This article contains graphic descriptions of violence against trans youth.

Pauly Likens was a 14-year-old trans girl. She had a core group of close friends, and she was seen by them, and loved by them and by her family. Pauly had a mother, a father, an older sister, and a 7-year-old younger brother. Pauly loved animals, including her two cats and her dog, Star, and she had ambitions of being a park ranger like her Aunt Liz, who she spent time with, shopping or getting her nails done.

“She wouldn’t let you be sad. She wouldn’t let you be down,” her friend, Melanie, told me. Pauly was kind and sweet, but also fiery and resilient: “There were people that she didn’t like, people that would talk crap on her, and she wouldn’t let it bother her.”

Pauly was light-hearted and creative, and made up words and phrases that her friend Kyrie, described as sticking with her. “She was the highlight of my day,” Kyrie, her BSF, told me. She was funny, she would hype her friends up and make them laugh, and she seems to have gotten up to some typical teenage mischief from time to time. She loved painting her nails and playing Roblox and Fortnite.

According to her Mom, Pauly was the kind of kid who would show the new kid around. Kyrie said of Pauly, “It was amazing being friends with her. She was so sweet and kind and never judged anyone no matter what. What made her special was how beautiful her soul was.”

On June 23rd this year, Pauly’s life and future were brutally and violently cut short when a 29-year-old man she met on the hookup app, Grindr, murdered her. The violence has shaken Pauly Likens’ community, and left her family and friends devastated.

On Saturday July 13, the Shenango Valley LGBTQ Alliance — a very small, grassroots group — organized a candlelight vigil and memorial for Pauly in cooperation with other LGBTQ groups from the area. An estimated 200-300 people turned out for the memorial, some traveling from Pittsburgh like myself, and many more from Pauly’s local community. People of all ages wore pink or the colors of the trans flag in Pauly’s honor. A large drawing of Pauly hung behind a central microphone, where multiple speakers called for an end to violence and discrimination against trans people, especially trans kids.

I spoke with Pam Ladner, President of the Shenango Valley LGBTQ Alliance, and she introduced me to some of Pauly’s friends. They were quiet, staying close with each other, young teens who lost their dear friend in a terrible way, squeezing each others’ shoulders and putting on brave faces. Kyrie and Pauly were hanging out, as they did often, sometimes four days a week, at Kyrie’s house the night before Pauly’s death. “She left at 9 and gave me a hug and said she loved me like she always did but I never thought it would be the last time. Never. She left a road sign here and before she left, I asked ‘are you gonna take your sign?’ And she said ‘prob not I’ll come back a diff day and get it.’ It makes me tear up knowing she was gonna come back. I really regret asking her what time she was leaving. If I knew it was going to be the last time, I would have never let her leave.” Kyrie also said, “I want everyone to know and understand Pauly and know her story and how she didn’t deserve this at all.”

Pauly lived out in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, just over an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh, close to the Ohio border. The area is lush and green, with the Shenango river running through it. Mercer County is 93% white, with 62% of voters in 2020 voting Republican. Hermitage is the largest city in the county at a population of 16,000, with Sharon, PA, where Pauly lived, coming in at 13,000 residents. In short, it’s Trump country. More than that, Grove City College, located in the county, is a noted training ground for the US’s far right leaders. They recently had to fight off allegations that they had “gone woke” for engaging in what sounds like the most minimal DEI work. A parent’s quote from the petition against the college’s wokeness in 2022 mentions that their director of multicultural education was seen “walking around campus regularly with a LGBT rainbow mask on” and the parent went on to ask “why is this person an employee of GCC?” He’s, notably, not an employee of the college anymore, not after that year.

In any area in the US, there are going to be queer people, there are going to be allies, there are going to be people who don’t think about LGBTQ folks much but who are more or less neutral, and then there are going to be anti-LGBTQ hate-mongers. But this area is particularly tense. It’s not just any old Trump country. It’s a hotbed for anti-LGBTQ sentiment and for white supremacy and all that entails.

That’s where Pauly grew up. And what has been so damn hard to hear, the more I learn about Pauly, is how much she was still carving out a life and a future for herself, whatever she might be facing.

I spoke with Pam Ladner after the vigil about what it was like for kids like Pauly to be queer or trans in Mercer County, and Pam turned to her own experiences as a parent of a trans teen. After they came out “I wasn’t even speaking to some of my close family for months at a time, because they couldn’t get on board with it.”

