Haunted by a stabbing

By Maggie Block

I wrote the first draft of this on Wednesday, May 13, two days after a 19-year-old UW student was stabbed to death in the laundry room of her privately operated campus housing. We didn’t know much. They didn’t release her name because her family needs to know first. They didn’t know who did it, though there was a rough description of a suspect. They didn’t know why she was killed. But we knew she was transgender.

I’m updating this on Monday, May 18, and we know a bit more. Her name was Juniper Blessing. “Juniper’s loss not only devastates us but diminishes the world,” their family said in a statement issued Thursday by the Santa Fe Human Rights Alliance. Juniper had a beautiful voice, her solo in her school’s performance of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers:

There are many more beautiful testimonials that Mathew Rodriguez compiled in his piece, Community Grieves Juniper Blessing, Trans Student With “Heart of Gold” Who Loved Meteorology and Pokémon, on Them.us.

While we do know more today than we did when I started writing this piece, the suspect I mentioned earlier turned himself in and remains in police custody. There is still no report on what motivated the murder of Juniper Blessing.

But for those of us outside the binary, there is a history of violence against our siblings (our sisters in particular) that strongly suggests she was killed for her gender presentation.

It breaks my heart.

And it scares me to death.

Not for myself, my gender assignment and presentation align in a way that I’m in no more danger than your average white woman.

I’m scared for my friends. I’m scared for my former students, many of whom have just announced the colleges they plan to attend this Fall. I am scared for every young trans person who walks home at night, or even does their laundry in their own building.

The Right has made transgender people, in particular trans women and girls, a wedge issue. They have spent years spewing disinformation, dehumanizing trans individuals, both real and figments of their twisted imaginations, and they have sown fear and disgust about a disempowered, tiny group of people. Again, we don’t know why Juniper was killed, but this focused stochastic terrorism’s natural outcome is more violence against the transgender community.

I’m not sure when this will stop, but I do know that unless cisgender people make the defense of transgender people and identities a high priority, it won’t stop at all. There aren’t enough of us. We need your help, we need you to question jokes made at our expense, and correct misinformation when you hear it, we need you to tell your family and friends normal human stories about the trans people in your life.

We need you to be informed about threats to our safety. For instance, two ballot initiatives that all Washingtonians will be able to vote on this November are: IL26-01, which would require that parents be notified if a student is using their chosen gender pronouns or name in school, and IL26-638, which would deny trans girls from playing girls’ sports and would open the floodgates to gender inspection of minors. The Washington State Education Association calls these bills anti-school and opposes them; they offer talking points against both initiatives. Please learn them, please share them, please make sure your community knows to vote against these initiatives this November.

Transphobia is a beast that encroaches upon us every day. It uses different tactics and tools, transphobia disguises itself as palatable paternal concern, a pied piper’s trick to lead you down the path towards violence against an acutely vulnerable, small sliver of humanity. We have already given transphobia too much ground, we need to beat it back.