The Transgender Day of Remembrance was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 kicked off the "Remembering Our Dead" web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Rita Hester’s murder — like most anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved.
Although not every person represented during the Day of Remembrance self-identified as transgender — that is, as a transsexual, crossdresser, or otherwise gender-variant — each was a victim of violence based on bias against transgender people.
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The compilation of names and stories should be understood not to be exhaustive. There are many reasons for that: identifying a murder victim as trans often depends on evidence that may or may not be present, such as women's clothing or evidence of surgery. In addiction, there are places where trans women are simply filed under "gay" in news and crime reporting. And in some cases trans women's families may be able to suppress their gender history (or their current identity, depending on how supportive the family is) in news or police reporting.
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You probably noticed that I've referred exclusively to women. That's because women make up the vast and overwhelming majority of victims of trans-related violence. Even though current estimates suggest that there are approximately equal numbers of trans men and women, women make up four out of five trans-related murders, and in fact many of the male victims are trans women's partners, not trans men. This year, the only male victim listed was a toddler killed for what his father apparently believed to be cross-gender behaviour.
And so when you look at the numbers of women killed each year for being trans, and you see that they're in the low dozens, and you think "that doesn't seem so bad," consider: There's another very easily-comparable minority of similar size, a group that in theory is subject to the same prejudices and the same dangers, and yet that group is not being killed at an even remotely comparable rate. The numbers may be small in absolute terms, but each hate crime is enormous in its impact on the targeted community, and trans women endure dozens - perhaps hundreds - of hate crimes every single year. This in a small community, numbering in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, at best the low millions, in the U.S.
You may ask what dead trans women to do with Daily Kos or U.S. politics. The answer is: everything. Most of the hot-button issues of the last year, from the economy to school bullying and homophobia to healthcare, connect directly to trans murders. Trans women are killed because they live in a culture that accepts homophobia and transphobia; that refuses to employ them in "respectable" jobs and leaves them to make a life on the streets; that fails to provide necessary healthcare, further increasing the demands on their income and the risks they're willing to take to get it. Racism is also a factor, leaving many trans women of colour undereducated and underprivileged compared to their white peers, restricting their opportunities even more. Don't Ask, Don't Tell makes it twice as hard for straight trans women to escape poverty through the military. Every issue we talk about here impacts the lives and safety of trans women.
So we remember our dead - and we work to make it better for the living.
Thanks for reading.