Log in
Content Note: This article depicts images and descriptions of violence against transgender people. Reader discretion is advised.
On May 31, Aurora Rush and Shae Sanders would do something that would forever change the course of their lives: The couple, both of whom are transgender, would use a public restroom in Bossier Parish, Louisiana.
Louisiana does not have an anti-trans bathroom ban on the books that would prohibit the pair from using their restroom of choice at the park, so this was wholly legal. Nonetheless, Sanders and Rush told Erin in the Morning that a mob of people at Cypress Black Bayou Park would exact revenge for this perceived transgression by beating them so severely that Sanders lost consciousness.
Sanders was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where they needed four stitches above their eye. Rush sustained injuries all over her body, including a concussion, but she wasn’t taken to a hospital. Instead, police took her to a men’s jail. Erin in the Morning could not find evidence that anyone else was arrested that day, and the Sheriff’s Office would not immediately provide those details. Sanders was charged with one count of disturbing the peace, and Rush with two—one for “fighting” and the other for the purported use of offensive language—meaning they face fines and up to six months or one year in prison, respectively, if convicted.
They say they didn’t even punch back. Still, a plea deal may help them avoid jailtime. But Sanders and Rush aren’t signing.
“I’m more angry at the response of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office than I am at the people who beat us up,” Rush said. “They further victimized me. I cannot just go to court, sign a piece of paper, pay a couple hundred dollars in fines, and let it just go away like it never happened. It’s an egregious miscarriage of justice.”
In the weeks that followed the incident, the Police Jury—state nomenclature for what other parts of the country might call a county board of executives—unanimously voted for one of the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bans in the country, reportedly at the request of Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself. He was not available for comment ahead of publishing for this piece.
Courtney Newburry, the couple’s attorney, said that in her opinion, what happened to her clients is nothing less than a hate crime.
“I believe the facts will show that this attack was targeted, calculated, had been simmering all day, and is the direct result of the dangerous and harmful rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes transgender people,” she told Erin in the Morning. “I believe the facts will show that the attackers had made a determination as to Aurora’s gender and that determination led them to believe they had the power to do what they did; that they believed themselves to be the heroes here.”
It began as a stereotypical “all-American summer day,” Rush recalls; friends gathered lakeside, had hot dogs grilled over an open flame, and tried to cool off from the relentless Louisiana sun.
But this is Trump’s America, meaning transgender people are being subjected to new and creative terror campaigns every single day. Even Rush, who has been living as a transgender woman in the deep south for over a decade, was blindsided by what happened next.
Rush had stepped away from the festivities to use the women’s room, and returned to the lake without incident. The day came to a quiet end. Then the couple parted from their friends and began walking back to their car, but first, Sanders needed the restroom. They are nonbinary, but assigned female at birth, so they often feel safest using the women’s room. They handed some belongings to Rush so that she could wait outside the building with it.
In Rush’s telling, that’s when a man began harassing her. She had never met him before; she didn’t recognize him. But as she walked back to her car in the parking lot, he followed. She said he threatened her if she entered the women’s room, called her slurs, and tried to goad her into a fight. Rush put her belongings down in her car, and returned to a pavilion area outside of the women’s room to wait for Sanders, and the man kept following her, she said.
But in the time it took Sanders to finish and wash their hands, a crowd of about ten people had formed. Sanders remembers emerging from the building to see their partner terrified, trapped at the center of a circle of men and women alike screaming profanities and threats. “It was every single hateful thing you can come up with that people say to a trans person,” Sanders said.
Sanders had to push past the crowd because, in addition to surrounding Rush, they were blocking the exit.
Sanders put their arm around Rush and tried to leave, but people blocked them.
What followed was a stream of vitriol. They allegedly called Rush a “tranny” and a “faggot.” They allegedly said they would stop Rush from entering the bathroom by any means necessary. They allegedly threatened to murder Rush. And they allegedly said they were protecting the children.
“I was in a total, complete, closed up circle,” Rush said. “There was no getting out of it. I could feel people behind me breathing down my neck.”
“We knew, at that point, that we were pretty much screwed,” Sanders said.
It’s not totally clear why the beating stopped, but evidently, a parks employee called the police. Sanders had been knocked unconscious and needed stitches for a gash above their eye. They were taken away in an ambulance. Rush sat in her car as police questioned her and others at the scene.
