Trinidad assault in midst of transgender tolerance

When she was first found — seen through the cracked opening of a Trinidad motel room door — she was lying on the floor naked, bleeding and bound at the hands and feet with telephone cords.

She had been sexually assaulted with a coat hanger. Inside the room, police discovered a hair dryer in the "on" position with a tripped circuit breaker. She told police that her assailant held her down in a filled bathtub, then tried to electrocute her, according to a report.

In Trinidad — a town of about 9,000 people in southern Colorado that sees no more than a couple dozen serious assaults a year — the attack last month is shocking enough. But that the victim was a transgender woman who traveled to the town's famed sex-change clinic strikes at the heart of something many Trinidad residents pride themselves on: the community's unblinking tolerance for and acceptance of the transgender community.

"I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen somebody even catcalled," said Marci Bowers, the internationally renowned doctor who runs the clinic and performs about 150 gender-related surgeries a year.