In Harlem, New York, on January 2nd, 2025, a man attacked a woman, with words and fists, and paid the price. 

Jaia Cruz, a 24 yr old woman, who is transgender and Latina, was standing in line at a deli. An argument started with Ray Hodges, a 36 yr old Black cis man, over who was next in line. This escalated rapidly. Hodges called Cruz slurs, and attacked  her. She told him to stop, and he continued to attack. She said she would kill him if he continued, and he pushed her against a refrigerator. She drew her knife, and he died en route to the hospital. 

The outrage machine has spun up shockingly fast, even for this time of escalating terror against trans women. She was described as “towering” and “giant” by Yahoo! in a classic monsterization of trans women (her height is the fourth search result on google). The New York Post published an article whose title called her “Pure evil” and “A disgusting excuse for a human being.” While he attacked her, Hodges called her a “faggot” and a “tranny”.  During her sentencing, Hodges’ family chanted and jeered “It’s a boy!” and “Fucking boy!” at her. She has been deadnamed, misgendered, verbally and socially abused in the reaction-economy, accused of being on drugs, a slut, aggressive; and people gleefully fantasize over what hideous violences await her in, as anonymous people are giddy to point out, “men’s prison.” Ms. Cruz is sadly no stranger to either violence nor public spectacle. Her image and dignity having been thrown to the rabid dogs of social media earlier last summer when videos circulated of her being viciously beaten in public by two men. 

Make no mistake, people know what they are calling for when celebrating her incarceration, when lying about her gender, and gleefully hoping she is sent to men’s prison. Trans women are subjected to a regime of sexual violence and torture in men’s prison. We are placed into disgusting circumstances by people who fucking hate us, who desire nothing more than our violent debasement. One aspect of this debasement is known as “V-Coding”, a system in which we are “given” to inmates to be violated, raped, and abused. 

Would this have gone differently if Jaia did back down? Certainly! Another woman’s life may well have been extinguished, gone unremarked upon, another abject, another victim, and Hodges may well have gone free in the city whose police brutally murdered Marsha P. Johnson and threw her body in the Hudson River. Trans women are a precious resource in patriarchy and racism and our lives are extinguished frequently in the pursuit of its violent maintenance. Cruz did only what was necessary, backed up against a literal wall, unable to trust anyone except herself. She does not deserve to be the new face of this hyperviolence, nor the recipient of targeting by the unleashed dogs of a reactionary, blood-thirsted public. She deserves a long life, surrounded by loved ones, outside of public mockery, out of prison, and free from the clutches of the fascist rape-reich. 

Transmisogynoir, the hyperviolent intersection of anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, and transmisogyny, sits as a fulcrum, a break-glass-in-emergencies tactic, to be wielded even by other oppressed groups. It allows the violence being suffered at the hands of the state to be redirected against abjected minorities. Trans women’s lives are fertile soil for the flowering of love, care, community, beauty and liberation, yet we are made dirt to the vast majority of the wider populace, ground for growing and training violence, prejudice, and resentment. 

The resistance against this tightening is already sprouting as well! Rodney Hinton Jr.’s heroic retaliation against police that brutally murdered his son was treated with the same spectacle and the same theater.

“Your favorite song… Nicola, Bart – immigrants, wrongly executed… But their deaths served as a message to others: that ours is a society that murders the innocent. Do you, too, believe that your sacrifice will change the world?”

Skull Face

Make no mistake. This occurred during the allegedly “most pro-worker”, “pro-trans” Biden Regime. The Democrats have been no friends to trans people. When prompted, Kamala Harris refused to even say that trans women deserved rights and healthcare. Gavin Newsom has pushed transphobic rhetoric, actively exhorting the fascist ranks of their evil party to abandon trans people altogether.  There has been nothing but escalating violence, genocidal rhetoric, and an unceasing hitlerian regime of legislation being introduced, un-fucking-challenged in both red and blue states, designed to cut trans people out of all walks of life, especially trans women.

Two trans women were attacked in broad daylight in a train station in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a self-declared trans sanctuary state! Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man, was tortured to death over the course of a whole month earlier this year in New York! In May of 2025, the suicide of a trans girl was turned into a spectacle to jeering hordes on twitter who mocked her relentlessly and turned her despair into celebration. 

The amount of violence has hardly escalated. We have always been hideously subjected to violence, including rape, murder, beatings, homelessness, and exploitation. What has changed has been the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding our deaths. From Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live saying of Brandon Teena’s rape and murder, “Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die,” in 1993, to now where we can look forward to outright celebration, heroizing of our killers, beaters, rapists and attackers.

