It’s been a while since I blogged about the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Probably TOO long since I have. Pretty much everything that I said back then still holds true today.
“These 160+ souls should never have had their lives cut short. They were people with the potential to go on and do great things. Who knows what they could have been or become. The only thing that’s known is that they did not choose to be who they were, or to die at the hands of hate. I encourage everyone to please stop the hate in this world.”
That is from the 2009 blog. I’m not going to re-hash what I said there, save to say that we are still being rattled with fear and hate and people are still dying because of it. Since 2009, though, a lot of good has happened. There is visible transgender presence in the media landscape1, there are projects like #girlslikeus and trans* people have not stayed silent when it mattered most.
But sadly, there is still a need for a day like TDOR. Sadly, people are still being killed, or driven to suicide, because of hatred and ignorance. The list of those who were died for being themselves can be accessed here. While it is a far cry from the 160 people who died when I first blogged on the subject2, the fact remains there are still too many names on that list.
I’m going to close this post with a quote from Anne Frank. Because, if people took the time to realize this, maybe so many of our trans* sisters and brothers won’t have to die at the hands of hate.
“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” — Anne Frank
Footnotes
- The biggest presence of a trans person in media right now is Laverne Cox who plays Sophia on Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black.” But she is not alone. Since blogging in 2009 there have been musicians like Laura Jane Grace & Mina Caputo, journalist-turned-author Janet Mock, and child-star-turned-activist Chaz Bono who have all made important contributions to trans people’s visibility.
- We are once again getting conflicting numbers being reported on the number of people who died this year. The list I linked to above only had roughly 70 names on it when I looked. This morning, I came across a link on BuzzFeed which puts the number at 238, which would make it MORE than the number reported when I blogged in 2009. However, as you can see in that post, there were conflicting reports then as well.