June 1 – Today is the first day of LGBTQIA+ Pride Month. A few days ago, I organized a vigil for a neighbor who was murdered.
Eryka Caldwell was a Black trans woman, 41 years old. She was killed May 19 in her apartment, just a few blocks from mine. Eryka had been struggling to escape a relationship with an abusive man.
Eryka lived, and I live, in Bushwick, a neighborhood in north Brooklyn. Bushwick and neighboring Ridgewood, Queens, are at the center of queer life and culture in New York City – especially for trans people.
Bushwick is what people imagine Greenwich Village was like in the years after the 1969 Stonewall uprising, before it was decimated by real estate developers and gentrification. It’s where queers gather, where our bands play, where our artists and writers hone their craft.
On any given day, you can see trans people on their way to work, on the subway, heading to school. We are simply part of the community – present, accepted, unremarkable. Which is itself very remarkable in this time of ascending fascism.
We come here for many reasons, of course. But these days a major, if unspoken, reason is: the sense of safety in numbers. We seek community and closeness in hopes that it will offer some protection as the powerful forces pushing for trans extermination close in.
Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest, is like that, too. So many trans people and other queer folk are fleeing to the city that no amount of mutual aid can bear the weight. So people are organizing and protesting to demand that Seattle officials put resources behind their claims to be a sanctuary for the trans community.
A week before Eryka Caldwell was murdered, Juniper Blessing was killed in Seattle. Juniper was a white trans woman, just 19, a student, murdered by a stranger in her college’s laundry room.
Across the U.S., at least 12 trans people have been murdered or found dead in suspicious circumstances since early March. That’s about one per week.
On the surface, Eryka Caldwell and Juniper Blessing don’t seem to have had much in common: from different generations, different backgrounds, living very different lives on opposite ends of the country. But what they did have in common was being members of a marginalized group that has been relentlessly scapegoated by the wealthy and powerful for the last half-decade.
The back-to-back murders of trans women in Seattle and Brooklyn, havens of trans life and queer culture, have made explicit what we already knew in our guts: in 2026, there is no safe place for trans people in the United States.
No more stolen siblings
On May 27, about 60 of us – trans and cis, queer and straight – gathered next to a Family Dollar store near Eryka Caldwell’s apartment building. We held candles, a trans pride flag, and signs that read, “Rest in Power, Eryka,” and “Black Trans Lives Matter.”
We walked as a group to the building, where the names of recently lost trans siblings were read out before a minute of silence. A neighbor of Eryka’s, a young cisgender Black woman, asked us to add the name of a trans friend who had died. Afterward, local musician Vi Viana played two songs to honor Eryka. People left bunches of flowers.
As the vigil was wrapping up, Jasmine, a Black trans woman, spoke passionately of the responsibility of everyone to protect other Black trans women. The assembled group decided to establish a neighborhood rapid response group for threats to the Bushwick-Ridgewood trans community, modeled after those already operating in the area to respond to ICE raids on immigrants.
Just that morning, news had reached many of us that the body of another trans woman had been found in Houston’s Brays Bayou. A few days after the vigil, we learned the victim was yet another Black trans woman. Her name was Persia Amarra Conway.
In 2025, 63% of the trans people known to have been killed in the U.S. were Black trans women, according to Advocates For Trans Equality. Of trans murders tracked by the Human Rights Campaign since 2013, 60% have been Black trans women and femmes. Seventy percent were people of color.
Between Eryka’s death and our vigil 10 days later, we learned of two other lost siblings. Murry Foust, a white trans man and student at Northern Kentucky University, had been missing since late April. His body was found in an industrial area of the town of Wilder by an independently organized search party. Police claimed that there was no indication of “foul play,” but the cause of death has not been released.
Last might be the most heart-wrenching. A trans girl, a high school student, identified only as Jane Doe, killed herself in January. She had been the main plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of Idaho’s ban on trans youth using school restrooms that match their gender. Her death was revealed because, in her absence, the case was dismissed.
The court offered “its sincerest sympathies” as it allowed the vicious restroom ban to take effect statewide.
Every trans suicide is murder.
What is social murder?
Frederick Engels, who co-founded scientific socialism with Karl Marx, first recorded the phrase “social murder” while studying the appalling conditions of workers in Manchester. That phrase has gained new currency among trans people in recent months.
Writing on the growing incidence of suicide and attempted suicide by trans people, especially youth, and the constant drumbeat of the far right egging us on to kill ourselves, Alejandra Caraballo, an attorney, law professor, and trans woman, explained:
“In 1845, Engels documented the conditions of the English working class in Manchester and articulated a concept that the workers themselves had already named: social murder.