As we spoke, a group that had formed outside of the vigil grew louder. Led by Pauly’s grieving father, a crowd of dissenters had played their own music throughout the vigil and chorused their own grief for Pauly, while misgendering and deadnaming her. At one point, a member of this group had to be escorted from the vigil for shouting Pauly’s dead name. Throughout the event, volunteers shielded the mother’s side of the family and vigil attendees from the protesters, using rainbow umbrellas, and escorted people to their vehicles, keeping the crowds separate. Pauly’s father paced up and down the street in a red pro-Trump hat, shouting that Pauly was his son, and telling vigil attendees that “not all kids fit your narrative.” Some vigil attendees reprimanded the protesters while they left, but, despite heightened tensions following the attempted assassination of Trump and shooting of rally attendees that occurred an hour to the east and south, these arguments did not escalate beyond brief verbal altercations.

Paul Likens Sr.’s insistence on misgendering his trans daughter might account for part of the confusion as media originally misgendered Pauly, as noted by Sue Kerr of Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents. There had also been two competing GoFundMe campaigns, one started by the father’s side, and one started to help Pauly’s mother pay for funeral expenses.

I asked Ladner what she saw as a barrier to acceptance for trans kids like Pauly, especially in more conservative, rural communities like this one, and in Mercer County specifically. Ladner emphasized the need for education, especially education geared toward parents and families, which she works to offer through the LGBTQ alliance. “Just from the mom’s standpoint, understanding that journey, and that journey that mom was probably on, having a trans child, and then not getting to complete that journey. You saw. She wasn’t even able to get there with that other parent…I hope that in the future if there is a parent who doesn’t understand, that they’ll give us an opportunity to help them understand and educate them and find their way to acceptance.” Pauly’s father was clearly stricken with grief. He lost his kid in a horrific way. He spent days searching for her in the park after she went missing. He might have gotten to a place of understanding, but we’ll never know because Pauly was robbed of her life. But her family life, the way trans people are talked about by conservative media and politicians, and the perceived and real isolation and vulnerability of trans people, especially young trans people, can’t be ignored when it comes to what happened to Pauly.

Pauly wasn’t completely isolated. She had friends who loved her, her family loved her. Her friends saw Pauly and embraced who she was. Kyrie told me, “This one time I was complaining to Pauly about my period and what she said I’ll never forget. She said ‘You complain about it but I’d do anything to have one because then I’d be a real girl,’ but she was a real girl.” Kyrie continued, “Pauly only wanted to be accepted for who she was.”

Still, with anti-trans hate speech and MAGA rhetoric, we continue to see young trans people, in their teens and early 20’s, suffer violent deaths at the hands of people who hate them, who see them as easy targets, or both. We know that Gen Z might be the loneliest and most isolated generation due to a variety of factors, from the economics that have led to the disappearance of third spaces, to social media, to the after effects of the pandemic, and more. We know that dating for transgender people can be difficult. We also know that underage teens, including and perhaps especially queer teens, are regularly using dating apps. These apps do not require age verification, though the technology exists where an app could require ID verification and facial scans to use an app like Grindr that comes with risk and adult sexual communication. According to this investigative piece, between 2015 and 2023, over 100 men were charged with assaulting minors or attempting to sexually assault minors they made contact with through Grindr. Even if this predation doesn’t culminate in the murder, predators are using dating apps like Grindr to find and assault or exploit vulnerable LGBTQ teens. A predator found Pauly, who likely just wanted some connection, and now we don’t have this amazing person with us anymore. Earlier this year, a young trans man, Jacob Williamson, was murdered by a man he met on a dating app and the man’s girlfriend.

Both of the above linked pieces discuss the fact that teens are going to get on these apps no matter what we tell them, which is true. Yes, it’s dangerous and in an ideal world every queer and trans teen who uses dating apps would delete them right now, but as someone who talked to older men on the internet when I was fourteen, who told my family I was sleeping at a friend’s when I wasn’t (as Pauly did that night), the onus is not on teens to be perfect as they learn about their world, their sexuality, and make mistakes while trying to figure things out. However, it is on us as a community to teach our young LGBTQ siblings how to stay safe, how to do their best to identify predators, to rely on their friends and trusted elders so that they’re never going somewhere alone, so that they avoid putting themselves in potentially dangerous scenarios. Whether we do this in our personal lives, via what we publish, or through sex education at schools or LGBTQ centers, we need to be having discussions about online safety, about safety and predators on dating apps.

