This post about Trans Day of Remembrance comes to us from Kieryn J. McCann. You can read Kieryn’s amazing poem “Kayla Marie” here.
–ed.
Today, November 20th, is internationally acknowledged as Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR). It is a day of collective mourning for the trans community. The first TDoR vigil was held in 1999 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a year after the murder of fellow activist Rita Hester, to remember not only Rita, but all our transgender siblings whose lives have been taken due to anti-transgender violence and oppression.
The Facts about Anti-Trans Violence
Trans activism at its core is work to end the violence and systemic oppression against trans people. This includes intersectional work to end racially motivated hate crimes, because Black and Latina trans women are STILL the most vulnerable of our community. 25 out of the 321 reported murders of transgender people globally were on US soil (that’s almost 8% of the reported murders; the US is only 4% of the world’s population). Out of those 25:
- 88% were people of color.
- 72% were victims of gun violence.
- 52% were Black transgender women.
- 48% were laid to rest under deadnames and misgendered in official coverage of their passing.
- 47% of victims knew their murderers; whether romantically, familially, or socially.
(Human Rights Campaign, Transgender Europe’s TvT Project.)
What Trans Day of Remembrance Means
While today serves largely as a day of collective mourning for the transgender community, allies are encouraged to educate themselves and take immediate action to practice the act of allyship, both in their personal lives and systemically. Some of these actions are:
- Refer to people using the language they’ve chosen for themselves.
- Normalize introducing yourself with pronouns and encourage other cisgender folks to do the same.
- Accept corrections with gratitude and normalize correcting others.
- Practice pronouns among other allies.
- Inform yourself on local anti-trans legislation and happenings near you, and vocalize your dissent to your community leaders.
Additional Resources can be found in the comments below.
Kieryn McCann
Kieryn (per/thons) grew up in the greater Kansas City metro before moving to a rural town about an hour outside of Wichita, Kansas. Thons full-time job is Primary Onboarding Specialist to per one New Human still in Training, colloquially known as parenting. In the time thon manages to carve out for perself, Kieryn can be found hanging out in various queer haunts in South Central Kansas molding dreams into reality with other community builders. As a neurodivergent, Kieryn writes according to per sense of synesthesia and how the words “taste” and “feel” in per mouth as if they were food. This lends itself to a style rich with alliteration and unconventional rhyming schemes.