Transgender Day of Remembrance

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” (George Santayana)

rememberingourdead.org

gender.org/remember/day/

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On November 20th of every year, the transgender community commemorates the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a memorial to remember those who’ve died as a result of anti-transgender hatred or prejudice through violence or negligence. This is a list that grows by an average of 18 known instances per year (although it is likely that there are also far more unreported cases).

The event is held in November, and was started in order to honour Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 inspired the “Remembering Our Dead” web project (http://www.rememberingourdead.org/ -- a project of Gender Education and Advocacy, Inc.) and a candlelight vigil the following year. Rita Hester’s murder — like many anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved.

Not every person represented in the Day of Remembrance identified as transgendered (transsexual, crossdresser, or gender-variant in a number of other ways), but each fatality was a result of transphobic or homophobic bias.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is designed to raise public awareness of hate crimes against transgendered people, something that is often missed in the current media. The event publicly mourns and honours the lives of our brothers and sisters who might otherwise be forgotten. It reminds non-transgendered people that we are still someone’s sons, daughters, parents, friends and lovers.

Names on the list are sometimes as nondescript as “John” or “unnamed male in womens’ clothing,” which is sometimes all that is ever disseminated in the media. Others are familiar pioneers in GLBT history, such as Marsha P. Johnson, who is credited along with Sylvia Rivera as helping to initiate the Stonewall Riot that touched off the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. There are widely-known stories, such as those of Gwen Araujo or Brandon Teena (the latter was the subject of the movie, Boys Don`t Cry), and lower-profile heartbreaks, such as the death of Robert Eads from ovarian cancer simply because he could not find a medical professional willing to treat him. Alberta has not been immune to this in the past, as there is even a local connection in Gracie Detzer, who was strangled and drowned in her own bathtub in Edmonton, in 1997.

While the official list contains over 360 names from 1970 to present, it is also clear that there are also far more unreported cases worldwide – it also needs to be kept in mind that these statistics were not actually compiled until 1998. In many cases, the victims of anti-transgender violence are not identified as such, due to the silence of their families, fear of the police among friends of the victims, and the refusal of the police to investigate these murders and/or report them as hate crimes.

It should also not be forgotten that gender biases and issues affect us all -- the women who experience being swept aside at times by apparent male privilege, males who are bullied and ridiculed for being perceived as too effeminate, women who experience assumptions made about them because they are labelled “butchy” -- gender stereotyping provides a means by which people can be marginalized and discriminated against, sometimes dramatically so, as the Day of Remembrance reminds us. More than once, for example, an infant was murdered by a parent who felt that the child was too “sissy” (Ronnie Paris Jr., Mikey Vallejo-Seiber) or because they were born with ambiguous genitalia (at least one unnamed infant). Willie Houston was murdered in a violent assault in a Tennessee department store because he held the hand of a blind male he was assisting, while holding his wife’s purse (she was trying on clothes in a fitting room). The case of Virginia Grace Soto -- who has fortunately survived the experience of being incarcerated with male inmates because of assumptions about her gender (despite having always been biologically female) – reminds us that there can sometimes be soberingly stark realities in the way that gender is policed.

(concludes with annual list)