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Emmett Brock thought he was dying, and his mind raced. This isn’t supposed to happen to me. This doesn’t happen this way. I can’t die like this.

He tasted the blood inside his mouth. He felt the fists land on his head. And he heard the shouts of the sheriff’s deputy on top of him, pressing him into the pavement of the 7-Eleven parking lot.

Three minutes later, the 23-year-old teacher sat in the back of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department cruiser not even knowing, he said, why the deputy had stopped him.

Brock was sent to the Norwalk station lockup and booked for three felonies. When he told the staff he is a transgender man, he said, they asked to see his genitals before deciding which holding cell to send him to.