Australian woman disabled after attack by trans-identified male says she was targeted for standing up for women's rights

An Australian woman has been left permanently disabled after being assaulted by a trans-identified male in what she believes was a targeted attack in retaliation for her gender-critical views.

Using the false name Ruby to protect the woman’s identity, Reduxx reports that she and her partner were attending the Punks Pub Crawl annual event in Melbourne when the incident occurred.

“I had only just arrived with my partner sometime around 3pm. There were about 70 people or so attending the crawl. The whole group of us stopped at Carlton Gardens for a group photo,” Ruby, a bass guitarist, told Reduxx.

“I was walking away, talking to a friend when I noticed one male walking beside the group but in the opposite direction to the rest of us,” she went on. “As he passed me he shoulder-barged me hard, and I stopped to address him.”

Ruby describes the individual as “male, but not obviously ‘trans’,” and recalls thinking her attacker’s attire was classic punk instead. 

“He just looked like a metal head with lipstick on, and I had never seen him before in my life,” she says. In the police report seen by Reduxx, the trans-identified male is described as being approximately 5’7” with long dark hair wearing a black shirt and black pants.

Surprised by the aggressive shoulder check, Ruby confronted the individual, asking, “Is there a problem here? Do you and I need to have a conversation?” After the attacker claimed it was an accident, with a friend backing this up, Ruby says she replied, “No, he just shoulder-barged me as hard as he could.”

Ruby’s use of male pronouns apparently caused outrage from her attacker’s supporters.

“I heard a few murmurs of ‘He?’ Like people were offended at my choice of pronoun,” she told Reduxx “I stood facing him for another [few seconds] waiting to see if he was going to kick off, but he seemed to have nothing to say so I turned and walked away.”

At this point, the trans-identified male attacked her from behind, pushing her to the ground with brute force.

“I was wearing a heavy studded leather jacket so I went down hard and fast. I put my left arm out to break the fall with anything other than my head and the impact reverberated all up my arm, shattering my shoulder and breaking my arm at the joint.”

Ruby was taken to the hospital where a CAT scan and X-Ray showed she had a fractured shoulder.

She managed to track down her attacker and identify the person as Sarah Cadzow, a male who identifies as a woman. Ruby believes Cadzow deliberately targeted her in retaliation for her gender critical beliefs that she had been expressing on her private Facebook account. She came to the conclusion that a mutual friend had alerted Cadzow to her views at the pub crawl and this was what led to Cadzow violently assaulting her.

“It became clear that someone had been showing the attacker my Facebook posts. The attacker had never been on my Facebook friends list, as far as I know, but his friend was. My Facebook has been all about women’s rights and spaces for about 4 years now, since I found out about men in women’s prisons,” said Ruby. “We messaged the friend shortly afterwards and he helpfully agreed in writing as to what happened, but attempted to justify it because apparently [Cadzow] was ‘defending his community’ by attacking a middle aged woman from behind.”

Ruby describes a frustrating few months waiting for police to take action and charge the trans-identified male. Even with two witness statements and the identity of her attacker, she claims Melbourne Police were slow to respond.

“I can’t speak for police resources or procedures, but it was very concerning to me that it took so long to charge him. They seemed to be handling the assailant very delicately,” she told Reduxx “I wanted there to be some immediate disincentive for him to do this again – to me or anyone else – and the police didn’t seem to take that concern seriously at all.”

Ruby believes there was a “tone shift” when police discovered that the accused identified as transgender.

“The delay in charging and the manner in which they went about it certainly felt to me like a reluctance to act. This was very serious violence and all I could think about during that waiting time was ‘Where are the consequences? What’s stopping him doing it again? What happens if he sees a woman in an Adult Human Female t-shirt?'”

Ruby says she will never be able to lift her arm above the shoulder, meaning she can never swim, shoot hoops with her son, hang washing, or get things down from a high shelf.

Her doctor said, “your ability to lift that arm above your head ended when you hit the ground.”

Cadzow was finally charged in relation to Ruby’s assault on January 25, almost four months after the attack. The trans-identified male is scheduled to appear at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on April 14.

However, Ruby is concerned that the case won’t receive a fair hearing because Australia’s criminal justice system has been captured by gender identity ideology. 

“This was a clear-cut act of male violence but I have my doubts as to whether statistics or records will reflect that in the end,” she said.

“It’s getting very scary to be a woman speaking up about women’s rights these days. This kind of violence is going way, way too far and it has to stop before something even worse happens.