A trans woman named Pearl Love says she was assaulted and threatened last Thursday on the 4 train by a woman who also shouted slurs in reference to Love’s gender identity and race. Love captured part of the incident and uploaded it to her Facebook and YouTube accounts “so now you can understand what’s happening in my everyday life,” as Love writes in her Facebook post on the matter. “That happens all the time. But it’s my first time recording it,” she adds.

Love says this happened between 4:30 and 4:45 on Thursday, as she rode into Manhattan from the Bronx. Her breakdown reads:

When I change 6 train to 4 express train in 125 st station an unknown woman sitting across me starter to verbally abuse me. Make lot of shit comments about how much she hate Trans people and want me to suck her dick. She also made racist comments. I ignored her and kept reading my book. When the train got to 86 st she start getting so loud and crazy yelling at me so I started to record her on my phone can- she start getting even louder and start assault me and hit me. As you can see it’s definitely a hate crime. She attacked me inside the train . When I retreated she threw all my stuff on the floor and chased me around the train and say she is going to find a stick to hit me. It was a crowded train and everyone heard it but no one helped me. Guys acting like nothing happened. For 5 min. Then when the train stop on 42 st. She got out of train but keep yelling at me, I recorded 4 videos around 3.5 min.

The video opens with Love’s attacker pointing out her “woman’s bag” that she’s carrying while “living in a man’s penis...and body with women’s makeup on.” When the woman notices she’s being recorded, she asks Love, who’s Asian, “What you gonna do? Send it to China? What the fuck they gon’ do?” The woman also refers to Love as a “transvestite” and a “homo, fuckin’ gay motherfucker in some fuckin’ women’s products and whatnot.”

“Do you do this on the weekends or is this an everyday event for you?” the woman asks Love. “Like, you sit up and get on the train everyday, like, ‘What do people think about me?’ one day, and then you cut all your shit off, put your extensions back in and go back to work, like...who are you really under all that makeup? Where’d you come from? Are you the emperor of China? Or like how are we supposed to act with you? What should we do about you? ‘Cause this shit right here ain’t appropriate for my child. I’m sorry, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll fight you right now, I don’t even feel comfortable with you right now.”

It’s as though this woman wants to make it extremely explicit that she’s committing a hate crime before approaching Love and hitting her twice, as she does at the end of the clip.

Assaults like the one captured in the video carry stiffer penalties when they’re identifiable as bias crimes, as the woman’s rant makes clear that this was. What a moron! A hate crime, as defined by the Department of Justice, is “the violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious, sexual orientation, or disability.”

I reached out to Love to ask her about this incident and whether she reported it to the police. I will update this post if and when I hear back. The NYPD says that no formal complaints are on file and the video has been forwarded to the Transit Bureau.

Update: We talked to Pearl Love about this incident.