmorton leapt in.

They wouldn’t know until later, but he’d knocked Carstens out cold. His next punch hit Throckmorton behind the ear. Hers gave him a nosebleed.

“And then he ran off,” she says. He wasn’t the first to run.

Carstens regained consciousness, and saw one of the fleeing men jump and kick Caywood in the head. According to a police report, the suspects fled westbound on Union and turned south on Broadway. Police attempted to get security camera footage of the crime, it said.

A man who saw the attack called 911 and bystanders waited with the women as police and EMTs arrived. Caywood bawled on the sidewalk. She’d never felt unsafe in her neighborhood before, she says.

“Obviously, this kind of stuff happens,” she says. “I didn’t really think it’d happen to me.”

Throckmorton’s biggest bruises were on her knuckles.

Caywood’s x-ray was inconclusive, but she suspects the attacker broke her nose. She couldn’t breathe from it for several days and “it does a weird crackle thing,” she says. She’s getting a CT scan, she says.

Carstens suffered a concussion during the attack. The impact also ruptured her left eardrum. Her injuries forced her to miss the Turnstile show at the WAMU Theater.

“Such a good lineup,” she says, speaking to The Stranger on a phone call with an earbud in her left ear, but not her right. She says doctors told her the hearing loss may be permanent. She tries not to think about that. Funnily enough, she says, the fact that she’s recovered from gender-affirming procedures has helped. Even if one day doesn’t feel like it improves, she knows to trust the process.

Carstens’s doctors have given her a long list of things to avoid: screens, sunlight, loud sounds, and books that “make you think too much,” she says. As a gag, her friends bought her coloring books.

“And I’ve used it,” she says. “My friends are amazing. Everyone has been helping out a lot.”

She’s “slowly, slowly,” improving and has a referral for the brain injury rehabilitation clinic at University of Washington. Still, her injuries could keep her from work for weeks or months. Light and sound hurt—so much that she can’t go outside for more than 20 minutes at a time without becoming nauseous.

Carstens is a server and bartender. To cover rent, she started a GoFundMe. She never expected to raise so much.

The Seattle Police Department’s Bias Crimes Unit is investigating the group attack, but have not yet filed charges or identified the suspects at press time. But the violent group attack on Carstens, Caywood and Throckmorton is not an anomaly, according to Yessenia Manzo, the senior deputy prosecuting attorney and hate crimes prosecutor at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

This is the fifth case like this in the last year or so. The prosecutors’ office have charges in four group beatings of transgender women in the Seattle area so far.

Manzo says in all four cases, every suspect was a cisgender man; most of the beatings took place in broad daylight; and in every case, male friends, associates, or, in at least one case, complete strangers joined in.

Race is the most common motivation for hate crimes, and no other group is targeted more than Black people. But Manzo says, in King County, only transgender women are being targeted in this way. The crimes stand out for both the “extremity of violence” and the small size of the population. Estimates vary, but it’s likely that one percent or less of the population is transgender, with transgender women representing a fraction of that number.

“I don’t have any other category, I don’t have any other protected status, I don’t have any other marginalized group that is being attacked in this pattern, in this egregious way where a group joins in,” Manzo says. “I think that is very unique, and I think it is telling about the level of animus and bias and hatred that trans women have to endure and how scary, how vulnerable it is for them to just exist, for them to just be in the world, for them to just go on an errand in the middle of the day.”

In June of last year, two transgender women were walking near a pier during a senior skip day event at Lake Union Park. One of the women was topless. They encountered Onosai Popio Faumuina, who told her to put a shirt on.

When she refused, he pressed his forehead to hers. She was offending his high-school aged cousins, he said. She pushed Faumuina away. He punched her in the temple. The woman’s friend tried to intervene. He punched the friend. Then, other men joined in, dragging the friend into the water. It’s unclear what Faumuina’s relationship was to those men, Manzo says. She feared they would drown her, she told police.

When a high school boy pulled Faumuina off the women, Faumuina pulled out a handgun and fired it at him several times. He missed the boy, and the crowd of people around him. One bullet went through a window at the Museum of History & Industry.

