Transgender Day of Remembrance
A day to remember those who have died as a result of transphobia.
Every three days a transgendered person is murdered somewhere in the world.
On November 28, 1998, Rita Hester (born William Hester in 1963) was stabbed twenty times in Allston, Mass and not unlike all the transgender murders, it was left unsolved.
A year later November 20, Gwendolyn Ann Smith organized the first Transgender Day of Remembrance in San Francisco with a candlelight vigil in memory of Rita Hester. Smith created a website “Remembering Our Dead” (https://td or.translivesmatter.info/ ) to track the deceased. We invite you to click the link and read the lists of murdered transgenders, how their lives were brutally ended, bodies unidentified and their hearts and souls forgotten.
LGBT murders were ignored until Matthew Shepherd’s (1998) murder was recognized nationwide, and then attention was brought to the hate crimes directed towards the LGBT community. The Laramie Project was an accumulation of research the Tectonic Theatre from New York City gathered from the residents of Laramie as they investigated the murder of Matthew Shepherd and transformed it into the Laramie Project that was one of the most popular plays globally performed at universities and community centers. The director, Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre troupe were honored by a star-studded cast at the Town Hall NYC in Manhattan in 2006. Kaufman mentioned as well as the play has been received, there was recently a murder of a gay male on the set of the Laramie Project in California and more work to be done.
This is where things get frightening, as we were writing this, there was literally another LGBT hate attack at a night club, Club Q in Colorado Springs, CO leaving five murdered and twenty-five injured. So, let us put this in some type of quasi-perspective. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance and the most recent attack was last night a few minutes before midnight.
“Let us renew our vow to honor the beautiful souls we have lost, ensure our transgender community feels seen, heard and represented – and never relent until every person is free to live freely as their authentic selves.” Nancy Pelosi
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