Trans woman stripped nearly nude & punched outside Palm Springs bar

A shocking video shows a transgender woman stripped to her undergarments and then sucker punched to the ground after a group attacked her outside a Palm Springs, California bar on Saturday night. Police are now investigating the assault as a possible hate crime though no suspects have been publicly identified.

The woman, Skyy Perez, had her phone stolen while hanging out with some friends at The Village bar. Security officers made her leave the bar when she tried searching through another woman’s bag to find the phone.

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She didn’t feel supported after coming out and would like to leave the trauma behind and focus on being a voice for young women and queer people.

Outside, a woman hit Perez in the back of the head with a sandal, causing her to fall and temporarily lose consciousness. Then, two other women began tearing off her clothes, she said.

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Video of the incident shows Perez angrily shouting at the alleged assailants and trying to spit at them just before a man approaches her from behind and sucker punches her to the ground. At another point, a woman threw the wig Perez was wearing into the second floor of a parking structure.

“I was in disbelief and a rage that I got hit for simply existing,” Perez told KESQ-TV.

Her friend who was also at the bar, Daniella Pineda, told the TV news station, “I haven’t slept, I can’t even eat sometimes. Because it’s very traumatic that we have to go through this. Those people were hating because we were trans. And they couldn’t just wrap their brains around us being able to live our lives out authentically.”

Pineda added, “It’s gonna make me want to live my truth even more.”

In a statement, the bar’s general manager David Mariner wrote, “For this to happen near our establishment makes us truly upset as we strive to be a leader in forward thinking. We are all-inclusive. We don’t stand for anything that is hateful.”

Trans people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, a 2021 Williams Institute study found. Trans people were also more likely to say that they were attacked in a hate crime than cis people, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.