Her Name Was Juniper Blessing
Sick Burns 5/15/2026 - The slain 19 year old trans University of Washington student has been identified in the press
It's never easy to write about a trans woman who dies by violence. It's just a fact of life as trans people that there are thousands of people out there who wish to do us harm on a daily basis.
We don't yet know the details for why a man allegedly murdered 19 year old University of Washington student Juniper Blessing yet, but her death has shaken many online and offline communities of trans people.
She was a gifted singer and a wonderful human being according to those who knew her best. She had loving parents and a strong community around her. Her death reminds us white trans people that yes, we are potential targets no matter how strong our community ties are.
bree goose 🇨🇦
A clip of Juniper Blessing singing
Ultimately though, I don't really want to write extensively about Juniper's death. I didn't know her, nor do I know anyone who knew her. Anything I write about her here will be superficial and ultimately useless beyond spreading awareness.
But there is an angle here that has largely gone unremarked upon.
Years ago, earlier in my writing career, I would have had multiple editors clamoring to get me to write about any trans death that hit the headlines. It was maybe the most reliable type of assignment I would get in about 2017. Left leaning online publications loved running the "X trans person was the 20th trans person murdered this year," type of headline.
On the one hand, these types of pieces always felt a lot like liberal trauma porn. "Look at these poor tr*nnies dying, isn't that awful." But at the very least it helped get through to thick headed cis people that yes we trans people are much more likely to be victims of violence than we are to be perpetrators.
These stories also, macabrely, were almost the only time when Black trans women were allowed to be the main subject of a piece of journalism. Black trans women so rarely got media attention when they were not dying at the hands of men.
Even worse, I perpetuated that cycle myself as a journalist. As an early career freelancer, I had to pitch the stories that were most likely to be picked up for payment by those making editorial decisions and I learned early on that editors were rarely game for stories centering Black trans women in life. I wish I had fought harder for them.
But even worse than that was is the media silence when Black trans women die by violence now. It takes a young, pretty face like Juniper Blessing to get a headline these days.
It's a statement on who the media thinks has value in society. There is maybe a place where a young white trans woman is worth writing about in death, but forget everyone else. And really forget about the epidemic of violence trans people of color have faced for decades.
I launched a YouTube channel to help supplement this newsletter! This week we did a fun little video about the 22 foot golden Trump statue and the corrupt conservative religious figures who blessed it.
The New York Times, the country's largest journalism outlet, ran a brief news hit on Blessing's death, only noting in paragraph 5 that the victim was trans. There's no mention that dozens of trans people have died by violence this year alone. There's no thought about how trans deaths depend on police and local media accurately reporting a victim's gender dysphoria.
This is the problem with turning a marginalized community's identity into a political issue. You can't be having all these trans women being murdered by men in the headlines when you're trying to convince the public that the safest thing would be for trans women to use the men's bathroom and locker room.
You run the risk of people seeing through the propaganda that way.
And maybe I am partially at fault for this. I have a big platform and news reporting experience, maybe I should report on all the trans murders? But here's the other thing about all this: no one clicks on those stories either, unless it's a young white trans person.
A couple months ago I ran an interview on here with the new executive director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute about Black trans lives and it remains to this day the least read thing on this newsletter.
I don't know how to make people interested in this.
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