(If you haven't read rserven's post on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I urge you to do so now. If you feel like coming back to read this one afterwards, that's fine too.)
The Transgender Day of Remembrance began in 1998 in response to the murder of Rita Hester but for the last several years it has brought another woman to my mind. I did not know Daxi well, but I knew enough to understand what manner of loss had befallen us all when she was taken.
We are in the office kitchen. She has arrived in tall shoes, with pink ribbons twined in her hair. We are forever trading nods and pleasantries, this beautiful girl and I. Still, I'm not even sure that she knows my name. I know a few of hers. The one she uses on good days, the kind of days you wake and wind ribbons in your hair, and the one she uses on bad days, when the mean reds hit and it takes all the strength you have to clutch a pillow in one hand and a telephone in the other. "Tell him it's Pumpkin." she'd whisper into the receiver.
And I suppose she wouldn't mind me telling you this now. What she'd mind, I suspect, is that there were no fireworks when she went, no moments of silence, no flags at half mast. We were nothing to one another, Pumpkin and I. Little more than nods and smiles, phone calls transfered and a "hey you, how goes it?" in the stairwell. Still I couldn't help but see in her what I have so often seen in myself, that ability to dress up sorrow with bravery. Put together and put on. She did it better but I've done it longer. That's all. So if you see her (as the man says) say hello, and tell her that there were indeed fireworks and more tears, more moments of silence than she ever expected. It's the god-awful truth.
When my daughter Ashlie died at sixteen, one of the phone calls I had to make was to her teacher, a former Army drill sergeant who manages to teach the students that no other teacher in town can manage. He told me later that his first thought upon receiving my call was that there was violence involved in her death. To say that she died “by her own hand” is little consolation, we agreed, but in light of the statistical alternatives, it is somehow a blessing.
Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo and Rita Hester are not anomalies. Nor are they(thankfully) the norm. But every year, on this day, Remembering Our Dead is one way to fight the bigotry and lack of understanding which results in the kinds of brutality that no one should ever face. On this day and every day, educating yourself and those around you, refusing to engage in the casual, "soft" bigotries of our current culture (those jokes about Ann Coulter's adam's apple included) and instead establishing your position as an ally can go a long way to changing public perception and ultimately, saving lives.