Both maintain they didn’t even really fight back; more than anything, they weren’t in fighting condition. Rush lives off of disability benefits because of a hip injury; she has trouble lifting heavy objects and moving one of her legs. Sanders has a structural defect in their spinal cord. An injury as mild as whiplash could render them in need of emergency surgery. After the ordeal at Cypress Bayou, they were blind in one eye for several days—the product of a scratched cornea.
Sanders is also medically vulnerable due to a neurostim implant in their shoulder—a device similar to a pacemaker, but connected to the brain instead of the heart. Doctors are still trying to determine if the attack damaged the wires, which could kill them.
Rush also incurred head trauma, scratches, contusions, and massive welts; one knot above her knee swelled to the size of an apple. Blood pooled around her eyes, a sign of a concussion. But the physical injuries were compounded by the moral ones.
The worst part, for Rush, may have been when officers approached her car, told her to step out of her vehicle, and informed her that she was under arrest. Despite the “female” gender marker on Rush’s driver’s license, they took her to a men’s jail, had her patted down and searched by a male guard, and initially booked her under a man’s name—and not even one she had ever used or heard of.
A photo she shared with Erin in the Morning appears to show a plastic bag where they had collected her belongings, labelled with a moniker she didn’t recognize. The name is crossed out and her proper, legal name is scrawled underneath. Upon her release from police custody, she looked up the name on Facebook, and she immediately recognized the face staring back at her.
It was one of the men, she says, who had attacked her.
Rush and Sanders were scheduled for arraignment on July 15, but that date was changed at the last minute. Their next court date is expected to be in August, Newburry told Erin in the Morning.
Coincidentally, July 15 was also the date the Bossier Parish police jury voted unanimously in favor of Ordinance No. 22—a resolution that would impose criminal sanctions on anyone accused of being in a gendered bathroom that deviates from their sex assigned at birth, and who refuses to leave upon request. It covers any bathroom, locker room, or changing room owned or operated by the Parish, including at courthouses, government buildings, and public parks.
It cited the passage of the Women’s Safety and Protection Act, a bill pushed by anti-trans activists “establishing definitions relating to biological sex and recognizing the authority of governmental entities to maintain separate accommodations based upon biological sex,” a resolution from the July 15 police jury meeting reads.
Ordinance No. 22 would require any and all municipal employees, from police officers to janitors, to monitor bathrooms for suspected trans people using the “wrong” one. If an employee fails to eject the individual whose gender or sex has been called into question, then they must be met with disciplinary action, the ordinance reads.
And if a trans person, or presumed-trans person, does not leave upon request from a stranger making assumptions about their gender, genitals, and biological make-up, then they could face criminal charges and up to a year in jail. The criminal charges and threat of incarceration make it perhaps the most severe anti-trans local bathroom policy in the country.
It’s also unclear whether the ordinance is actually in effect; government officials gave Erin in the Morning different answers when asked. Initially local news reports said there would be a final vote on Aug. 5; several jurors told Erin in the Morning the adoption was final; the Parish attorney did not respond to requests for comment; the Sheriff’s office said it had not yet been adopted at all.
A document posted ahead of this week’s Aug. 5 meeting indicates they will consider having another public hearing; nobody showed up to testify at the first one. The ACLU of Louisiana sent the governing body a letter alleging it didn’t properly advertise the vote, violating Open Meetings Laws, and that they would need to restart the process. If that resolution passes, then there will be an opportunity for public comment on the matter scheduled for Sept. 2, Parish documents indicate.
Now, community groups are mobilizing both to support Rush and Sanders and to challenge Ordinance No. 22. “Things have gotten bad,” said Peyton Michelle Rose, executive director for the statewide advocacy group Louisiana Trans Advocates. “But we’ve already had it bad. We’re used to standing up for ourselves.”
Meanwhile, multiple jurors told Erin in the Morning that the ordinance was requested by Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself in the weeks following what happened to Rush and Sanders.
“There was nothing on the books for him to do as law enforcement,” juror Glenn Benton said in an interview. “That’s why he asked us to do it.”
For Rush and Sanders, the uphill climb that remains is not just legal or political. They continue to struggle with chronic health problems as a result of the physical assault they experienced. They are still adjusting to their new normal of chronic migraines, shifting court dates, mounting medical bills, and severe PTSD.
“I am a completely different person,” Sanders said. “I am terrified now. I’ve never been scared like this before.”