Pauly’s body was discovered on June 25th, dismembered and in trash bags in a lake in the Golden Run Wildlife area. Cause of death has been determined to be sharp force trauma to her head. It appears that Pauly was killed in the early hours of the morning on June 23rd, not long after she posted to SnapChat that she was on a walk to clear her head in the park at 2:30am. Her friend, worried, contacted her to see if she was okay. A vehicle, allegedly owned by DaShawn Watkins, was identified from security camera footage and was seen driving in the park in the same area and time that Pauly was believed to be in the park according to both her social media post as well as footage from security cameras. Security camera footage showed Watkins struggling to carry a heavy duffel bag into his apartment, and on June 24th, after buying an electric saw the day before, security footage showed Watkins leaving his apartment several times with multiple trash bags and other bags. One can only grasp at straws, but this doesn’t feel like an accident, like an impassioned violent act. This is someone who already had a duffle bag, and who, we must remember, sought out someone on an app who was 14 — who looks 14 years old — and who met her sometime before sunrise but after 2:30am.

It’s likely impossible that anyone reading this can understand why anyone would do something like this, this violent, this seemingly random, but we need to recognize the constellation of factors that open the door to increased violence faced by trans people. DaShawn Watkins is a 29-year-old, cis man who allegedly met a 14-year-old trans girl on Grindr, confirmed that he engaged in a sexual act with her, and then allegedly killed her. When questioned, Watkins apparently said that he was gay. District Attorney Peter C. Acker told Pittsburgh’s Action 4 news that he would not pursue hate crime charges because Watkins was “openly gay” and Pauly “was transitioning.” There is a sense that because there is an element of intra-community violence within the LGBTQ community, that this cannot be a hate crime. But we know that some of the biggest voices of transphobic hate are people who identify as lesbian or gay. There is also the fact that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s, and many other states’, legislation does not include LGBTQ identity or gender identity as a protected class when it comes to hate crimes. Pennsylvania’s current hate crime legislation only allows for hate crime charges on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Nevertheless, Pauly’s death, like the death of Jacob Williamson, seems like one that is a part of a trend, one targeting vulnerable trans teens. Jacob was brutally killed by a cis man, Joshua Newton, who said on a livestream, “it was fun.”

We know, also, that often the people who are most engaged in hate against trans people are those attracted to trans people, and who cannot extricate themselves from their shame around that attraction. Data shows that the more conservative a locality, the more likely its residents are to search for trans porn. And — as I know from on more than one occasion looking into the personal online history of a conservative — these men will continue to follow trans adult creators, all while spewing the most right-wing talking points. The history of the completely diabolical trans panic (and gay panic) defense illustrates, actually, how well-understood it is that men who feel attraction to trans people also do not desire to lose their heterosexual privilege, and feel shame — and that shame also means they do not value trans people or their lives or truly see trans people as people. All of this has coalesced in a rise of transgender hate and violence against trans people, both at a state level and in everyday life.

While the majority of transgender women murdered in recent years are Black women, trans people and especially trans women and girls as a whole are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violence. On a micro level, we know that a lack of acceptance greatly increases a person’s risk when it comes to experiencing domestic and other types of violence, and that lack of acceptance has a direct impact on the fact that trans people are subjected to interpersonal violence and state violence. We also know that on a macro level, our society is obsessed with trans people, devaluing them, putting them in the spotlight, and shaming them and the people who care about them. UC Berkeley Associate Professor Eric Stanley put it this way in an article for Berkeley News in 2021:

“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.'”

As a speaker from Pittsburgh’s TransYOUniting said at Pauly’s vigil, “I’m a Black, trans woman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I’m tired. I’m tired of coming to these. I’m tired of us being murdered.” She went on to say, “So many of my friends have been murdered, and it should not be happening. There are so many folks out here. So many community members showed up today. But what are y’all going to do when you leave here? How are you going to show up for us then? That is the problem. Because you come here. But you don’t show up when we need you. We need you when we’re alive.” She continued, “We need you to show up to polls. We need you to show up to school boards. Because we matter. Pauly mattered. Say her name!”

It is on every living person to show up. It is on parents to work to educate themselves so that they can provide supportive environments for their trans kids. It’s on the other “helper” adults in these kids’ lives to make sure they have support at home, that they aren’t isolated, lonely, neglected, or abused. It’s on apps like Grindr to take community safety seriously, and for executives who won’t roll out age verification for dating apps to know they are enabling the assault, rape, exploitation, and murder of queer and trans teens and young adults. Even if they aren’t legally responsible, they are morally responsible.

We need to continue relentlessly fighting for queer and trans rights, for LGBTQ books and representation in schools and libraries, for trans kids to be protected by school policy — not outed or harmed. We need all of these things and more.

Pauly Likens was a 14-year-old trans girl with a beautiful soul who should have lived a full fucking life. Rest in peace, Pauly. You are sorely missed.

Interviews have been edited for clarity.

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