Transmisogyny flourishes in the client states of the U.S. Empire as well. On April 4th, 2025, Sara Millerey González, a trans woman from Colombia, was raped, beaten, and mutilated by having all her limbs broken, before being thrown into a stream in a ravine to drown to death. She later died in the hospital. Again, people prioritized filming the spectacle instead of stepping in to stop it. 

What will we do then? So much structured, dedicated, motivated violence is arrayed at the innocents, who the Empire has decided to grind into a pulp as it thrashes.This will not resolve with simple reforms. Just like Pavlov and his dogs, the reactionary elements have been primed, conditioned, and rewarded for their worst impulses, encouraged and trained to salivate when they smell fresh meat. 

Jaia Cruz’s actions in her own defense will serve as a warning to those who would terrorize us. We will not be passive or pacific. We will no longer ask timidly for respect of our pronouns. We will instead demand our safety, knowing that it will only blossom from the barrel of a gun. Let her serve as a rallying call to all transfeminine people to organize for our self defense. Let us be unafraid, disciplined, and swift. 

We cannot trust so-called “allies” any longer. You are with us, or you are against us. You will fight and bleed and die alongside us, or you sentence us to abject horror in prisons, allowing and committing our murders alongside the cops and fascists and bigots. It has been too long that queerness and transness have primarily been a vehicle for otherwise neutral parties to feel good about their own pathetic, capitulationist lives. That ends now. End your own complicity. Buy us weapons, food, housing, hormones, and stay the fuck out of our way.

Some queer people may react to this essay with timidity, and to that I say, I am not sorry. We are not at a point where you can opt out of the violence because it will find you. There is not an off ramp, there is not a reformist track anymore. Brianna Wu and Buck Angel are not going to fucking save you, and begging the Democrats will give you nothing. Get with the program.

Unrelenting, unmitigated, unapologetic terror against the enemies of trans women’s dignity and safety is the only answer. Trans women will never be respected until every aspiring woman-beater, self-indulgent rapist, and whinging, sniveling, coward who hides behind a screen to mock our deaths, is afraid for their miserable, worthless lives, afraid to look us in the eye for fear of being the last thing they ever see, afraid to be cut down in righteous self- and community- defense. 

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Cruz said to investigators:

“I told him, ‘You come to me and I’ll kill you.’”

“No motherfuckers are going to put their hands on me no more.”

“He tried to mess with me because I’m trans, and I poked him up.”

“I hope he’s maggot food.”

Good for her! Well that she is still here. This is only what is deserved by people who would hurt vulnerable women. 

“I killed him laughing. Oh, well. I’ll piss on his grave.”

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government.  Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

All of the above is reminiscent of a previous prominent Canadian serial killer, Robert Pickton. Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women, of whom 26 were confirmed, but he was only found guilty and sentenced for killing six. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally only searched Pickton’s pig farm in order to score easy money by ticketing unregistered firearms. They dragged themselves to investigate further when they found two missing womens’ blood and property. It took five years and cost $70 million to unearth the remains of the 26 women on Pickton’s farm. After his conviction, the Canadian Supreme Court found no further reason to continue trying Pickton, as there was no higher punishment possible for him. It will be much the same for Skibicki, who is already charged with first degree murder. He will be quietly put away and the government will claim justice has been served. But the conditions that allowed him and Pickton to commit their crimes, to murder Indigenous women under the settler state’s radar, will remain for as long as the Canadian state persists. For example, Robert Pickton’s brother David Pickton, who was previously convicted for groping and threatening to rape and cut a woman into pieces, walks free today. His freedom only required his claim ignorance of his brother’s crimes, despite having worked on the farm where they took place.

None of this is accidental. Whenever Canada looks into its past, it always unearths more Indigenous bodies than it bargained for. In 2021, a search uncovered a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More schools across Canada and the U.S. were searched. This resulted in the discovery of the bodies of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. The liberal Canadian media describes these events as “tragedies” and publishes reports of unheeded recommendations. For example, the government found many instances of what it called “police mishandling” in Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a 2012 British Columbia provincial government inquiry into the Pickton murders. This report had dozens of recommendations for the police and provincial government, but none were taken seriously. Indigenous leaders accuse Canada of disregarding the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. This is true, but misses the full picture.

