My first Transgender Day of Remembrance was an emotional experience. I was not quite twenty years old, living on my own for the first time, and still struggling with my own identity as a trans man. Queen’s University, where I was attending at the time, was holding a candlelight vigil. To a shy second-year like me, even the small group gathered outside the main library seemed intimidating, but I steeled myself, took a candle, and followed everyone else down a path to an enclosed courtyard.
The organizers passed out tiny slips of paper, each with a name printed on it – one of the 160 trans people known to have been killed since the previous year, most of them women, most of them non-white. We read the names. We had a moment of silence. Someone began to recite “Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep”, by Mary Elizabeth Frye.
That was when I started to get mad.
Because Transgender Day of Remembrance is a lot of things, but what it is not is a funeral. We don’t gather on November 20th because we are sad and want to be comforted. We don’t gather to be reassured that our brothers and sisters are now the soft stars that shine at night; we stand at their graveside because they are there, they did die, and they will continue to die if those of us alive to remember them do not take action to stop it.
I’m older now, a little calmer in my activism, and I’m no longer mad at the Queen’s organizers. They meant well. They were just missing the context. Up here in Canada, it’s easy to become complacent, to think that the most pressing issues queer people face are adoption rights and employment discrimination. But around the world, trans people – especially trans women, especially trans women of colour – are still fighting for the most basic right to exist. Even here, we’re not fully safe: one murder has made this year’s list from Alberta, at least seven from across our southern border.
Transgender Day of Remembrance is our day to remind ourselves and our allies of the danger we face, danger that we simply cannot afford to forget about. Here in Canada, we’re still struggling to get anti-trans violence recognized as a hate crime, and to de-legitimize the despicable “trans panic” defense. Justice for the more than 60 trans people murdered this year, and those who will face similar violence in the year to come, will not be found in poetry and comforting words; it will only be found in action, in affirming their lives and pushing for real change to protect us all.
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