Ilektra A. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–
The past few years have seen a marked increase in transphobic balderdash bubbling up like a vomitous gruel from the reactionary political sphere, with right-wing media pundits, politicians, and the U.S. President himself spreading endless lies, vitriol, and accusations. This rhetoric ranges from claims that all trans people are “predators” who “prey on children,” to the stated ambition of the anti-trans movement as being “determined to use every level of government to drive transgender people out of public life.” Given this worrying situation, which has been partially addressed in prior articles on the topic, it is unfortunately unsurprising (though no less heartbreaking and outrageous) that since Apr. 1, there have been a total of 13 transgender people murdered in the United States. Bourgeois media has mostly neglected to cover this string of heinous crimes against some of the most vulnerable members of the population, and while many may rightfully decry these outlets’ silence, it is very much an expected part of the broader playbook the transphobic bourgeois establishment has deployed in recent years, one that has followed a very clear pattern of dehumanize, disenfranchise, destroy, and disregard.
At the front of the anti-trans playbook lies the often-employed tactic of dehumanization. This typically comes from right-wing pundits, politicians, political insiders, the U.S. President, and frankly, any online grifter without morals or any sense of self-respect looking to make a quick buck by exploiting the hot issue of today.
We see this manifest in dehumanizing rhetoric, such as Congresswoman Nancy Mace repeatedly using transphobic slurs and derogatory language in reference to trans people; fascist political commentator Michael Knowles calling for the complete “eradication of transgenderism from public life entirely;” President Trump spreading the frequently-referenced false statistic that transgender women are “invading” women’s sports, causing widespread injuries and humiliation of their cis counterparts; and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson issuing a statement reserving the restrooms in the Capitol and House office buildings for “individuals of that biological sex.”
One could go on endlessly citing examples of the bigoted, false notions the fascists have been spreading about trans people, but the fact of the matter is that this tactic’s core purpose is to set the rhetorical and moral foundation for the next item in their playbook: disenfranchisement.
Standing firm upon their supposedly steady moral “high ground,” the anti-trans fascists deploy the next method in their toolkit, that of disenfranchisement, or disempowerment and marginalization. What few protections trans Americans had prior to the start of this recent full scale assault on their existence are slowly but surely being chipped away, revealing the beginnings of what, to the empathetic, progressive-minded individual, can only be seen as the head of Medusa, its writhing, serpentine coils poised to petrify the progression of civil rights for all oppressed people.
This has primarily taken the form, in this decade at least, of anti-trans legislation being proposed en masse by various federal, state, and municipal legislatures across the country. While the majority of the bills proposed, which aim to restrict or fully eliminate the already limited civil rights trans people enjoy, do not proceed past the proposal stage, the sheer number of them being proposed (793 this year alone), act in a similar fashion to the pellets fired from a shotgun at long range, as in, while many do not impact their intended target, a number of them do, with 55 being signed into law in 2026.
The content of these bills aims to make living a normal, happy life far more difficult, or even impossible, for trans people, such as Kansas Senate Bill 244, which de facto invalidated the driver’s licenses of all trans residents of the state with practically no advanced notice, Missouri House Bill 2009, banning the provision of lifesaving healthcare like hormone replacement therapy (which many trans people who have had certain gender-affirming surgeries need to physically stay alive) to incarcerated trans people, and the notorious Idaho H0752, which deems it a criminal offense for trans people to enter a restroom that is not aligned with their sex assigned at birth, with penalties ranging from one year in jail upon a second “offense,” to life imprisonment after a fourth.
Emboldened by vicious dehumanizing rhetoric, and sweeping attempts to delegitimize trans existence on paper, useful stooges of the bourgeois order push the envelop into the final, tragic stages of this ongoing campaign of anti-trans genocide and erasure: destruction, or to put it more bluntly, murder, which then subsequently gives way to disregard, wherein, the bourgeois media acts as if it never even happened.
Since Apr. 1, a total of thirteen trans and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. have been deliberately targeted and murdered on account of their identities, with several others currently missing. To make matters worse, these murders have received practically no coverage from any of the mainstream, corporate-funded media outlets such as CNN, Fox, and HuffPost. This lack of coverage, far from being accidental, is part of the aforementioned aim of the reactionary transphobic movement to “eliminate [transgender people] from public life entirely.” In gathering sources for this story, there was extreme difficulty in acquiring the precise details of the victims’ lives, who they were, what their names and ages were, and the manner in which their lives were tragically and violently cut short.
With the exception of Them, an LGBTQIA+-focused outlet owned by Condé Nast, the only coverage of these murders has been published almost exclusively in small, local newspapers in the localities where the killings took place, as well as by various independent journalists and online publications with a specific focus on investigating and reporting on queer issues. With the help of these sources, among others, the names and ages of the victims, along with the dates and locations of their recent targeted murders, are as follows:
- Davonta Curtis, age 31, Apr. 8, Chicago, IL
- Daniella Analee Escobedo, age 34, Apr. 12, Las Vegas, NV
- Danielle Spillman, age 74, Apr. 13, San Francisco, CA
- Aleanna Belcher, age 31, Apr. 17, Binghamton, NY
- Luca “RedBeard” Knapp, age 39, Apr. 18, Cibola County, NM
- Lanessa Rodriguez, age 35, Apr. 28, Fort Pierce, FL
- Hailey Singleton, age 29, May 5, Dunnellon, FL
- Juniper Blessing, age 19, May 10, Seattle, WA
- Eryka Caldwell, age 41, May 17, Brooklyn, NY
- Nathaniel Potts, age 16, May 20, Raleigh, IL
- Murry Faust, age 22, May 24, Wilder, KY
- Leia Trysiss Ali, age 35, May 24, Las Vegas, NV
- Persia Amarra Conway, age 33, May 25, Houston, TX
The unfortunate aspect of this tragic situation, of course in addition to the fact that any of these people were murdered in the first place, is that this list is most likely incomplete, as the vast majority of the murders of trans people, especially of black trans women (the demographic most likely to be targeted and impacted by anti-trans violence and harassment), go entirely unreported. What’s more, day by day, week by week, year by year, as long as class society is allowed to continue, as long as the working class is subjected to the whims and wishes of the owning class, viewed as nothing more than replaceable cogs in the relentlessly churning, ever-decaying machine of capitalism, this will continue.
The ruling class not only foments divisions among separate strata of the working masses in an attempt to divide and disorient any prospective proletarian movement, it requires a constant, steady supply of fresh blood, of new labor, to exploit, use up, and jettison into the industrial meat grinder once its productive capacities are at an end. Any deviation from the cis-heteronormative order which ensures this consistent stream of new workers – namely, gay and trans people – is seen as an affront to the bourgeoisie’s dominion, and must at once be identified, targeted, eliminated, and cast out from their proverbial “heavenly kingdom.”
That is why the working-class movement, in its increasingly pertinent quest to shape itself into a more cohesive, independent, organized, and militant form, must under no circumstances give a single nanometer of headway to the bourgeoisie’s attempts to divide and disenfranchise any section of the working class, or to redirect legitimate social grievances or strain to anyone else but the real culprit for this crisis of capitalism: the capitalist. We must unreservedly stand shoulder to shoulder with our trans brothers, sisters, and siblings in the fight to end capitalist class rule once and for all. Our very future depends upon it.