Faumuina pleaded guilty to a count of second degree assault for shooting at the teen and a hate crime for beating the trans woman. In July, he was sentenced to a year in jail, but was given credit for the time he had already served.

“In this case, being topless wasn’t causing any reasonable affront or alarm to anyone,” Manzo says. “This individual was offended, but I think what’s important in this case is that they didn’t just assault her—he started by assaulting her and then the group joined in to assault both trans women.”

This February, Michael Martindell followed a transgender woman off the bus, demanding to know why she went “around showing people you like to fuck children” as she walked home, court documents say. Martindell called her a “f—t” and a “pedophile.” She was returning from the bank, according to charging documents.

The attack was captured on a surveillance camera. Martindell was yelling across the street when the woman reached her apartment. She started recording Martindell with her phone. He charged, his finger pointed at her.

The woman tried to escape. Yelling slurs, Martindell grabbed her neck. She tried to hold onto a street sign. He knocked her down and pinned her to the ground. He scratched her eyes, pulled her hair, and smashed her face into the sidewalk, according to police and court documents.

As Martindell was beating the woman, two men on the street ran over to join in the assault. One man kicked her in the head and groin. A second man leaned over her and called her a “f—t” repeatedly. When Martindell tossed the woman’s phone into the street, the man who kicked her took it. According to Manzo, they did not know Martindell. There’s every indication that they were strangers.

A jury found Martindell guilty of second degree robbery for taking the phone and a hate crime for beating the woman. A judge sentenced him to 17 months in prison. Martindell had a lengthy criminal history, including a 2017 conviction for failing to register as a sex offender. He also had an active case for failing to register again.

As The Stranger reported in March, a trans woman and veteran was beaten outside her U District workplace by a group of four men shouting “Semper Fi,” the motto of the US Marine Corps. Before the assault, they called her a “f-g” and a “drag queen” and told her to “take off her fucking makeup.” All four men punched her in the face, knocked her down and kicked her on the ground. She briefly got away, but they caught up to her to continue the beating. They broke her front teeth. Before the attack, she told them she was a decorated Navy veteran, police documents say. The suspects retorted by saying “Trump got rid of your ass anyways and kicked you all out of the military.” Police arrested one of the assailants, Andre Karlow, at his apartment building. According to arrest records, his girlfriend had called police on him the day before, alleging he’d thrown a can of food at her.

Karlow was already awaiting trial for attacking a transgender Sound Transit fare ambassador in the Chinatown-International District light rail station in September 2024. (After he beat the woman in the University District, Karlow’s $3,000 bail was posted by the Northwest Community Bail Fund.)

Last week, a trans woman was attacked in the Renton Transit Center, allegedly by three teen boys and a 25-year-old man. Prosecutors have submitted charges for the man and two of the teens. Another teen is expected to be charged today.

In addition to the anti-trans beatings, there’s also been a rash of anti-gay attacks in Seattle since the Presidential election.

In the early hours of November 6, a man flying a white Trump/Vance flag on his Porsche allegedly hit a gay man in the arm with a metal baseball bat after instigating a confrontation. In February, a woman, a man and a teen boy allegedly drove circles around Pony, firing gel waterbeads at the people standing outside from a toy gun. In early June, Seattle police arrested a 23-year-old man after he put someone in a headlock while screaming anti-gay and anti-trans slurs outside a gay nightclub on Capitol Hill. Charges have been filed in all three crimes, but none have yet gone to trial. The pre-trial process is lengthy, Manzo says, and considers victim input when prosecuting hate crimes. Trials can be traumatic.

Over the phone, Carstens says she has a complicated relationship with the Seattle Police Department, but that she wants them to find the young men who beat her and her friends on Capitol Hill earlier this month.

“I think, when somebody goes out of their way and comes up and tries to target a group of people just purely based on hate, it’s really important to catch them and hold them accountable,” she says.

With a potentially long recovery ahead of her, and books and screens off the table, Carstens spends a lot of her time with her friend Michaela. Michaela, who did not want to use her last name for this article (and you’ll see why), works as a paralegal from home and lives close to Carstens. (Even on the short walk over, Carstens wears sunglasses to protect her sensitive eyes.)

