When Did Empathy Become the Enemy?
I Watched Two People Change the World in a Newsroom. We've Forgotten How.
I can’t stop thinking about Juniper Blessing. She was 19 years old. A gifted singer. A lover of weather and big skirts and Pokémon. She came to the University of Washington to study atmospheric science because she loved the sky. A friend who knew her wrote that it wasn’t possible to dislike her, that if the man who killed her had just talked to her, she probably would have made him laugh.
Instead he stabbed her more than 40 times in a laundry room.
She could have been one of my students. She was someone’s everything.
They are coming for the people I love, and they’re doing it under the banner of Christian values.
Not metaphorically. Right now, in this country, transgender people, children among them, are being stripped of healthcare, pushed out of schools, erased from public life, and driven toward suicide by a political and religious movement that calls itself Christian. Calls itself a defender of some sacred, God-given moral order.
I have spent over two decades teaching college journalism. In that time, the student newsroom became, for reasons I’ve always considered a gift, a home for the queer community. Editor after editor, gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary students ran our publications with a standard of excellence I still hold up as a model. They were, without exception, among the finest, most creative, most deeply kind students I have ever taught.
So when I hear someone invoke God to justify taking their rights away, I don’t hear theology; I hear an attack on the people I love.
I need to tell you about a conversation I witnessed in our newsroom years ago that I have never forgotten.
One of our student writers was a strict Baptist. One of our editors was a gay man. She knew he was gay, everyone in the newsroom did, because he was out and easy about it, the way people are when they finally feel safe enough to be themselves.
She came to him a day before the election and told him that her pastor had instructed her to vote yes on Proposition 8, California’s ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. Prop 8 is what many of us called Prop Hate.
I was nearby and I just listened.
She asked him, sincerely and without cruelty, how he knew he was gay.
He told her about being a young boy and feeling drawn to other boys in a way he couldn’t name yet and couldn’t stop. And then he asked her a question I have never forgotten: Why would anyone choose this, knowing how hard their life would be?
Then he told her what he wanted. Not special rights or anything complicated, just the right to marry the person he loved, the same thing she wanted, the same thing most of us want. She listened and gave him a hug.
The next day she told him she had voted against her pastor’s recommendation. That she could not, in good conscience, take that right away from him.
I went to my office and I cried.
Two people. A real conversation. An empathetic decision made by a young woman willing to let her humanity override her instruction. That is what’s possible when we actually talk to each other, when we see each other as people first, instead of positions.
I am writing this partly because I’m not sure we know how to do that anymore. Social media has made it too easy to hate at a distance. The rhetoric coming from pulpits and legislatures has gotten too loud, too vicious, too proud of itself. And the people paying the price are real human beings — my former students, my friends and family members, kids who just want to exist without being legislated into shame.
I know these people. I have watched them walk through the newsroom door and leave their mark. The young Latino man, a gifted writer and artist, who was sent to conversion therapy for being gay and nearly didn’t survive it; the student who quietly changed their name and is now a proud trans woman and a practicing lawyer; the gay editor who fought the college administration to run a controversial abortion rights cover and won us every journalism award we’d ever received. The stories go on and on.
And there is one more I need to tell you about, the one whose story changed me in ways I still carry into my classrooms today.
They were one of the best editors-in-chief our student magazine ever had. Brilliant, creative, gifted in ways that still make me shake my head. They wore colorful vintage clothes that looked like they came straight out of a pinup model’s dream closet. They were always smiling, always giving the most generous and thoughtful feedback to their staff. I never once saw them make even the most amateur, first-time newbie writer feel lesser than.
Early on, they let me know their pronouns were they/them.
I have to be honest and confess that I struggled. I would say “she” naturally, automatically, the way you reach for a word you’ve always used, and then catch myself. Apologize. Try again. Fail again. Catch myself again. For months.
And then they decided to write their story, to put it into words and share it with the world. What they had survived. The abuse, and the cruelty visited upon them in ways I will not detail here because it is not mine to tell. It was the kind of thing that breaks people. The kind of thing that would give anyone every reason to close themselves off, to turn hard, to stop trusting the world entirely.
