Remember the Transgendered

Let’s start at the beginning. When we talk about transgendered people, we mean those individuals who do not identify and perform as “man” or “woman” in accordance with a binary system that prescribes gender expression solely on the basis of one’s genitalia. This includes, but is not limited to, transsexuals (pre, post, and non-operative), transvestites, persons with ambiguous genitalia, and persons who have chosen to perform ambiguous social genders. Today marks the fourth annual observance of the National Transgender Day of Awareness, a day set aside to remember those who have lost their lives because of anti-transgender fear and hatred. The Day of Remembrance began as a way to publicly grieve for Rita Hester, a transgendered woman murdered on November 28, 1998. An online monument and scattered candlelight vigils soon gathered momentum, and the scale of this year’s observance—rallies in Boston and New York, a candlelight vigil in Indianapolis, memorial services in Minneapolis-St. Paul—will hopefully draw America’s attention to her transgendered citizens and to the fear and hatred they encounter every day. It’s a solemn day, in a somber month, and these are scary times. Perhaps it’s easier not to remember Rita Hester today, it’s easier not to dwell on the twenty-five known victims of anti-transgender violence since the last Day of Remembrance. But notwithstanding the November gloom and the warplanes winging their way eastward, today we must remember.

We remember today because it affirms our commitment to exposing and condemning anti-transgender violence as long as it persists. The mainstream success of Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry briefly brought anti-transgender violence into the media spotlight. But the spotlight is fickle, and a month later some other name supplanted Boys Don’t Cry on the cinema marquee. The Day of Remembrance is our commitment to not just moving on. We owe it to the victims whom we remember today to remind the media about the persistence of anti-transgender violence. Brandon from Boys Don’t Cry isn’t the only one we’ve lost, and anti-transgender violence didn’t disappear once Hilary Swank won her Academy Award.

We remember today because in remembering the victims’ deaths, we affirm the value of their lives. “Too often,” writes Day of Remembrance founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith, “people want to make our dead into forgotten people.” Police investigations are often lax, and murders are carelessly catalogued as accidents or suicides. But the Day of Remembrance calls murder murder, and highlights the brutality of anti-transgender killers who attempt (in the words of one Day of Remembrance organizers) “to obliterate their victims, perhaps in an attempt to erase them completely, by any means necessary.” The Day of Remembrance denies murderers the prerogative to erase their victims, and also resists more subtle forms of erasure. Insensitive news media frequently trivialize victims’ gender identification by using victims’ “birth pronouns” and by describing transgendered people as almost delusional, convinced they are something which they manifestly are not. The Day of Remembrance allows us to publicly testify to the gender identities of these victims—not in ironic, pathologizing “air quotes”, but in a respectful manner consistent with the rich lives they led.

Finally, we remember today because it reminds us not to be complacent. Yes, the cities of Cambridge and Boston have transgender nondiscrimination policies written into the law books. Ostensibly, Harvard students live in a metropolitan area that is aware of transgender issues and supportive of transgender communities. Yet, our own university does not include gender identity in the list of categories against which it is committed not to discriminate. And the most recent act of anti-transgender violence picked up by national media took place on October 3 in Newark, Calif., just a half-hour drive from San Francisco, the birthplace of the Day of Remembrance.

We remember so that we might celebrate the life of Rita Hester and so many others. We remember so that we might shine a light on the inhumanity of their killers. We remember in the hope that next November, there will be no new reasons to mourn.

Marcel A.Q. LaFlamme ’04 is a folklore and mythology concentrator in Mather House. He is public relations chair of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance.