In her dimly lit room in a Malaysian village, Suki rests on a bed as she recovers from a brutal attack that has highlighted what campaigners say is growing hostility towards gay and transgender people in the country. A transgender woman, Suki was beaten up by a group of assailants last week with sticks and plastic pipes in Seremban, a town south of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. She suffered broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and head injuries that required seven stitches. Police have arrested eight men suspected of carrying out the attack. “They hit me and stepped on me repeatedly, I couldn’t move,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at her home in Rantau, a sleepy village in the central state of Negeri Sembilan.