Octavia Jimenez was at Target with her partner, April Dean, Thursday to pick up some prescriptions when she spotted a dress she liked in the Montana store’s Pride section.
Jiménez entered the locker room to try on a rainbow plaid dress. When he came out, there was an older man in a baseball cap looking at her holding the cap, he said in an interview. He walked up to her and said, “Enjoy it while you can.”
At that moment, Jimenez said he felt his sense of danger rise. She and Dean spoke to a Target employee for help.
It was then that Jiménez began recording. In the video, which has been shared on social media, the man is seen removing his clothes from the Pride section and throwing items on the ground as a Target employee tells him to “come down.”
Jimenez said the employee asked the man to leave the area and escorted him to the manager’s office.
As a visibly trans person in Missoula, Jimenez told HuffPost that she normally feels very safe, but that this experience was “shocking.” The incident, which has gone viral, was just the latest episode in an ugly series of confrontations involving aggressive customers who are upset with the store’s celebration of Gay Pride Month. The company Announced this week that it would remove items “that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior” from some of its stores.
“It’s a little sad to see them bow to the pressure of these people who clearly have no other way to be satisfied than to see us go,” Jimenez said.
HuffPost contacted Target about the incident involving Jimenez, but the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jimenez said she was shocked to come face to face with this kind of hate, especially in Missoula, which she says is generally trans-friendly. The city is represented by the representative of the state of Montana. Zooey Zephyr, the first openly trans woman elected to the state legislature. Both Jimenez, a trans woman, and Dean, who is nonbinary, attended rallies in support of Zephyr when she was banned from the legislature last month.
The lawmaker expressed her support for the couple on Thursday.
“My heart goes out to the trans woman and her non-binary partner who were harassed,” Zephyr tweeted. “While the man may have said ‘enjoy it while you can,’ I hope the couple knows that there are people across the state working to create a Montana where they can always enjoy their lives in peace.”
In April, Montana Republicans voted to ban Zephyr to debate on the House floor after she criticized her colleagues for supporting a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.
In a speech, Zephyr warned Republicans that they would have “blood on their hands” over such a bill, which was later signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.
“I think (the censorship of Zephyr) directly reflects the movement that we saw here, in that our elected officials are conducting public displays of hate and attempts to remove queer people from public life,” Dean said. “This trickles down to things like this and ideas like this that are allowed in the public sphere that encourage people to do things like they did today.”
Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh called for a boycott of Target on his podcast for selling “crease-friendly” swimsuits, aimed at trans women who have not undergone gender-affirming surgeries, which Walsh falsely claimed were marketed to boys. .
The company said in an online statement that the removal of certain products comes after experiencing “threats” to the safety and well-being of its employees.
These confrontations are not new. There are dozens of videos of right-wing agitators confronting Target employees and customers about LGBTQ-affirming products every June during Pride Month, as well as many more of employees receiving threats from anti-mask customers at the height of the pandemic.
Since the announcement about the removal of Pride products, several LGBTQ+ rights organizations, including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, having called the company to reverse its decision.
After Jimenez and Dean left Target, she broke down and cried in her car. She was preparing for her first day as a cashier at a grocery store that same day.
“I was definitely a little scared to go to work today,” Jimenez said. “It’s the kind of thing you never expect to happen.”