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Trans Grief Should Not Wait for a Verdict

Writer: Kerry Manzo, PhD
Kerry Manzo, PhD
2 hours ago
6 min read

I am a trans man and a survivor of sexual assault. For the last seven days I have been struggling to find a voice to talk about Jonathan McKinsey.


We need to talk about Jonathan McKinsey.


A photo of a smiling, bearded man seated at a restaurant
Jon Mckinsey via Facebook, September 7, 2026

On Saturday, September 26, Jonathan, a trans man and father, was shot to death in the parking lot of a sports park in Dublin, California, in the middle of the afternoon, with families nearby. He was 40. His wife's parents, both 77, have been charged with his murder. Prosecutors say the couple lay in wait for him. Witnesses say they took turns firing.


I don't know Jonathan McKinsey's full story. Neither does anyone writing about him right now. What we have are filings from a bitter custody fight in which he and his estranged wife accused each other of abuse. She obtained a temporary restraining order against him and alleged he had threatened her and her parents. He had been charged with two misdemeanors involving one of their children. He pleaded not guilty. He, in turn, alleged that his wife, mother-in-law, and father-in-law abused him physically and verbally, including using anti-trans slurs against him.


Outside the bitterness of his marital relationship, Jonathan was described by congregants of his church who voluntarily supervised his visits with his children as a "gentle" father who wanted more than anything to be reunited with his kids. In one of his filings, he wrote: "I miss our children deeply and am pleading with this court." Days before the hearing where a judge would have answered him, he was killed.


Too much a man to mourn

The allegations against him have become the frame for too many stories about his death, in traditional media and across social media alike. One local station introduced him, in its first sentence, as a man "who had previously been charged with child abuse." An ABC7 headline days after the murder read, "Documents reveal child abuse, domestic violence claims of man allegedly killed by in-laws." His own allegations of abuse, including the anti-trans slurs, arrive later, if at all.


Here is how that reads to me. It reads as if his entry into manhood is being offered as the explanation for his killing. As if his anger, his alleged threats, his being too much a man, invited what happened in that parking lot. And so the rest of us are asked to wait. Hold the grief. Hold the outrage. Hold the vigil. First he must be declared innocent.


I refuse that bargain. Nothing in a custody file is a death sentence. Two people allegedly brought guns to a public park and shot a man in front of strangers' children.


That is the story. You can hold open every question about what happened inside that marriage and still say plainly: Jonathan McKinsey should be alive, and his killing deserves the same grief and the same outcry we would give anyone else.


We have seen this before

Last year it was Sam Nordquist. Sam was a 24-year-old Black trans man from Minnesota who traveled to the Finger Lakes in the fall of 2024 to be with a woman he had fallen for online. From December into February, he was held in a motel room and tortured by seven people, including that girlfriend, until he died. His body was found in a field in February 2025.



Undated photo of Sam Nordquist via New York State Police and Associated Press
Undated photo of Sam Nordquist via New York State Police and Associated Press

In December, Sam contacted the county's social services office. He said he was in a controlling relationship and that he missed home. He asked for help. Whatever help came, it did not get him home.


Within days of the first arrests, prosecutors announced they had no indication his murder was a hate crime and urged the public not to speculate about motive. The coverage that followed was slow and hedged, as if the violence needed a category before it could be mourned. The girlfriend at the center of it has since pleaded guilty to every charge against her, including first-degree murder, kidnapping, and aggravated sexual abuse.


Sam's killing was intimate partner violence against a trans man. For weeks, it was called almost anything but that.


The numbers we keep not saying

Trans men and trans masculine people experience gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence, at least as often as trans women, and far more often than most people assume.


In 2011, the national nonprofit FORGE surveyed 1,005 trans people. Trans masculine respondents were more likely than trans feminine respondents to have survived childhood sexual assault, adult sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking. Hate violence was the only category where trans women reported more, and the gap was a single point: 30 percent versus 29 percent.


Newer research points the same way. A California study published in JAMA Network Open found that trans men had nearly seven times the risk of past-year intimate partner violence that cisgender women did, and nearly ten times the risk of past-year physical violence. And the Williams Institute's analysis of the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey found that being visibly read as trans predicted physical attacks for every group except trans men. These together suggest that much of the violence against us does not come from strangers who clock us on the street. It comes from closer to home: partners, families, the people who know exactly who we are.


Where do trans men go?

When a trans man is being hurt at home, where does he go?


In 2017, I co-founded Out in West Texas, a trans advocacy and education initiative, to help make vital services reachable for trans people in small-town and rural West Texas. In that work I spoke with trans men who struggled to get crisis services, and I heard from workers in crisis centers who struggled to understand that supporting trans men was part of their job at all.


On paper, programs funded through the Violence Against Women Act cannot turn away survivors for being male or trans. In practice, a shelter system built around women's needs often has no bed, no protocol, and no language for a man who needs a safe place to sleep. In most of the country, shelter options for trans men are exceedingly rare. Without them, survivors go back to the people hurting them, or they go without care, and the trauma goes untreated for years.


Violence against trans men stays invisible partly because the systems meant to catch it were never built to see us.


Say his name now

I am writing this as a trans man, as a survivor, and as an advocate for my community, for men and masc folks who are victims and survivors. I am not willing to make Jonathan McKinsey wait for a verdict before I grieve him, and I am not willing to let Sam Nordquist become a story we stopped telling.


Here is what I am asking:

  • Say their names. Jonathan McKinsey. Sam Nordquist. Mourn them now, not after someone certifies they deserved it.

  • Read the coverage critically. Notice when a trans man's masculinity is offered as the motive for violence done to him, and say so.

  • Ask your local crisis services one question: if a trans man called tonight needing a safe place, what would happen? If they don't know, point them to FORGE, which offers free training for providers serving trans survivors.

  • Fund the work. Rural and small-town LGBTQ+ organizations are often the only bridge between trans survivors and help.


If you are a trans man or trans masculine person being hurt by a partner or family member, you deserve help. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, and FORGE can help connect trans survivors with local resources.


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