Here’s what I’ve got this year: I want this day to go the fuck away. Not because it’s not valuable and intentional and useful. It is all of those things. It serves a useful function. It helps people understand the very pervasive discrimination trans people are up against.
It’s just that there are all these people I love in my life who happen to be trans and it breaks my heart to see this very real reminder that somehow we are so upset by transness that we allow this kind of violence to persist.
I don’t want to remember someone for being trans and being killed. I want to remember people I miss because I miss something about them – their smile or their voice or their kindness of their love of trains.
But another year passes, and another TDOR comes and goes, and I think instead of all the radical, amazing activists I know who happen to be trans, and of all the amazing artists and musicians and writers I know who happen to be trans, and of all the amazing, boring people living perfectly mundane great lives post transition who no one knows are trans and I think: YES.
So that’s why we have the Transgender Day of Remembrance: to get the attention of all the people out there who don’t realize what the hell is going on out there. For me it is a day to remember why it is I chose this work, or why it chose me, and why I keep choosing it.