[This year’s news cycle was a vicious one, and left little time for reflection. As 2020 nears its end, we’re taking the opportunity to look back on the most important Mercury stories written during the past year. This article was originally published on February 13, 2020. We hope you’ll consider making a monthly contribution to the Mercury to help continue our work into next year and beyond.—eds.]
When Lisa Woods reminisces about her daughter Nikki Kuhnhausen, one story makes her especially proud.
Kuhnhausen was one of a handful of transgender high school students at Hudson’s Bay High School in Vancouver, Washington between 2015 and 2019. She was known for being tough, and often got disciplined at school for fighting with other students who picked on her or a friend. One day in her sophomore year, she saw a younger trans student crying outside the women’s restroom. Other teens had kicked the student out.
“Nikki demanded their names,” says Woods, speaking at her home in a heavily forested neighborhood in Vancouver. Woods is a middle-aged woman with wavy blonde hair and sad eyes, though they perk up when she recounts this story. “She went and got them and made them apologize,” says Woods, who adds that the student was never bullied again. “[They were] safe with Nikki around.”
This is one of many memories Woods has returned to since December 7, 2019, when the Vancouver Police Department told her Kuhnhausen had been murdered in what officers believed was an act of anti-trans violence. Kuhnhausen, who was 17 years old at the time of her death, was one of at least 26 trans women to be murdered in the United States last year.
“She was never afraid to be Nikki,” Woods says. “I fear that’s a part of the reason why she got killed, because she didn’t think anybody would hurt her.”
Around 2,000 women are murdered in our country every year. The percentage of transgender murders is not any higher than any other demographic. In fact a trans woman who is not a prostitute is statistically far safer than a real biological woman. Also there’s no such thing as a transgender child, teaching kids they can choose their gender and pushing them into medical intervention will be the greatest crime against this generation of children. The harm is already being done, there are 17,000 detransitioners on just one reddit conversation, mostly woman under 25. Go read the Keira Bell ruling.
Sara Lee is either an idiot, a liar, or both. First off quick googling shows her number of murders are wrong. The second sentence is unverifiable for a numbers of reasons but mostly due to irregularities in reportings state by state making no number actually reliable, the third is an opinion that has no basis in reality at all, that statistic simply does not exist.
Next denying the existence of transgendered children does not make it so. Followed by the fact that nobody teaches that a child can choose their gender. I certainly didn’t choose mine, it chose me. Did you choose your gender Sara? What we teach children is that it’s ok if their biological sex doesn’t match their gender identity. Nobody pushes medical intervention on children, it gets offered when there’s potential for it to be beneficial to the child’s overall health. Also in regards to de-transitions, Do you believe everything that you read on reddit?
Lastly what the actual fuck does a judge in the UK’s opinion on medical transitioning for children have to do with medical facts or the USA?