A stabbing is an intimate kind of violence. It is physical and deliberate, requiring proximity and often, the touch of skin against skin. So, when University of Washington student Juniper Blessing, a young transgender woman, was stabbed 40 times and left in an apartment complex laundry room to die, there is no doubt her killer, motivated by the toxic mixture of hatred and shame, felt life slip from her precious body.
Intimate violence cannot be separated from the violence mediated through the state. This is not a mechanical process, however, and state policy does not directly produce interpersonal harm. Still, the terms set by the state, the violence it permits and condones, define the boundaries of what becomes possible. One flows from the other.
Juniper was murdered just days before the Trump administration issued sweeping grand jury subpoenas to hospitals across the U.S., including NYU Langone, for providing what it calls “sex-rejecting” procedures. As S. Baum has reported, these subpoenas are unprecedented in scope. They demand patient-identifying information, parental consent forms, employee records, and target doctors, nurses, billing staff, administrators, and even volunteers in an effort to intimidate and criminalize the provision of care.
Juniper was not a trans minor. At nineteen (that arbitrary marker), she had survived childhood by a single year, achieving what the state increasingly seeks to prevent. For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.
There is no end to state violence; there is no limit to what the state will do to preserve corporate profits, stabilize the position of those in power, and, at present, shore up its authoritarian rule. One of its most enduring expressions of that effort is the systematic withdrawal from collective care.
Even before the Trump administration took power, the U.S. health care system was already in crisis and failing to meet basic needs. Decades of neoliberal policy have hollowed out public health infrastructure, privatized care, and priced many out of access to care altogether. This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable. Producing a hierarchical matrix based on race, immigration status, religion, gender, and sexuality, it tells us that some bodies are worthy of care and others are not. Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.
MAGA pundits recognize the widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the health care system, but they have redirected that ire away from insurance executives and hospital administrators, obscuring the steady erosion of health care as a public good. This displaced blame requires a scapegoat, and so a fraudulent narrative about a supposed transgender industrial complex where reckless health professionals manipulate children into receiving gender-affirming care emerges as the Right’s justification for systemic neglect.
This right-wing narrative is strategic and false. Gender-affirming care represents a tiny fraction of health care spending, and for many trans people, access to that care requires enormous sacrifice. Even after navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of insurance, those who pursue medical transition are often saddled with untenable debt. Nevertheless, the narrative is mobilized to divert public anger away from state abandonment, the systemic withdrawal of resources for public goods, and toward a manufactured enemy.
Because the health sector has been a consistent site of resistance to neoliberal austerity, anti-trans attacks are also about disciplining health workers. Major work stoppages have occurred across the industry, including a 301-day strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, MA (2021), a Minnesota Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2022), a 75,000-member Kaiser Permanente strike across six states (2023), and a New York State Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2026). In fact, more than 100 nursing strikes have occurred between 2020 and 2026, involving at least 127 hospitals nationwide. Issuing subpoenas, passing legislation, and wielding threats of prosecution, the state seeks to break the relationship between patients and caregivers and to prevent broader demands for a more just and universal health system.
It is here that the entanglement of state violence and intimate violence is revealed. A state that declares trans youth should not exist, a state that undermines their care, and criminalizes their parents and providers, sets the terms for which lives are considered deserving and which become disposable. In a process that marks trans life as illegitimate, state disavowal grants permission, giving a wink and a nod to the Right’s vigilante terror.
As details about Juniper’s killer emerge, we may find that he does not neatly fit within the category of the Right. But even so, the residue of the Right’s vicious anti-gender politics continues to circulate, influencing the thinking of those even beyond the MAGA faithful. In fact, early reports suggest Juniper’s killer was stalking several women, both cis and trans, which also illustrates the way transmisogyny extends beyond trans women endangering cisgender women as well.
While we cannot claim that MAGA’s anti-gender movement murdered Juniper in a direct or immediate way, the regulation of trans youth, the effort to prevent transition, to surveil families, to criminalize care, also produces a world in which trans adulthood becomes precarious and exposed. The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.
If we want to confront this violence, we cannot see gender politics as separate from the wider resistance to Trumpism and the authoritarian Right. The same system that withdraws support, that redirects tax dollars from care infrastructures and towards militarization and war, creates the conditions for gendered violence. Indeed, the contemporary anti-trans turn is in many ways a reactionary political response to neoliberal crisis, mobilizing gender discipline to stabilize social reproduction, redirect economic grievance, and legitimate continued disinvestment in collective care. In this moment, gender violence functions as a coercive tool where a withered social safety net has driven a return to rigid gender norms. When the state abdicates responsibility, the family must fulfill the remaining need.
As news of Juniper’s death continues to move across the media landscape, they will simultaneously be portrayed as villain and victim, as an object of pity and a figure of blame. These are abstractions. In reality, trans individuals are ordinary people navigating a brutal and precarious moment, often with an extraordinary level of poise and restraint. Comrades, we need you. Juniper needs you.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”