If one were to look at a national calendar of LGBT community events that are generally celebrated over the entire United States, the one trans specific day on that calendar would be the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR). TDOR is a day where internationally, the LGBT community remembers and allies gather together for marches and memorial services to remember those who’ve died in the previous year due to anti-transgender hate.
I spoke with the trans woman who’s credited for creating TDOR, Gwen Smith, to get a sense of history about why the day exists, why it’s annually held Nov. 20 each year and why the day is marked with marches and memorial services.
“The beginning is Rita Hester,” began Gwen.
“At the time I was working on America Online. I was chatting on the Transgender Community Forum there – pretty much near the end of the Transgender Community Forum at that point. I’d come to the chat and the news of Rita Hester’s passing had crossed the wire, and I came in to just talk about it.”
That was in November 1998.
Rita Hester was a trans woman of color living in the Boston area. She was described as statuesque and glamorous in a 2012 Boston Globe article, and frequented community hangouts, such as the Model Café and the Silhouette Lounge. She was a sometime drag performer at Jacque’s Cabaret, and one of her routines was a medley of hits by famed disco icon Donna Summer.
Rita was known as someone who was thoughtful and nice, and she was well liked – with lots of friends.
But on the early evening of Nov. 28, 1998, neighbors heard banging noises from within her apartment, and they called police. When they arrived to the apartment 15 minutes later at 6:30 p.m., they found her dead from multiple stab wounds.
The homicide case is still unsolved; no one has ever been charged for her killing.
As Gwen recalls, there were people who were in the AOL chat group who were from the Boston area of Massachusetts. Gwen noted to the chat roomers how Rita’s killing had a lot of parallels to the strangulation of Chanelle Pickett.
“Both African American trans women; both had been at the club the night before,” commented Gwen. “There’s not a direct connection because we know where William Palmer is – murderer of Chanelle Pickett – but, isn’t it odd that the two stories had so many correlations? They were three years apart, but one was Nov. 28 and one was Nov. 20. Isn’t that kind of wild?”
“And I was really surprised that so many of the trans people who were in this discussion – including all the ones from the Boston area – were saying, ‘Well, who was Chanelle Pickett? What was this story about?’ And the reason that surprised me so much was that the murder had gotten a lot of play in trans circles. The trial of William Palmer had finished up about 15-months before the Hester murder. And again it’d gotten a lot of play because he got a really light sentence compared to what he did.”
Gwen then described how Palmer was well known in the trans scene at the time. He often frequented the same trans bars that Chanelle and Rita did. Palmer had once told Chanelle that she “was the prettiest tranny I’ve ever seen,” and on the night of Nov. 20 1995 Palmer and Chanelle went to Chanelle’s apartment.
“Yet,” added Gwen, “[William Palmer] used a ‘trans panic’ defense to serve as his defense in his trial. He got a reduced sentence. And to a certain extent, it worked: he was not charged with murder but was charged with battery.”
Gwen noted that less than a year-and-a-half after Palmer’s trial ended there was another murder in the same area of Boston and even the locals didn’t remember the murder under similar circumstances three years earlier.
In Boston, Nancy Nangeroni led the organizing effort for a candlelight vigil where Rita Hester’s death was memorialized. About 200 people protesting and mourning her death attended.
So from a place of anger, Gwen began the Remembering Our Dead Project in 1998 in conjunction with gender.org. Trans people were forgetting their history and forgetting their dead. She began researching and collecting documentation on previous murders of trans people, and then chronicling their deaths.
Prior to the Transgender Day Of Remembrance being formally established as an annual event, in February 1999, a short lived trans activist group called TG RAGE, of which Gwen Smith was a member, held a candlelight vigil outside the Castro Theater in San Francisco. That candlelight vigil was held in conjuction with the showing of the Brandon Teena documentary at the theater.
Using the names of the dead that Gwen had assembled for the Remembering Our Dead Project, the group held about thirty signs of other trans people who’d been murdered. TG RAGE wanted to show that what happened to Brandon Teena wasn’t unique, but that anti-transgender hate killed numerous trans people.
That next November, Gwen Smith in San Francisco and Penny Ashe Matz in Boston coordinated together and organized Transgender Day of Remembrance events in their respective cities. Gwen hoped it would be an annual event.
The next year a few more cities held events. Gwen tried to foster more events in the beginning with trans people she knew in other areas of the country. She’d ask, for example, “Why doesn’t Washington, D.C. have one of these events yet?” Gwen remembers that West Hollywood was the third or fourth city after San Francisco and Boston to hold a TDOR, and they ran with it as an annual event.
Three years in, San Diego held our first TDOR memorial in Balboa Park. I remember talking to A.J. Davis, who many remember as a past communications director at The LGBT Community Center, telling me about how she and a friend of hers organized that first memorial. A.J. wasn’t trans, but was a strong ally to the trans community.
In November 2003, being out for less than a year as trans at the time, I joined with others in planning our 2003 TDOR. It was Brenda Watson, longtime member and leader of the Imperial Court, who got me involved in the event.
The Center, to this day, is the hub of our TDOR planning in San Diego. Our city has both a candlelight march – where the tradition of protesting the loss of life to anti-transgender violence is kept – and a somber memorial where the names of the dead are read to remember those who we’ve lost.
Gwen formed a limited partnership with GLSEN to sponsor TDOR events at schools about four years in, and with that and other partnerships the number of TDOR events in the states went from two the first year to hundreds within five years.
In the past decade, TDOR went international; TDOR events are held annually literally all over the world now.
Gwen originally maintained the list of the dead by herself, but then she brought in others to help as the list grew. Monica Helms, who designed the pastel pink, pastel blue and white transgender flag, will be here in San Diego this year for our events. She, along with longtime Boston based trans activist Ethan St. Pierre, have assisted in maintaining that list of the dead.
Gwen no longer plans the TDOR events in San Francisco. That’s in large part because of the emotional drain it takes on individuals to maintain the list and organize San Francisco’s remembrance events.
TDOR started as an angry response to the killing of Rita Hester, and the need to remember trans people’s murders due to how quickly Chanelle Pickett’s death was forgotten by many in the trans community.
It’s now turned into a day where not just the trans community, but the LGBT community and our allies remember the deaths caused by anti-transgender violence, and honor those who have died. We in San Diego will no doubt keep the tradition alive for years and years to come.
