Cassie Brighter Is Gone. Empowered Trans Woman Is Not.
She founded this publication.
She founded this publication. She died on April 4. It stays open, and I plan on keeping it open.
In 2018, a woman cornered Cassie Brighter in a Regal movie theater restroom and told her she didn’t belong there.
Cassie froze. Her heart went. Her face went hot. She was standing at the sink with her partner, a five-foot-tall Chinese American nonbinary person who always came along when she used a public restroom. It took Cassie years to work out why they did that. They were guarding her.
Then she went home and wrote an essay. The essay was not about the woman at the sink. It was about Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, the white Freedom Rider who sat down at the Woolworth’s counter in Jackson, Mississippi. Cassie’s argument was that we have all seen plenty of bad behavior, and what we are short on is somebody better to copy.
She got attacked, and she responded by citing a role model.
That was the method. Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it.
She died on April 4, 2026
Her daughter Emma brought that news to this community herself. I’m not going to write about how it happened, and I’d ask you not to speculate. What deserves your attention is the nine years of work she left sitting in the open, most of which you have probably never read.
The method
In April 2022, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman.” It was a trap, engineered so that any answer could be clipped and run on Tucker Carlson that night. It was.
Cassie’s reply ran in GEN, Medium’s politics and culture publication, in front of 100,000 readers. She named the trap as a fallacy, a gotcha built so no answer could win.
And then she answered the question anyway. Sixteen minutes of it. She handed them the definition the whole stunt had been designed to avoid receiving.
In January 2023, when “groomer” was the slur of the season and Drag Queen Story Hour was the target, she didn’t get defensive. She opened with the numbers, sourced and linked: the murder rate, the violence rate, Pulse, Club Q. Then she turned the accusation around and aimed it at the Southern Baptist Church’s own documented record of child sexual abuse.
In September 2024, she spent thirteen minutes dismantling the Cass Report. She built it on “nothing about us without us,” tracing the phrase back to Native American activists who objected to being written about by the people colonizing them. Then she walked through what happens to Black patients, to women, to autistic people, when the studied are kept out of the room where the studying gets decided.
And then she’d turn around and write about sex headaches. Or Marilyn Monroe. Or thirty things to know before you turn thirty. Or whether AI was coming for OnlyFans income. Or song lyrics she thought we should retire.
She refused to be one thing. A publication called Empowered Trans Woman was never going to be a publication about nothing but being transgender, and she made sure of it. She wrote about dating, beauty, grief, desire, and politics. People contain all of that at once.
In November 2024, she watched the election results and wrote four minutes she called “Like Watching The Second Plane Hit The Towers.” A year before September 11, she had stood on the roof of Tower 2, an immigrant taking in the country she had chosen. She watched it come down. Twenty-three years later, she watched something else come down and knew exactly what she was feeling.
She was a Latina woman of trans experience who believed in this country enough to be broken by it twice, and who got up both times and went back to work.
Now look at who was reading
Brighter Thoughts, where the groomers piece and the Joan Mulholland piece ran: fifty-five followers.
My Trans Child, where the Cass Report rebuttal ran: 169.
Our Sensual Selves: 194.
That election piece, the one with the towers in it, has one clap. One.
She was writing ten-, thirteen-, and sixteen-minute essays, fully sourced, with live links to the Williams Institute, CBS, and the medical literature, for an audience that would fit inside a classroom. She did this for years. She never coasted, and she never wrote shorter.
Read that paragraph again.
That is what I have inherited. Not an audience. A standard.
Where I come in
I came out at fifty-three. There are years I don’t get back, and I’ve stopped pretending the arithmetic comes out even. What I found afterward were rooms full of women who had run the same numbers. One of those rooms was Cassie’s.
For six years I’ve moderated the Empowered Trans Woman private group on Facebook alongside her. It isn’t glamorous work. Most of it is approving members at midnight and removing the man who joined to argue or troll. Some of it is the woman posting at three in the morning, about to tell her wife, unable to breathe, and somebody has to be awake when she does.
Cassie built that room, and she kept a door on it. For six years I stood at the door with her.
She didn’t know me when she built it. She built it anyway, for whoever walked in. I walked in.
Empowered Trans Woman stays open
I now own this publication, and it is not closing.
If you’d like to write for it, email me at grace@graceannhansen.com, and I’ll add you to our writers. If you already write here, send your work the way you always have. I’ll read it, and I’ll get it out.
Submissions used to go to Cassie. They come to me now. That is the only thing I intend to change without asking you first.
The last piece she published in Our Sensual Selves went up on July 3, 2025. In it she introduced herself as “a trans woman, a queer human, and transformational coach.” She was building something new when she died. She didn’t get to finish it.
I intend to finish this part.
The lights
In January 2020, Cassie stood on a stage and told a story she called “A Pineapple Is Not a Broken Orange.”
Six words. I’m not going to explain them to you. She was better at this than I am, and she already said it.
A woman in a movie theater restroom once told Cassie Brighter she didn’t belong there.
She was wrong. Cassie spent the rest of her life proving it in public, in ten-minute increments, for fifty-five people at a time.
The room is smaller than it was. I’m not tying a ribbon on that, and she would have hated me for trying.
What I can give you is the lights on and an editor who reads what you send.
So send it.
We were never broken oranges. Cassie just said it first.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.