In actuality, the settler terror incarnate in the murder of untold thousands of Indigenous women and children is vital to the Canadian state. The settler government “cares” only insofar as the violence must continue. To accuse the police of “mishandling” these cases is an understatement bordering on injustice, for the police are not mere bumbling fools. True to their role in the history of Canada, they are active collaborators with settler terrorists! Some Canadian police admitted in the 90s that they would rather solve one murder of a white, bourgeois victim, than investigate the deaths of a dozen prostitutes — who are disproportionately drawn from Indigenous and racialized women. Police comments of this nature were documented in case studies into the Pickton murders, such as Stevie Cameron’s On The Farm. As for the perpetrators, liberals consider them monstrous, and rightly so, but fail to recognize that becoming a serial rapist-murderer is the logical apotheosis of settlerism. There are no acts more viscerally colonial than direct, individual sexual violence and murder against the colonized. To understand the causes of this violence, and its ubiquity in Canadian society, one must recognize the mountain of colonialist cruelty in Canada’s dark and genocidal history — the mountain these acts stand atop. 

The inability to recognize such grotesqueness condemns liberalism as a failed ideology. Even when some well-intentioned liberals document the atrocities in historic works such as Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk, or true crime texts like Cameron’s On The Farm, the most they can accomplish is a grim witness-bearing. There is no prescription in liberalism to end the spilling of Indigenous blood by settlers and the settler state. The best liberalism can offer is some befuddled discourse and solemn “remembrance.” As Daschuk said in an interview with Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix news in 2016, referring to the deliberate mass starvation of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, “the stories were so profound and the truths, in some cases, were so ugly that we can’t turn our backs on them.” But what does it mean to not turn one’s back? In Canada’s case, not a lot — typically some mumbled apology and dead-end state “inquiries.” In that same interview from nearly a decade ago, Daschuk stated, “I think we’re at a moment. I think there’s enough momentum, and goodwill in the general population” to “examine how our society might right its inherent inequalities.” But in the years since, this hasn’t transpired, nor can it. The graveyard of failed bureaucratic endeavors surrounding Canada’s genocidal past and present, which includes the now-dissolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Forsaken inquiry in British Columbia, and whatever crib-strangled half-effort will soon emerge in Winnipeg, is only expanding, while the “inherent inequalities” remain and genocidal injustices continue.

Anti-colonial resistance must be found beyond liberal frameworks. On July 7th, the pig government of Manitoba told the families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, to their faces, that they would not search the Brady landfill, despite the feasibility study demonstrating that a search was possible. In a hollow and tired deflection, Premier Stefanson cited safety concerns to workers conducting the search, and suggested that the search should be the federal government’s responsibility. In response, Indigenous activists, including Morgan Harris’s daughter, Cambria Harris, rightfully and immediately blocked access to the landfill, returning to a protest tactic first applied last year, when these murders first came to light. This people’s blockade against the settler government is continuing, even though the City of Winnipeg filed an injunction on Tuesday, July 11th to have it forcibly dispersed. Naturally, the demonstrators are unlikely to acquiesce to the city’s demand, and have every right to hold their ground.

The reoccupation and blockade of their own stolen land is an essential tactic for Indigenous resistance to colonization across Turtle Island. From present struggles in Wet’suwet’en and Landback Lane, weaving back through the “IdleNoMore” movement and “NoDAPL” protests at Standing Rock, Indigenous actions have been most successful when they impede the movement of the settler state, settler capitalist firms, and settler “private citizens,” and settler access to land. Looking only slightly further back into history, the settler government’s fear becomes palpable when it is confronted with armed land reoccupations, as occurred during the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) in 1990, and Wounded Knee in 1973. These brave acts of popular anti-colonial resistance stand at the head of five centuries of Indigenous resistance, and will continue until settler colonialism is finally dismantled. The nascent actions to blockade Brady landfill are only a thread in this storied history.

Unfortunately, until they are united in a broad people’s anti-colonial movement, these actions can only delay and prolong the ongoing displacement and genocide regime of the U.S.–Canada settler empire. It is a death by a thousand cuts. The 1980–94 Clayoquot protests (The War in the Woods) did not prevent greedy settlers from harvesting old growth lumber in British Columbia for long — similar events unfolded only three decades later in the 2020–22 occupation at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). The capitalists, motivated by their unceasing, existential drive for endless profits, will never willingly stop; they will raze the whole Earth, if they are allowed to do so, and they will be aided at every step by the capitalist class-dictatorship state. Clayoquot and Ada’itsx demonstrated that the state has endless patience and capacity to jail peaceful protesters. The plaudits heaped by the state on acts of peaceful resistance, thereby condoning and denuding these actions of revolutionary impetus, are another obstacle. Still, it’s clear that while Canada, its police, and its corporations exist, there can be neither lasting peace nor permanent victories in the Indigenous liberation struggle. There can be no justice for the tens of thousands of children buried beneath residential schools or for the uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Unfathomable cruelty characterizes the Indigenous experience in Canada and across Turtle Island. The settler state offers only this choice: they may live on the rez (reserve/reservation) and contend with an ongoing cultural and literal genocide, or they may leave. If they leave, however, they’re extremely likely to be criminalized, rendered homeless, victimized by physical, emotional, and sexual violence (including disappearance and murder), or any combination of these traumatic experiences and horrible fates. If they are murdered, their bodies can be buried in landfills or fed to pigs. Their spirits and families can find no peace. Yet liberal settlers dimly wonder why the phrase “Reconciliation is Dead” is popular.

