I found out today that the world lost a unique and beautiful spirit just two weeks before Christmas.

Maddie Joan Blaustein was a beautiful and talented transgendered woman and an online friend who passed away on December 11, 2008. Maddie was only 48. I didn’t know her well, only through the online political communities we both frequented, but she was delightful, whip-smart, and deliciously snarky and I was proud to stand beside her in various political battles.

I wanted to talk about Maddie here because I have recently lost those online communities to what I’ll just call “irreconcilable differences,” so I cannot share the regret at her loss with others who knew her in those places I used to belong.

Maddie’s posts were always a breath of fresh air, cutting through the bullshit and not wasting time on the intellectually dishonest or the willfully deluded. Though Maddie was treated deplorably by her supposed allies in one of those communities when they turned on her for defending Hillary Clinton, she always stood strong against the mysogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that was allowed to run rampant in that allegedly progressive place.

Besides mourning the extinguishing of the bright spark that she was in an increasingly dreary world, I wanted to acknowledge her passing publicly because of something that was posted about her on the aforementioned forum after her death. Maddie’s brother, who was also a member of that online community, marked her passing with a condescending tribute. While he began his tribute with “Maddie was my brother and my sister,” he referred to her as male throughout the rest of it, negating her life as a woman and disrespecting her in a final attempt to have the last word. In the last few months of her life, he had defamed her publicly on the Internet, posting transphobic rants and calling her mentally ill. He eventually “turned her in” like a good little Hitlerjugend to get her banned from the forum for not falling into lockstep (and goosestep) with the party line, and continued to slander her when she was no longer allowed to defend herself there.

I’m sad and I’m angry that Maddie is gone and that this hateful person gets to define her after her death. I may be misjudging him. He may have loved Maddie. But his transphobia prevented him from seeing the beautiful person she was, and that comes through in his online eulogy. What happened in the name of “party loyalty” may have merely been a spat as he suggests, and Maddie may have already forgiven him, but that online spat was out there for the world to see, and it was ugly and painful, and was not just an insult to Maddie but to all transpeople, and to all women.

Anime fans may have heard Maddie as the voice of Meowth on Pokemon, among others, and comic book fans may remember her Deathwish miniseries by Milestone Comics. She had a wicked sense of humor, and brainy-hot geek-girl looks. I wish I’d had a chance to tell her how much I admired her.

I will miss you, MJ.