“I have always been more for celebrating accomplishments and victories and I have never really loved the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), to be honest,” said Helen Kramer, author of My Husband Betty, to LGBT Weekly. “I know so many vibrant, interesting, awesome trans people, and it upsets me that there are so many people who only first learn of the [trans] community through these violent deaths.”
And that’s a difficult reality for those of us in the trans community. What many trans people find true, even within LGBT spaces, is that many don’t know very much about us – don’t know very much about us trans people as individuals.
In the LGBT community though, if one knows much at all about the T subcommunity of the LGBT community, one likely knows that the TDOR is an observance Nov. 20 each year that honors the memory of those whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.
This year, there are over two hundred names of people who’ve have passed in the last year due to that violence.
“I have been conducting Knoxville, Ky. TDOR every year since 1999 (Gwen Smith was a friend of mine when I lived in Sacramento),” Bear Rodgers told LGBT Weekly.“First year only trans women attended – then no one would.”
“In 2010 KnoxBoyz created KnoxGirlz since the previous MTF groups kept falling apart,” added Rodgers. “Once trans men and women were united we went back to a community based public TDOR.”
This year, as every year for over a decade, the San Diego LGBT Center will hold a TDOR memorial service for those who’ve violently passed. It’s a difficult event to attend; it’s a difficult event to plan.
Just about every TDOR has the component of reading the names of the dead due to anti-transgender violence which includes a brief description of the circumstances of how the trans victim died. Often, these descriptions are written in the first person, so that for a moment the person reading the name – gay, straight, bisexual, queer, trans or allied – takes on the story as their own.
It’s hard to just read the names of the dead and leave it as that. Kramer, who’s organizing Lawrence University’s TDOR this year, said, “People are moved by the information [about the dead], which is why I have started participating in [TDOR]. I tend to try to expand the conversation as well – by making sure people understand that many of the people who attend TDORs are not often the same people who face the greatest risk of transphobic violence.”
Diego Sanchez, the policy director at PFLAG, has taken a different approach. “Remembering our dead and celebrating our lives, is important,” Sanchez told LGBT Weekly. “We must mourn who we lost and live through that pain and the reality that ‘but for the grace of God, go I.’ And we must affirm our family commitment to be there for each other and celebrate that we live to fight together.”
Connor Maddox is the Project Trans coordinator at The San Diego LGBT Center, and for over a decade he’s been involved in planning San Diego’s TDORs. He and Rodgers described similar feelings regarding planning the events memorializing the deceased: they both feel heartbreak and anger regarding the dead, as well as the frustration that there isn’t anything that they, or the trans wider community, can do immediately to stop the killings. They also talked about numbness.
“I have been surrounded by senseless death all my life,” said Rodgers, “and as an Army officer sometimes I was the one who broke news to parents and widows. So by now I am kind of numb while also seething.”
Both Rodgers and Maddox talked about what they saw as apathy in the trans community. We remember the dead Nov. 20 each year, but unless there is a killing in our neighborhoods we generally try to put it out of our minds for a year.
Claire Russell, the web director of transgendercentersd.com (a virtual resource center for trans people in San Diego), believes the apparent apathy isn’t really apathy, but numbness due to the trauma of just so much community death due to antitransgender violence. Both Maddox and Russell talked about psychologically distancing oneself, and shielding oneself emotionally; it is a numbness that trans people feel when we think about how many die due to anti-transgender violence: especially in terms of remembering the lives of the individual dead.
In San Diego, there is a longing for a physical transgender center. Russell believes that a physical, transgender center, such as in a small building or in a storefront, would help address the apparent apathy in a way that virtual connections can’t. “A trans center would celebrate the construction,” said Russell, echoing the sentiments of Kramer’s thoughts, “instead of mourning the destruction, of the San Diego trans community.”
Meredith Vezina is someone who’s recently been involved in the brick-and-mortar world imagining of a stand-alone San Diego trans center. She sees a stand-alone trans center as providing space to meet a need that members of almost all minority groups have: connecting with people who have a commonality of identity, and then with those peers develop a space for feeling safe, liberated and unbeholden to people outside of one’s minority population. It’s the difference of connecting with people who are sympathetic to one’s needs and connecting with people fully empathetic with one’s needs.
As to having a physical trans center, Vezina stated, “I don’t think having one will stop [the killings], but it’d give people a place to be together and look for guidance.”
TDOR is an annual memorial event that in San Diego is planned by trans people and attended by a broad spectrum of community allies, those in our own personal community and community-connected families
But connection to those in the trans subcommunity of the LGBT community by people outside of that subcommunity needs to be understood in sometimes awful terms. We die in horrific numbers due to anti-transgender violence, and that scars many of us to the point beyond pain; to the point of numbness that often looks, on every day other than Nov. 20, as apathy.
I want to thank Autumn for conveying my thoughts so eloquently.