Trans Day of Remembrance: Mourning the lost, fighting for the living

	Lily Zheng Columnist

By: Lily Zheng | Columnist

Content warning: violent transphobia, transmisogyny, suicide

Lamia Beard. January 17th, 2015. Norfolk, Virginia.

Taja Gabrielle DeJesus. February 8th, 2015. San Francisco, California.

Ashton O’Hara. July 14th, 2015. Detroit, Michigan.

Kandis Capri. August 11th, 2015. Phoenix, Arizona.

While the official Transgender Day of Remembrance site lists over 70 trans people killed worldwide since November 20th, 2014, Transgender Europe reports 271 trans people murdered between October 2014 and 2015. This number is consistent with stats from another monitoring project that reports that over 1,700 trans people were murdered in the last seven years. The total number of deaths due to violence are even higher, as this number fails to take into account those trans people who have taken their own lives, and those trans people whose trans identities were erased after their murders.

Trans communities exist in a perpetual state of emergency. Daily violence against trans people continues unchecked, pervading every level of every society, and sustained by existing social injustices. Anti-transgender violence falls hardest on those society already deems undesirable – transgender women/femmes of color around the world, and Black transgender women/femmes in America.

We exist in a time and country where Caitlyn Jenner, a rich, conservative, white trans woman, can receive a standing ovation and an award in the same year that at least twenty-two trans people, most of them Black and brown trans femmes, are violently murdered. Never before have trans people been so visible in media and popular culture, and never before have trans people been so violently under threat. Every year trans communities grieve for those lost before tirelessly taking up the banner once more, advocating for greater health care services, an end to the private prison industry, legal and institutional recognition, equitable educational opportunities, and an end to the violence that takes so many of our sisters and siblings away from us.

We must understand violence as something bigger. Violence is not one man with a knife alone at night; it is the shouts of “tranny” and “shemale” that stab us daily on the streets and at the store; it is the feeling we get when health care professionals look at us and call us “sir;” it is the experience of endless job hunts and hunger, the pain of being rejected by women’s homeless shelters because trans women aren’t “real women,” the bitterness of sex work for survival, the danger of prisons that claim our lives, the sting of abusive relationships that claim our bodies. Violence is the system we inherit from the world, and the weight of that violence is thrown onto the backs of low-income Black trans femmes and other femmes of color.

Here at Stanford University, ranked 2014’s #1 LGBT-friendly school, systemic injustices are diluted but not nearly solved. Trans students on campus continue to face daily misgendering, gender binarism and cisnormativity, difficulties with health care services, erasure in classrooms and curriculums, and a lack of access to gender-appropriate bathrooms and housing. Our educational labor is taken for granted by peers and professors alike and we are either completely ignored or propped up as tokens to represent all trans peoples’ experiences – even as we struggle with accessibility issues, maintaining our mental health, and finding our own ways to thrive on (and often off) campus. These disparities fall especially hard on Black trans femmes on campus, as they do off it.

Cisgender people, we demand better. We deserve better.

We demand that cisgender people end violence against the transgender community, and particularly against Black trans femmes. TAJA’s Coalition asserts that “transphobia and violence against trans people is not a trans problem. It is a problem rooted in and created by cisgender people, and there is a call to see active support of and participation in local and national efforts to create resources, access and justice for our trans communities.” This looks like self-education. This looks like holding yourself and your peers accountable, like teaching your families, friends and coworkers that trans people are worthy of dignity, worthy of love.

We demand that Stanford University not only make its campus safe and accessible for trans students, faculty, and staff, but challenge its complicity in cycles of prejudice, discrimination, and structural oppression. We demand accessible gender-neutral restrooms in every facility, straightforward name and gender changes in university databases, and gender-inclusive curriculums. We demand an intersectional, historically accurate, and culturally competent education concerning trans communities be given to students, faculty and staff, and that Stanford take the lead on these initiatives. It doesn’t matter how “safe” or “diverse” a place Stanford is if it the policymakers, professionals, and community leaders it creates fail to unlearn transmisogyny, cisnormativity, and violence. We refuse to live among and graduate with those individuals who will go on to deny our humanity.

These demands will not be met overnight, and these demands alone are not enough. To truly undo historical and deeply embedded injustices in our society, activists and administrators must look towards critical change that targets systems larger than Stanford – the prison-industrial complex, gentrification, police brutality, and many others. The path to liberation begins with a commitment to action, and with the humility to admit when old ways of thinking require upheaval. Today is Trans Day of Remembrance; today we grieve, mourn, uplift.

Tomorrow we act.

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

inclusivenessiskey

“We exist in a time and country where Caitlyn Jenner, a rich, conservative, white trans woman, can receive a standing ovation and an award in the same year that at least twenty-two trans people, most of them Black and brown trans femmes, are violently murdered.”

I understand that trans women of color are targets of hate crimes at disproportionately high rates, but language like this – “rich, conservative, white” – which is often used among the activist community, just makes me worry that your message – which is very important, by the way – won’t really be able to get through to the allies that this movement needs to build in order to be successful. From an outsider’s perspective, it really does sound like you’re saying that the struggles that marginalized people who also happen to be white or well-off are somehow not as legitimate as those of people of color and/or people from lower-income backgrounds. I think we need to find a way to highlight the disproportionate rates of hate crime toward trans women of color, without making potential allies – who may happen to be rich, conservative, or white – feel uncomfortable. Because just because trans people may not feel comfortable all of the time on campus, doesn’t mean that making others feel uncomfortable with this kind of language, as well as throwing around phrases like “gender binarism” and “erasure” which may be confusing to the public, will get us any closer to a more inclusive society. I think activism needs to find a way to be more accessible and less isolating to people who do not feel as impassioned but would still be useful allies to have.
Smallquestion

Great article as always, Lily. But I wonder if the level of violence affecting trans communities is unprecedented or if it’s just getting a lot more media attention than before. Perhaps you could shed some light on this?
Kenneth Cole-Rieser

If Lily had any balls she would, in her writing and in her efforts, go after those that profit most from the discrimination and violence against people of color, trans or not, namely the Jews… the Jews used to be supporters of people of color and people who were generally “not considered to be in the norm or normal”) but once they became extraordinarily wealthy on average (good for them) they shifted their political efforts from being the leading white progressive allies to being the leading supporters of the occupation in Palestine, the leading opponents of the BLM movement, and people who inflect any debate on race with an almost long-gone self-pitying based on admittedly legitimate suffering they themselves may have endured. Lily, if you had any guts, I think “balls” is insensitive, write about the Jews for once (and see the shitstorm you’ll get, I’m sure you’ll love it!)
Reg

your obsession with Jews (and some anti-black garbage too) in every one of your posts is quite sad. I know you are from Ireland, but don’t bring your bigotry with you here.
Lily Zheng

A mixture of sparse reporting and other factors (people being closeted, differing reports, news misgendering) makes the answer to that question difficult. It may be that violence is remaining more or less constant and that reporting is getting better — or it may be that there is more violence in the first place, and that reporting is just as bad as it used to be. Given the consistent misgendering of trans women in the news, even now, I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter. That point is definitely up for debate, though.