Two Women, Two Worlds: On Davonta Curtis, Juniper Blessing, and the White Trans Community’s…

Two Women, Two Worlds: On Davonta Curtis, Juniper Blessing, and the White Trans Community’s Selective Grief

I need to say her name first. Davonta Curtis. Thirty one years old. A Black transgender woman from Chicago who spent Easter Sunday with her sister, dropping off supplies, celebrating family, living her life. That same night, the man she trusted came back with her to her apartment and beat her to death with a hammer. He had Googled how to do it beforehand. He left her there, naked, partially covered by a sheet, in a pool of blood. Her sister found her three days later.

I need you to sit with that. I need you to feel the weight of it. Because most of you didn’t. Most of the white trans community didn’t even blink.

Now I need to say her name too. Juniper Blessing. Nineteen years old. A white transgender woman, a gifted singer, a meteorology student at the University of Washington, a young woman doing her laundry on a Sunday night when a man followed her into the laundry room and stabbed her more than forty times. She never made it out. She was extraordinary, and she is gone, and her family is shattered, and the world is genuinely diminished by her loss.

Both of these women deserved to live. Full stop. The murder of any young person, trans or cis, is an outrage. I am not writing this to minimize what happened to Juniper Blessing. I am writing this because of what the difference in response tells us about whose lives the white trans community actually believes matter.

Davonta Curtis was murdered on April 5, 2026. Juniper Blessing was murdered on May 10, 2026. Thirty five days apart. The responses from the white trans community were not even in the same universe.

Juniper’s murder became national news almost immediately. Memorials grew in Red Square at the University of Washington. The story was picked up by NBC, ABC, The Advocate, LGBTQ Nation. White trans people across the country posted tributes, expressed outrage, demanded justice. The grief was real, the solidarity was visible, and none of that was wrong. That is exactly what our community should do when one of us is taken.

But where was that energy for Davonta? Davonta’s murder was initially reported with her deadnamed and misgendered by the Chicago Police Department and by media outlets. It took days for corrections to appear. The National Black Justice Collective mourned her. Black LGBTQ press covered her. A neighborhood vigil drew people who loved her, who tied pink balloons to her doorknob and lit candles in her memory. But the white trans community? Mostly silence. No widespread vigils. No national outpouring. No trending hashtags on the apps where white trans activists have built significant platforms. A 31 year old Black trans woman was premeditated murdered by a man who looked up how to do it on Google, and it barely registered.

I have to be honest about what that tells me. About what that tells me about my own life. I am a Black trans woman. I know, with a clarity that does not require any study or statistics, that if I am murdered because I am who I am, most of the white trans community will not say my name. Not unless I happen to be famous. Not unless I have a large enough following in predominantly white spaces. Not unless my story fits the narrative of trans victimhood that white audiences find legible and sympathetic. The hard, brutal truth is that white supremacist logic does not disappear just because you are trans. It moves with people. It shapes whose grief counts, whose death demands accountability, whose murder is understood as a loss to the whole community and whose is understood as a local tragedy in a neighborhood most of white America has already written off.

This is not a new pattern. Black cis women have lived with this forever. When Black women are murdered in this country, the silence is institutional. The coverage is minimal. The outrage is muted. The cases go cold. And when they are solved, the resolution comes slowly, if at all. The same logic that renders Black cis women’s lives disposable has simply extended itself into trans spaces. Black trans women are not seen as fully part of the trans community’s story, any more than Black women have historically been seen as fully part of feminism’s story, unless it serves a strategic purpose.

The numbers make this undeniable. Black trans women account for roughly 13% of the transgender population but made up nearly three quarters of known trans homicide victims between 2017 and 2021. One study found that figure as high as 78%. Latina trans women are the second most targeted group, accounting for one in ten gun homicides of transgender people between 2017 and 2023. When researchers looked specifically at trans victims under thirty, 91% of the 51 cases analyzed were people of color. And the method of killing differs by race too. Black trans women are shot at nearly twice the rate of non-Black trans women, while non-Black trans women are more likely to be stabbed. Among the general population, only 7% of gun homicide victims are Black women. But 65% of transgender gun homicide victims are Black trans women. That number should stop everyone reading this cold.

These are not random statistics. They are the predictable output of compounding systems. Anti Blackness. Misogyny. Transphobia. Poverty. Criminalization. The way Black trans women who are sex workers are treated as having forfeited any claim to protection or grief. Davonta Curtis was reported to have been a sex worker. I want to say plainly: that is irrelevant to the horror of her murder, irrelevant to her worth, irrelevant to the obligation we have to mourn her and fight for her. The fact that some coverage felt the need to mention it at all is itself part of the problem. It is the old logic, recycled: she was already outside respectability, so her death is less legible as tragedy.

Juniper Blessing was a university student with minors in music and philosophy who sang with a transcendent voice and loved the weather. Davonta Curtis was a 31 year old woman who spent Easter dropping off supplies with her sister and came home to be murdered by someone she trusted. Both of those are complete human lives. Both of those are real losses. But only one of them got the full weight of community grief.

I understand part of what drives the disparity. Juniper’s murder fits a specific kind of narrative that white liberal and progressive spaces recognize: a young, educated, white person killed in a “safe” progressive city, doing something completely ordinary, by a stranger. It is the kind of story that breaks through because it challenges assumptions. Seattle is supposed to be safe for trans people. She was just doing laundry. There is a particular horror in that, and it is real. But the absence of an assumption of safety is itself one of the compounding burdens that Black trans women carry every single day. We never had the luxury of assuming we were safe. When our unsafety results in our deaths, the dominant culture, including white trans people, treats it as confirmation of what was already expected rather than an outrage demanding response.

Here is what I also know: we are in a moment when this cannot continue. This administration has made it clear that Black people and trans people are both in its crosshairs. The executive orders have come. The defunding is underway. The rhetoric has become policy, and policy has become violence. In that context, a trans movement that does not center Black and Latina trans women is not a liberation movement. It is a white interest group with a progressive aesthetic. That is not enough to survive what is coming, and it is certainly not enough to build a future worth surviving for.

Intersectionality is not an abstraction. It is a description of how power actually works. When Kimberlé Crenshaw developed that framework, she was doing exactly what needs to happen here: insisting that we look at the places where systems of oppression overlap, because that is where the most extreme vulnerability lives. Black trans women live at that intersection. We bear a disproportionate share of the violence. We bear a disproportionate share of the silence. We are being told, through the pattern of whose deaths get mourned and whose don’t, that even within the community that should understand us best, our lives are worth less.

Both Davonta Curtis and Juniper Blessing deserved to be here. Both deserved vigils and outrage and justice and love. Both deserved a community that said: this is unacceptable, this is one of ours, her life mattered. The fact that only one of them got that is not a small thing. It is not a minor oversight or an unfortunate gap in media coverage. It is the shape of white supremacy operating inside a community that explicitly claims to oppose it.

Say Davonta Curtis’s name. Say it the same way you are saying Juniper Blessing’s. And then ask yourself why you have to be told to.