The sum of this experience is sometimes called the “Fourth World” — in which primarily Indigenous and Black people, but also gender nonconforming and disabled people, live Third-World conditions in allegedly First-World countries like Canada or the United States. In this framework, Fourth World communities are understood to occupy a unique underclass, beneath the settler working class proper. Fourth-World workers are locked in a web of contradictions with the capitalists, the First-World workers, and the “Fourth-World” propertied classes all at once.

Fourth Worldism dovetails with Engels’ theory of labor aristocracy and Sakai’s theory that settler proletarianism is a myth. In letters to Marx in the 1850s, Engels worried that England, then the “most bourgeois of nations,” feeding itself on the spoils of hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, would soon have not only a bourgeoisie — its capitalists — but also a “bourgeois working class.” Marx and Engels feared that England’s colonial plunder would be sufficient bribery for its working class to betray their own class interests at the expense of racialized workers and workers abroad. Marx, for instance, wrote that the English working class would never free itself from “its own” capitalists until it stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Ireland, India, and other British colonies. The situation Engels described is sadly true in Canada and the U.S., where the settler proletariat has, time and time again, betrayed its class interest as workers to align with the settler capitalists, at the expense of  Turtle Island’’s colonized and other “Fourth World” peoples. Sakai takes Engels concept to its furthest extreme and claims, “Amerika [or canada] is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” For Sakai, settlers only exist to brutalize the Indigenous proletariat, whose slaughter and dispossession built the luxuries they enjoy.

Regardless of whether we find these theories plausible and rigorous, or nonsense, the wretched lived experience of Canada’s Indigenous populations cannot be denied, nor can the solution to their predicament be avoided. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island understand that the settler state will not change its colonialist character out of good will; it will only capitulate to any demands made from a position of power. As Mao said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The present mobilized resistance, while heroic, must spark the revitalization of Indigenous revolutionary anti-colonial organization, complete with the capability for armed struggle. When Indigenous nations make the settler pay in capital, real estate, political standing, comfort, and blood for his broken treaties and residential schools, his sprawling suburbs and golf courses, his oil pipelines and cleared forests — then and only then will the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty become realizable. The 1974 successful re-establishment of Ganienkeh as Kanienkehaka (a sovereign nation governed by its own laws and traditions) by the Mohawk, against the U.S. government, shows only an elementary hint of what could be. Let a thousand Ganienkehs overgrow the entirety of Turtle Island!

Among the settlers there is a desperate need for mass cultural upheaval. We must expunge the cultural and economic conditions that culminate in the violation and murder of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, and the thousands of other Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). This begins, at the community level, by terrorizing the terrorists — by keeping a vigilant watch on settlers who show any political inclinations toward fascism and any personal inclinations toward domestic, sexual, and other interpersonal violence. Pickton and Skibicki could never have gotten away with their crimes for so long, had they not been shielded by whole communities, who (at best) looked the other way and (at worst) aided and abetted them. But this is only the elemental level. The solution cannot be merely personal and communal; it must be political. Communists must heed the call of Indigenous liberation. Full decolonization, which can only mean the abolition of the existing settler state and the utter destruction of the U.S.–Canada Empire and its settler society, the total restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and the prolonged reeducation of the settler population must be included in our minimum programme. This is the only way towards any semblance of genuine “Truth and Reconciliation.” Only the anti-colonial revolution can achieve anti-colonial justice. If projects cannot uphold this bare minimum, they will be eradicated in the forthcoming revolution. If we settler would-be Communists fail to reeducate ourselves, then we will rightfully reap the 531 years of rape and murder we continue to visit upon this land and its people.

Author’s Endnote: In this piece I have used standard capitalization for illegitimate place names, such as canada. Rest assured, this was only done for legibility, and I don’t consider canada to be a legitimate nation.