Instead, they chose this. Vintage outfits and a smile that lit up a newsroom. Patience with struggling writers and grace toward a professor who kept getting their pronouns wrong, never once getting angry, just hugging her and telling her how much it meant that she kept trying, kept apologizing, kept catching herself.
Thanks to them, I’m a better professor. I understand now, in a way I didn’t before, the real harm that misgendering causes. I still stumble sometimes, and when I do, I think of them. They made me never want to stop getting it right.
That lesson came wrapped in a hug.
I keep coming back to the same thing: the people being called groomers, sinners, abominations, and threats to children and civilization. These are the most patient, most generous, most empathetic people I have ever known and taught. The cruelty flows in one direction. The grace flows back the other way, every single time.
That should tell you everything.
Tell me again who the threat is. Tell me again who needs to be protected from whom.
Now, about that Bible.
I am consistently astonished that people who appear to be otherwise thoughtful and intelligent will reach for a book written thousands of years before science, psychology, and the most basic understanding of human sexuality, and use it as their moral guide for policy in 2026.
And not even all of it. Just the parts that suit them.
Because here is what else The Bible says, for those keeping score:
Raping virgins: "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."(Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
If a woman grabs a man by the genitals during a fight, even to defend her own husband, her hand must be cut off: "When two men are fighting and the wife of one of them intervenes to drag her husband clear of his opponent, if she puts out her hand and catches hold of the man by his privates, you must cut off her hand and show her no mercy." (Deuteronomy 25:11)
A man named Lot, upheld as righteous in this text, offered his virgin daughters to a violent mob outside his door: “Do what you like with them.” (Genesis 19:8)
Soldiers killing boys and woman and keeping the virgin girls for themselves: "Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man." (Numbers 31:17-18)
Pimping out your daughters: "Look, I have two daughters, virgins both of them. Let me bring them out to you and you could do what you like with them. But do nothing to these men because they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Genesis 19:8)
Slaughtering innocent women and children for rebelling: "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their women with child ripped open." (Hosea 13:16)
I am not listing these to mock people of faith. I am listing them to make a specific point: you are already picking and choosing. Everyone who reads this book picks and chooses. The question is what you choose, and why, and who gets hurt by it.
When you choose the passages that let you deny a transgender teenager medical care, but set aside the passages about stoning rebellious children and cutting off women’s hands, you are not following God’s law. You are following your own bias, dressed in Scripture, pointed at the most vulnerable people in the room.
That is not faith, it’s a weapon. Don't let the Sunday clothes fool you.
And the consequences are not abstract.
LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight, cisgender peers. For trans youth, the rates are worse. Every bill that tells a trans kid they don’t belong, that their body is a political problem, that their existence requires a legislative solution, is another weight placed on someone already struggling to survive. When you say “I’m just following my faith,” you are not making a neutral statement. You are participating in an environment that kills children. That is not rhetoric but rather a documented, measurable fact.
Calling it faith does not make it less lethal.
I know there are people reading this who are struggling with where they stand. People who know someone queer, or know someone with a trans child, or who were raised with beliefs they've never quite questioned. I have extended family members whose feelings on all of this I honestly don't know. And I find myself hesitant to ask because some things, once said out loud, can't be unsaid.
So instead I'm writing this, and hoping they read it, and hoping it moves them the way a Baptist girl in my newsroom was moved twenty years ago.
She didn’t abandon her faith. She just chose, when it mattered, to see a person, to really see him.
I have to believe that’s still possible.
And I keep thinking about my editor in their vintage dress, hugging a professor who kept getting it wrong, patient beyond anything I deserved, teaching me something about grace that I carry into my classroom every single day.
Two people. Both of them showing me what it actually looks like to lead with love.
Because the alternative of hiding behind an ancient and self-contradicting text to justify cruelty toward the kindest, most creative, most alive people I have ever had the privilege of teaching is not righteousness.
It’s just cruelty with better PR.