ALT My mother once told me that she stopped believing in God after Sandy Hook. We lived in Connecticut, so it was a particularly sensitive topic. A few months after it happened, we were wrapping presents on our ping-pong table when she admitted to me that she’d been struggling with her faith. Not that either of us were particularly religious: I was firmly in my Annoying Reddit Atheist phase, she went to temple twice a year and had already given up on making me come along with her. Thankfully, I didn’t say anything stupid and just asked her to continue.

ALT She told me that she couldn’t possibly fathom what might possess someone to do something so terrible, but the massacre alone wasn’t the nail in the coffin for her belief. It was what came after: the debates over gun control, Alex Jones accusing the victims of being crisis actors, it was too much to bear in the wake of such a senseless tragedy. She said that the final straw for her was a Facebook post, of all things. It was someone saying that we should be comforted by the knowledge that the dead elementary schoolers are now angels by God’s side. But there was no comfort to be found for my mom, just boiling rage. They aren’t angels, they’re corpses, tragic voids in the lives of parents, grandparents, siblings that will never emotionally recover. That was what she told me.

ALT It’s not just that Juniper Blessing was murdered in cold blood. It’s not just that she was killed in such a brutal, shocking way. It’s that none of the people contributing to our culture of transphobia were able to take a single moment of self-reflection to consider that maybe it’s wrong to say that she deserved it for being trans. That maybe it’s wrong to insinuate that the monster who stabbed her more than 40 times could’ve been acting in self-defense. That maybe it’s wrong to use the replies of a post memorializing our departed sister to argue that any trans woman who so much as kisses a man without outing herself is a rapist. That maybe, just maybe, trans people aren’t the existential threat that so many have convinced themselves we are.

ALT For years, I kept telling myself that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We made it through decades of systemic homophobia, we made it through the AIDS crisis. I thought that maybe we could make it through this too. I knew that things would get worse before they could get better, but I really did believe that they’d get better eventually. So I held onto my hope just to keep myself moving forward, at least whatever microscopic sliver was left. No longer. It’s gone now. When my mother was confronted with unspeakable tragedy, she lost her faith in God. The only faith I had to lose was my faith in humanity, so I did. I can draw no other conclusion other than that we’re too far gone as a species for any possibility of redemption. There’s no fixing the damage that’s been done, the rot is too deep. All we can do now is try to survive, take care of each other, and hold our loved ones close.