This eradication takes the form of misgendering and deadnaming transgender people after their death, as the police, bourgeois media, morticians, and families work in tandem to eradicate our ancestors and erase our collective history. It was in defiance of this epistemicide that the first recorded Transgender Day of Remembrance was held in memory of Rita Hester, a black transgender woman whose murderer is still being protected by police who refuse to investigate the case (as they do with most trans murder cases). Since that ceremony in 1999, this ritual of resistance has spread across the globe, with international groups long linking anti-trans violence to colonial and imperialist  systems of genocide, femicide, and misogynoir.

These systems can be clearly observed in the data we do have. This year, the Trans Europe and Central Asia network recorded 281 reports of transgender and gender diverse people being murdered worldwide: 90% of these murders are femicides, 88% are Black or brown people, 68% of murders are recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 34% of victims are sex workers. In this same report, it is observed that there has been a sharp increase in the targeting of trans activists, making 14% of victims in 2025 where they only made up 6% in 2023.

There are, however, differing numbers that will be listed on this day, as the organizations which track this information differ in philosophy on what they count as violence against our people. Due to these differences, the Remembering Our Dead project has recorded 365 deaths worldwide, a number that includes suicides, deaths in detention by police or in prisons, and more. No matter the number there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of our sisters, siblings, and brothers whose lives were cut short and may never be accounted for in this naming of our dead. 

In the last essay Sylvia Rivera wrote before her death in 2002, she expressed her recommitment to the struggle, stating in conclusion:

Before I die, I will see our community given the respect we deserve. I’ll be damned if I’m going to my grave without having the respect this community deserves. I want to go wherever I go with that in my soul and peacefully say I’ve finally overcome.

As we come together to honor our dead and our ancestors on this day of memory, do not forget that it is you and your community that have the means to struggle and achieve a liberated life in a liberated world. Let the flickering candle flames on this day be a kindling for a revolutionary passion. For together, you, your community, and your comrades have the power to bring about the world that is to be. 

What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

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.”