a bar asked five people to cover up a t-shirt. two weeks later there was bear mace in the fred meyer parking lot.

via FOX 12, KATU and Hoodline and KOIN.

The Sports Bra is at 2512 NE Broadway in Portland. It shows women's sports and nothing else. Its own mission statement, on its own website, is about as inflammatory as a laminated menu: "Our mission is to make great food and delicious drinks, and to create a space that supports, empowers, and promotes girls and women in sports and in the community."

On Sunday afternoon, police were called to that address because two groups of people were pepper-spraying each other, and by the time it was finished a nearby Fred Meyer had broken windows.

what started it

On September 6, staff asked five customers wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics, a brand whose entire proposition is that trans women should not play women's sports, to cover the message or leave. The bar has not moved an inch since. Its position, as printed by FOX 12: "While everyone has a right to express opinions in public, messages or conduct that exclude or demean others remain strictly barred inside the establishment."

The same afternoon, eight people from that group were removed from a Portland Thorns match at Providence Park, which said they had been distributing unapproved materials. The group disputes that characterization.

Somebody filmed the exchange in the bar. That is the entire mechanism by which a dress-code disagreement in one Portland restaurant became a fortnight of street fighting.

the arrest that wasn't

The first protest was September 11. About seven people stood across the street from roughly thirty counterprotesters. Police arrived around 5:45 p.m., looked into two reports of irritant spray, made no arrests for lack of probable cause, and reported no injuries. A slow news night in a city that has seen worse.

Nine days later it went differently. Around a dozen protesters, a few dozen counterprotesters, and a police call at 3:30 p.m. to what officers described as "two groups of people with opposing views causing a disturbance reported to be pepper spraying each other." Police said they "used de-escalation techniques and got the groups to separate." One group ended up inside the nearby Fred Meyer, where officers found vandalism and broken windows. A witness, Kyle Hunt, described "two ladies fist-fighting, throwing haymakers," and called the scene "absolute chaos." Omar Gil of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization said his group "don't accept transphobia here in Portland."

Who sprayed first depends entirely on who you ask, and the accounts do not agree. FOX 12 reported that counterprotesters said the group opposing the bar used heavy mace, and that video showed one protester spraying what appeared to be bear mace at a counterprotester, who answered with a spray of his own. Hoodline reported it the other way around, that the bear mace came from the bar's defenders. We are not going to pick one for you on the strength of two conflicting local write-ups.

One person was arrested on Sunday, and this is the part nearly every write-up has smeared over. Michael J. Duntley, 59, was booked on second- and third-degree robbery, harassment and second-degree disorderly conduct. Read quickly, in a paragraph about a maced crowd, that list looks like the charge sheet for Sunday. It isn't. KATU reported plainly that Duntley was wanted for taking someone's phone at a different protest in late August, and that his arrest was unrelated to Sunday's events.

The charge that does belong to this story landed on Tuesday. The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office has charged Thomas Wayne Allen, a conservative live streamer, with assault and with violating his probation, and KOIN reports a warrant will be issued for his arrest. The alleged victim is Holly Brown, an activist with Portland Contra Las Deportaciones. KOIN filmed Allen shoving a protester to the ground earlier this month, though the district attorney's office would not confirm whether that is the incident being charged. Allen told the station the charges were "bulls--t" and said he had not known about them. The charges are allegations and he has not been tried.

"I feel really happy that hopefully more people are going to be protected from his violence," Brown told KOIN. "So, I think the hardest thing for me was just kind of dealing with the emotional turmoil of being attacked and then also wondering whether or not there were actually going to be consequences." The district attorney's office said it "will not tolerate violence in this county, and we stand by our firm commitment to protect free speech," which is the sound of an office trying to hold two things at once and, to its credit, managing it.

who is filming all this

Here is what our own scan turned up, and it is the part worth sitting with. We searched X for reaction the way we do on every story, once narrow and once wide, and pulled about 250 posts. The volume is enormous. Almost none of it is ours.

Five of the top six posts by engagement belong to Andy Ngo. The single biggest post in the entire set is XX-XY Athletics' own account, on being booed in Portland. Fox News has been there twice. A bar on NE Broadway has become a backdrop, filmed and posted to audiences who have never set foot in Oregon.

The counterweight is a scattering of individual queer accounts making the obvious point about privately owned businesses and dress codes. That asymmetry is not a measure of who is right, and we would say the same if the numbers ran our way. It is a measure of who has built the machinery to turn a Sunday afternoon in northeast Portland into national content, and who has not. The trans-athlete fight keeps being decided in courtrooms, slowly and on paper. This is what it looks like when it gets decided on a sidewalk instead, and our venues are usually the address on the incident report.