November 20 is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance:
The Transgender Day of Remembrance serves several purposes. It raises public awareness of hate crimes against transgender people, an action that current media doesn’t perform. Day of Remembrance publicly mourns and honors the lives of our brothers and sisters who might otherwise be forgotten. Through the vigil, we express love and respect for our people in the face of national indifference and hatred. Day of Remembrance reminds non-transgender people that we are their sons, daughters, parents, friends and lovers. Day of Remembrance gives our allies a chance to step forward with us and stand in vigil, memorializing those of us who’ve died by anti-transgender violence.
[Quote from Remembering Our Dead]
I hesitated to write this post, because I have no desire to appropriate TDOR — as has been done before, by well-off, acceptably-queer, white cis folk like me, and will likely continue to be done. (The “white” is especially important to point out here, because of the way race intersects with transphobia to devalue certain lives even more than others: trans women of color are most at risk of being mourned on this day.)
Nor do I wish to detract from the vigil, nor dishonor the dead.
Note: Read that list, please. They all had names, even if we do not know them. They all had lives, even if we never hear about them. And they were all murdered, even if we never bother to find their killers.
But neither do I wish to contribute to a trope that leads to cis people, like me, associating only doom and gloom and death and despair to trans persons lives. I know how much it pisses me off to have only one day a year — and have it be entirely “Woe is the marginalized person, for their life is miserable!” That’s what we risk when outsiders come in, and take over, and use our public mourning to show just how good we are, see, we care, look at how miserable those people are, how horrible, let us pity mourn them — until the day is over, the vigil ended, and we walk away, proud of another box we can tick off on our Good Ally(TM) checklist.
That isn’t what this day is supposed to be. It is by trans persons, for trans persons, as they take a moment to honor and remember their fallen, as a community. We cis persons are called to witness, to hold the space, and to remember that what we do contributed to their deaths.
We are called to take that lesson not so that we beat ourselves up with it, but so that we can change, so that these murders stop happening.
We are called to walk into the rest of the year with this knowledge: that what we do, and fail to do, every day, creates the environment in which this can happen.
And perhaps most important, we are called to walk into the rest of the year with the duty of celebrating trans lives: with remembering the dead, yes, and remembering those who live.
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Posts for the dead, by the living:
Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
[...] Arwyn at Raising my Boychick [...]
Well said.
(I linked to you on my post; you and others said it better than I could.)
[...] Arwyn at Raising My Boychick: International Transgender Day of Remembrance 2009 [...]