“Engels’s formulation was remarkably precise. When society places people in conditions where they cannot survive, when it deprives them of the necessities of life, when it forces them through the arm of the law to remain in those conditions until death is the inevitable consequence, and when society knows that these people will perish and permits the conditions to remain, the result is murder.
“It is, as Engels wrote, disguised and malicious murder, murder against which no one can defend themselves, because no one sees the murderer and the death of the victim appears natural. But it is murder all the same. …
“Every element of this framework maps onto what is happening to transgender people in the United States right now.”
Caraballo continued: “In September 2024, Nature Human Behavior published a study … across five years of survey data from 61,240 transgender and nonbinary young people. The study found that state-level anti-transgender laws caused an increase in past-year suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth by 7% to 72%, with the sharpest increases among those under 18. The study established, for the first time, a causal relationship between anti-trans legislation and suicide attempts.
“The causal mechanism is the one Engels described: the imposition of conditions that make life unlivable. When a trans teenager cannot access medical care that treats gender dysphoria, cannot use a restroom at school, is forcibly outed to hostile parents, is called the wrong name and pronouns by teachers compelled by law to do so, is barred from sports teams, and is told every day by the government of the country they live in that they do not exist in any legally cognizable form, the result is predictable.”
The groundwork for genocide
Caraballo argues that social murder better describes the current situation facing the trans community than genocide.
In my view, both are accurate. Social murder is in effect and seen as a powerful yet “deniable” way of murdering trans people. It was already operative under Joe Biden’s administration, famous for “thoughts and prayers” while trans futures burned under his nose.
At the same time, the Trump administration has been rapidly laying the ideological groundwork and building the repressive infrastructure to shift toward roundups, mass incarceration of trans people, and extermination.
Most people think of genocide as the death camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust or the mass bombing of Gaza. But there were many steps in the process leading up to those “final” acts of mass murder.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has documented the rapid onset of conditions leading to a government-orchestrated genocide of trans people in the U.S.
On March 11, Lemkin issued its third “red flag alert” for trans people in the U.S. It says in part: “The Administration has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to U.S. national security in the world.
“Given these ideological developments, especially coupled with the increasingly hostile and draconian legislation against trans identities, the Lemkin Institute believes that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.”
‘We will find and kill you’
The Trump regime’s new “Counterterrorism Strategy” was released on May 6. It explicitly names trans people as a “threat” to U.S. national security, along with antifa and other left-wing movements. Naturally, the violent, fascist, white supremacist movement that serves as a pillar of Trump’s power goes unaddressed.
A cover letter signed by Trump ends with the vow, “We will find you and we will kill you.”
“Whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head-on,” Sebastian Gorka, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, told reporters.
A misinformation campaign by the administration and far-right “influencers” attempted to cast blame on trans people for the assassination of hate-monger Charlie Kirk last year. For a few days, the threat of pogroms against trans people hung menacingly in the air.
The Kirk story fell apart. But it is still repeated as gospel truth by the far right. And every mass shooting or assassination attempt against a Trump ally is now accompanied by stories blaming trans individuals or trans people as a group.
The vast majority of these incidents are, of course, carried out by white, cisgender men with right-wing views.
The purpose of the misinformation campaign is to create a false consciousness among the masses of people, where it’s “common knowledge” that trans people are dangerous.
And that, in turn, intensifies the atmosphere of social murder – even as it brings the final stages of genocide closer.
We mourn the trans people who have been murdered or died under suspicious circumstances since March 1, 2026:
Persia Amarra Conway (Houston, Texas)
Murry Foust (Wilder, Kentucky)
Eryka Caldwell (Brooklyn, New York)
Juniper Blessing (Seattle, Washington)
Lucas RedBeard Knapp (rural New Mexico)
Lanessa Rodriguez (Ft. Pierce, Florida)
Aleanna Royal Belcher (Binghamton, New York)
Dannielle Spillman (San Francisco, California)
Davonta Curtis (Chicago, Illinois)
Shyyell Diamond Sanchez-McCray (Petersburg, Virginia)
Mommie Spotsie King (Dunnellon, Florida)
Daniella Analee Escobedo (Las Vegas, Nevada)
And all those we don’t know, who were deadnamed, misgendered, or ignored by police and media.
After this article was submitted, news broke of the murder of 16-year-old Nathaniel Potts, a gender nonconforming person, in Raleigh, Illinois, on May 20. Nathaniel, a gender nonconforming teenager, was shot in the back.
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