As supporters plan a rally today at 7 p.m. to support a transgender woman whose brutal beating at a Rosedale McDonald’s was caught on videotape and widely circulated on the Internet, the chorus of condemnation against the attack is growing louder.

“Ten years ago when I was researching my book “The Riddle of Gender,” I attended a memorial service and march for Amanda Milan, a 25-year old transwoman stabbed to death outside the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City in front of a crowd of onlookers,” said longtime Baltimore writer Deborah Rudacille.

“Just about every transwoman I interviewed for the book talked about being publicly harassed and many had been beaten or raped at some point,” Rudacille said, in an email to The Brew.

Rudacille said the April 18 attack on Chrissy Polis illustrates a problem the Maryland legislature could have acknowledged and helped address by passing a bill to prohibit employers, creditors and housing authorities from discriminating against transgendered people. (It was approved by the House of Delegates and effectively killed in the Senate.)

The beating of Polis “shows that transgendered people continue to be the target of extreme prejudice and violence, making the failure of the Maryland legislature to pass a transgender protection bill yet again this year all the more shameful,” she said.

Baltimore County police have charged 18-year-old Teonna Monae Brown of the 2000 block of Kelbourne Road in connection with the beating, The Baltimore Sun reports.   Also charged in the attack is a 14-year-old girl whose name is not being released because she is a juvenile.

Amid widespread demands that the incident be investigated as a hate crime, the Facebook page organizing protest has so far received 1,666 “likes.”

Robocalls Against Bill

Some activists are also saying that the attack shows that the bill that died in the Maryland Senate should have been stronger and included “public accommodations” as well as job and  housing discrimination.

“What is the point of being protected in your job as a bus driver if you can also, technically, be refused service on the bus and that’s not against the law?” said Donna Simone Plamandon, a Baltimore area transsexual who is active in the transsexual, intersex and transgender communities.

Still, Plamandon said she applauds efforts to lobby legislators on the issue and to call attention to the problem of violence against transgender people.

“I don’t want to lose another generation to hate, to suicide and despair because they’re afraid to leave their houses.” said Plamandon, who plans to attend today’s rally.

During deliberations over the bill in Annapolis this spring, opponents made robocalls saying the bill would endanger safety in public restrooms in Maryland.

“Even though [public accommodations] wasn’t in the bill, they said it anyway to scare people,” Plamandon said. “The bathroom is the battleground.”