Transgender Teen Jayden Tkaczyk is the Face of an American Moral Crisis
Say his name, please, as you also think about an anonymous trans girl in Florida
“I was terrified. I was running through the woods having no clue what to do. I was calling the police and was yelling to the police like, ‘Help me, help me, I need help! I’m scared!’”
Those are the words of Jayden Tkaczyk, a 16-year-old boy who had just been badly punched and reportedly “stomped on” by a large group of teenage boys. He was running through the woods to escape them, lost in the dark as invisible branches and brambles reached out to injure him further.
He was fleeing up to 20 members of the high school football team he’d briefly played on last year, quitting the team after what he calls “constant threats of violence.”
Because he’s transgender.
He even changed schools, but the football team caught up with him, anyway, at an outdoor party. “They were just saying the F slur over and over and over as they were punching me and stomping me,” Jayden says.
The town police chief isn’t sure that beating a queer person while calling them an anti-queer slur constitutes a hate crime, but he’s assigned a “specially-trained” detective to the case out of “an abundance…