Carstens was at Michaela’s when a photo of Michaela started circulating on right-wing accounts on social media, suggesting she was the “trans shooter” who killed Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in Utah.

As so many terrible things do, it started with a tweet. Before the shooting, Michaela saw a post on X that said “Dr. Pepper” was an “anagram for Epstein Island.” She screenshotted the post and drew random lines between the words.

“And just none of it matches up,” she says. “It’s a shit post, as they would say.”

Coincidentally, a user with the name “Omar” and handle @NajraGalvz” reposted Michaela; and coincidentally, this “Omar” had also posted that Kirk was coming to their college tomorrow “and I really hope someone evaporates him completely” and “Let’s just say something big will happen tomorrow.”

It did. In a flurry of internet “investigation,” the post went viral. Eventually, Michaela did, too. When someone Googled “Omar’s” handle, her profile photo popped up in the images tab. When “Omar” deleted their account, users suspected Michaela was “Omar.” The rumor spread from X to TikTok and Instagram.

The transphobic and violent comments escalated to “hundreds” of direct messages, with “many people telling me they were going to kill me, some people telling me I should just kill myself.” The possibility of real danger settled in when authorities released a second suspect and she realized there “actually was a large swath of people online that think I’m Charlie Kirk’s murderer.”

The accusation persisted even after suspect Tyler Robinson turned himself in, with users posting side-by-sides of her face and his, insinuating that he’d just cut her hair. People lined their photos on top of each other, and faded one into the other to compare their faces. There were photos of his sunglasses edited onto her face.

“I mean, it was ridiculous,” she said, but it’s mostly died down now.

Michaela and Carstens are recent friends. They met on Twitter, and both moved to Seattle to escape what they felt were unsafe places. Carstens moved from Spokane last year, Michaela came here from Texas in May. (Yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that makes it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom of their choice in government buildings.)

Michaela says it’s a strange coincidence that she met Carstens on X shortly before all this happened. Both women told The Stranger they’ve bonded over their shared experience of intense transphobic hate at a time where it felt like transphobia was coming from all sides. From the government, from a President who has issued several executive orders targeting transgender rights and medicine, from far-right podcasters, and from the culture writ large.

Before anything was known about the shooter, far-right influencers and many elected Republicans blamed Kirk’s death on transgender people. Several called for President Trump to designate them a terrorist threat.

Though some officials have attributed the shooting to “left-wing ideology,” it’s still unclear if Robinson even has an ideology. Officials also say Robinson was dating his trans “roommate,” but it’s unclear how this person identifies. Officials also say this person is cooperating with the investigation. There’s no indication that Robinson is trans, or was motivated by so-called “trans ideology.” In an alleged transcript included in charging documents, Robinson allegedly wrote that he killed Kirk because he was “tired of the hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated with.”

Michaela says what happened to her and her friend is emblematic of the “two things that this rhetoric leads to.”

“For Maddie, it was on the local level that some boys now felt emboldened that they can go out and go queer bashing,” she says.

“On my note, it shows it on the national level. We can’t escape it, whether you’re trying to just live your life online and connect with other trans women, because a lot of us don’t have the privilege of living in an area where you can be out and open without fearing for your safety. It just kind of shows that whether you’re in a city that you think is safe, or whether you're not even going outside at all and only limiting yourself to online spaces, this harassment and hate campaign is coming for all of us.

“I started transitioning nine months ago,” she says. “I wanted to come up here to hide, you know what I mean? I was not going to be public, I never wanted to be an activist or anything like that. But at the same time, because this happened to me, and because people have wanted me to speak on media [Michaela spoke to KUOW and Seattle Times about being falsely identified as the Kirk shooter] and I have an opportunity, I feel like for the community, I’m obligated to communicate that this was not random.”

Carstens’s been thinking about how the queer community organized to protect itself from queer bashing in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. That’s where people’s heads need to be right now, she says.

“People who want to harm us know exactly where to find us, and that’s starting to happen more, and it’s terrifying.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated since publication to remove a detail in order to protect sources' safety.