It was roughly 11pm on April 29, 2026, and trans geneticist Jey McCreight was walking home through their Chicago neighborhood when, they say, a stranger called their name.
A few days earlier, McCreight (he/they) had launched their new trans science education initiative, Beyond X & Y. For the event they’d flyered the queer neighborhoods of Chicago where they lived to promote the launch and been profiled for a local news story. So their name and face had been very public and associated with the trans rights movement.
“I was walking home and this man came up to me and said ‘Hey, are you Jey?’” McCreight told Assigned Media during a video interview where they recalled the assault. “I said ‘Yes!’ very chipperly because I’d just had my launch event 3 days before, I’d had my face on fliers because I live in the queer part of town. I’ve been recognized in the past and every time it’s been someone who’s been very excited to meet me.”
This time, however, the experience of being recognized as a trans public figure was a prelude to something far, far darker. The stranger began savagely beating McCreight, targeting their head and right eye with successive punches, later taking out a knife and cutting them, and eventually making an unsuccessful attempt to strangle them.
McCreight’s memory of how the assault ended is uncertain, and they say they spent the whole next day confused, in a fog of head trauma and paranoia where they repeatedly slept in the hopes of waking up from what felt like a nightmare. Police and medical records confirm they sought emergency treatment for severe facial injuries at Illinois Masonic Hospital on the morning of May 1, requiring surgery and a titanium mesh implant to return their right eye to its proper position.
The most likely motive? McCreight’s trans activism.
“I’m pretty sure it was because I was trans,” said McCreight. “He recognized me, he knew my name, and as he was beating me up he did say some trans slurs that I won’t recount.”
Reached for comment, the Communications Office of the Chicago Police Department confirmed the basic outlines of McCreight’s story, and said that an investigation is ongoing.
As the shock of what had happened began to set in, McCreight says their first instinct was to run away, to “move out of Chicago, into the woods, go stealth, never do this again.” But as they told their story to cisgender nurses, staff, and police, he found himself buoyed by their kindness, and by their curiosity about their science education project.
“I was sharing science facts — I can’t help myself, it’s just who I am,” McCreight explained. “Everyone was so wonderful, telling me they could see my passion, and not to give up, and it was a reminder: Don’t let this one hateful, insecure person ruin your life more than they already have.”
That isn’t to say McCreight has bounced back easily. They’re currently in an intensive outpatient program for survivors of trauma, and they say that people shouldn’t look at a smiling post on Instagram and imagine that they don’t have darker moments. Despite those moments, however, they’re determined not to let the assault bring a premature end to Beyond X & Y, the trans science education initiative they’d only just started.
“Biology very rarely operates in discrete, simple rules,” said McCreight. “In middle school the first things you learn are Punnett squares and Mendel and it seems so simple. By the time you get to undergrad you learn that there is this complicated Rube Goldberg machine of genetics, and absolutely nothing is just a simple binary.” Their goal now, apart from healing, is to recommence the public speaking, events, and interviews they’d planned for Beyond X & Y, and collaborate with other trans scientists and science communicators to bring the joy and excitement of trans science to the wider public.
