Among trans people, trans women are the most targeted. Within the LGBT world, it seems clear, even if based on anecdotal evidence, that transgender people are the most victimized. Recent research by the Southern Poverty Law Center, based on 14 years of FBI statistics, shows that LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as blacks or Jews, and more than four times as likely as Muslims. Raucci and Hulsey were fortunate to escape more serious injury or death. For transgender people, we’re like in the pre-civil rights era.” “Every three or four months, I’ve had some kind of incident, name calling, threats, because I’m transgender. “There’s a near hysterical amount of hatred that can show up against transgender people at any moment,” Raucci says, a first-year law student. She survived and the man was arrested and charged with attempted murder and a hate crime. Bleeding, Hulsey returned to the street to help her friend and the man stabbed Hulsey again.

She ran into a fast food restaurant for help while Raucci tried to distract him until police could arrive. The man followed, pulled a 3½-inch steak knife from his coat and stabbed Hulsey in the chest. They were sitting in the back, talking about the rest of the evening when a man across the aisle began accusing them, Raucci says, “of defrauding him by pretending to be women.” As he got louder and more menacing, the women hurried off the bus at the next stop.

4, two white transgender women - Rae Raucci, 52, and Samantha Hulsey, 24 - were riding a city bus in San Francisco at 5 p.m. It’s just something that comes with the territory.” When you go to work, you know you might get shot. While the violent deaths make Tracy wonder every time she steps out of her front door whether she will return home in one piece or at all, the murders do not surprise her. It’s absolutely rooted in transphobia and hatred and it’s absolutely a national crisis. “We’ve had people’s genitals mutilated after they’re dead. “We’ve had people burned in their homes,” says Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, policy adviser for the Racial and Economic Justice Initiative at the Washington, D.C.-based NCTE. Since 2013, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), nearly 30 transgender women, most of them black and Latino, have been slain with fists, knives, guns and hate. In the first two months of 2015, at least seven transgender women of color - almost one a week - were murdered in the United States, from Miami to Los Angeles. Her advice to “the next generation of girls” is blunt: Always be on guard. It’s too dangerous out there and she has too many scars to her body and soul to waste time with fairy tales. But Tracy doesn’t try to sell dreams about Prince Charming to her struggling sisters. “There aren’t too many girls out there older than me,” she says. In Tracy’s America, she is practically a senior citizen. After all, she was walking in heels before many of them were born. Being too public, she says, “can get a girl killed.” Other trans women don’t always know Tracy’s real name either. She hasn’t forgotten the murders here three years ago of two young African-American transgender women. A lot of my girlfriends didn’t even make it to 30.” “My grandmother is 90 and I have more dead friends than she does.

“None of my crew, the girls I came up with, is still around,” she laments. All things considered, though, she’s been lucky. Tracy says she has been beaten by boyfriends, raped by strangers, shot by a stalker and “disrespected and dehumanized” by police and paramedics. She has been haunted by prejudice and pain for much of her 46 years. CHICAGO - Tracy is a proud black transgender woman, determined since childhood that, no matter the price, she would never pretend to be anything other than “my authentic self - the woman God made.”

In the crosshairs