Haunted by a stabbing
By Maggie Block
I’m writing 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 don’t know much. They aren’t releasing her name because her family needs to know first. They don’t know who did it, though there is a rough description of a suspect. They don’t know why she was killed. But we do know she was transgender.
And her death may have nothing to do with her gender identity. Perhaps it was totally random, or perhaps there was another completely unrelated motive. 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— for my AFAB ass to live as authentically me, I don’t need hormones or surgery, being low femme to soft masc in my clothing and hair is all the transition this nonbinary person needs.— I’ll be read as a woman for the rest of my life. Annoying? Yes. Deadly? Not at all.
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 the UW student 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 them, 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, disguises itself as palatable paternal concern, is a vicious trickster, and is winning. It will win if we don’t all work together to dismantle the structures that sustain it.