I don’t have anything snappy to say this week.
I can’t pull out my usual attempts at humor to make what starts out as an angry diatribe in my head become a palatable and light-hearted piece of funny self-deprecation. This is not the week for it.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance is Nov. 20 and was initially founded in 1998 to memorialize the murder of trans woman Rita Hester. Gwendolyn Ann Smith created Transgender Day of Remembrance to bring attention to the hate crimes inflicted on gender nonconforming people, and the day now acts as the peak of Transgender Awareness Week.
Fortunately, thanks to the dedicated work of famous activists like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, trans people do enjoy much more media visibility than we used to. At least now our stories are not restricted only to tragic tales of death and despair, like “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Soldier’s Girl.” These films, though, are both based on heart-wrenching true stories that, while not the only things that happen to trans people, are still a very real threat. These films focus on a white trans man and woman respectively and don’t even begin to hint at the threat to trans people of color, particularly trans women.
That is what I want to draw attention to on this Transgender Awareness Week. We can pat ourselves on the back for watching “Orange is the New Black” and by being accepting of people who have “had the surgery” (just as a side note, don’t ever say that. Don’t even think it). But until we live in a world where trans people don’t have to fear going into public bathrooms or even just walking down the street, we can’t congratulate ourselves.
On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, I want us to truly remember some of the 1,378 transgender and gender nonconforming people that Transgender Europe reported murdered between January 2008 and October 2013. I want us to feel the weight of every casual transphobic joke and slur that we’ve said, maliciously or otherwise, and to recognize what kind of society we live in that actively creates an environment that enables the beating and murder of innocent people simply for expressing themselves.
I want us to know their names. Evon Young. Tiffany Holder. Cecilia Marahouse. Marcio Sergio de Lima. Milan Boudreaux. Kelly Young. Ashley Sinclair. Valarie McKinney. Natalia Sotero. Diamond Williams. Jessy Calderón Espinoza. The list, horrifically, goes on and on and on. These names are only people murdered between November 2012 to November 2013. Eleven names out of the 238 Transgender Europe has documented. These numbers are horrific, and no doubt vastly underreported.
I can’t think of anything funny to say this week. It’s too heartbreaking, and I’m doing my best to remember those who have not been as lucky as I have. The ones who could not make people laugh about being misgendered in a restaurant. The ones who didn’t worry about being called out in a public bathroom but made it out feeling exhilarated and accomplished.
This day is too important to make light of, and I hope I am not the only one who feels the heavy weight of this somber act of memory. For me, Nov. 20 will always be a day to remember those subjected to violence simply for their existence. I, unlike they, have plenty of other days to laugh.
Morgan Philley is a junior English major from Clinton.
