"It’s never just one thing. It’s always a constellation of systems that are rubbing up against each other. It’s racial capitalism. It’s the ongoing impact of settler colonialism and imperialism. It’s also the institutions of policing, imprisonment and deportation. These are all different forms of domination situated together that produce this atmosphere of violence. So, in responding to these murders, we need to be thinking about all of those things, all the time. That is hard and doesn’t make for a very good mainstream news story: They want a single bad person, not a whole deadly system. But most forms of anti-trans violence are specifically brutal. They’re also very corporal. Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us. It’s not usually, “I hate you, get away.” It’s more often, “I hate you. Come really close so I can terrorize you.” We see this in the ways trans people are produced as props in the latest culture war. These anti-trans bills are rooted in an obsession with the idea of trans people’s bodies. The politicians authoring these bills are saying, “Let me study you, produce you as a singular object outside of yourself, so that I cannot just terrorize you, but produce your life as terror.” This is, as I explore in my book, the other side of assimilation. But, I mean, compared to 20 years ago, people have a broader understanding and lexicon of trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people. So, there is that. And we are seeing more media visibility, but the violence is still increasing."