It is a day that is very hard for many transgender people, myself included, but in that it becomes easier for cisgender people to see what we struggle with. For one day they can be aware of what many transgender people are always dealing with, and hopefully it can spark the same anger and outrage I often feel in them. The enemy of any social movement for the sake of a marginalized group is apathy, that when we ask for aid we are met with indifference and told that we don't matter because of who we innately are.
I hope this speech can spark some outrage in you to an issue you may be unaware of (or unaware of the extent to which the transgender community suffers), or to any transgender readers who are living this life some comfort that your experiences are shared by many, are real, and that we are working to put an end to transphobic violence.
But first we need people to care.
Transgender Day of Remembrance Opening Speech by Ada Clevinger, November 20, 2019
Hello. I am Ada Clevinger, I use She/Her pronouns, and as the President of Catalyst I would like to welcome you all to our Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony. As a transgender woman, I would like to thank you all for attending in support of the transgender community as we honor the 368 transgender people who were murdered this past year. I would like to especially thank the transgender people who have agreed to speak, read names, and just attend at all. Coming together as a community like this is comforting.
The proceedings for this evening will be a welcoming address by myself, followed by some words from Hope Aria and Eli Wood. Following those speakers we will begin reading the names, at the end of which we ask for a moment of silence to pay our respects to the dead, after which we will be done.
It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge, honour, and pay respect to the traditional owners and custodians (from all four directions), of the land on which we gather. The Mi’kmaq people deserve recognition not just for many of us here being settlers on their land, but also for the history of colonial violence that targeted the gender identities and expressions of the indigenous peoples to enforce a gender binary patriarchal social order and disrupt their culture. As we are confronted with the violence that we are seeing today against transgender people of all backgrounds, it is vital that we recall that this same violence was used as part of a genocide against indigenous peoples, and the revival of two-spirit and other gender identities within their communities is amazing but not unfettered by the ongoing pressure and violence of settler colonialism.
This is going to hurt. This is my third year taking part, and it just gets heavier. Transgender Day of Remembrance is in a minority of the events held by the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s not Pride. It’s survival. It is not a celebration, it is a memorial. In 1999, the first Transgender Day of Remembrance was organized by Gwendolyn Ann Smith in recognition of the murder of Rita Hester the year prior, a crime which has gone unsolved still to this day. It was held so that her death would not disappear like those of so many other transgender people who are killed because of transphobia. You would hope that they could find justice post-mortem, that their murders could be solved and the community made safer by prosecuting the people killing us, but they couldn’t even have their deaths be acknowledged by anyone outside of the transgender community.
Do you know how many people are on this fucking list and we don’t even have their name? 49, nearly a seventh of the trans people who have been killed this year don’t have names. Think about that when you hear ‘Name Unknown’ be read over and over again. This began because a woman could not have her own death be recognized by general society, and twenty years later we are still not even guaranteed to have the recognition of being named in death. They’re just another dead trans person.
I say all of this as a white woman at a Canadian university from a wealthy family that did not throw me out when I told them I was transgender. For many of the names on this list, that last detail is the only thing we have in common. While we memorialize the 368 deaths this past year, we need to remember that these people were not just transgender. It is not always just transphobia that contributes to these deaths, but racism and classism as well. The life expectancy in Canada is around 80 to 85 years. For black trans women it is 30 to 35. Before many of the people in this room have had a mid-life crisis, most black trans women have already died. If we consider class, and that many trans people, especially black trans people, are discriminated in hiring and become sex workers, we can see a vulnerable population becoming more and more vulnerable to being targeted, all while these crimes are ignored.
And if that is not upsetting enough already, the youngest name on this list is 14. Kids are dying. Kids are killing themselves because of the discrimination and lack of support they receive. The attempted suicide rate for transgender boys is over half, about 30% for transgender girls, and for non-binary youth about 42%.
These numbers are mocked by transphobes regularly. It is not an accident that our suffering is ignored.
I hope I have made clear what we are here today for. This is not to relegate our suffering to one day and move on, we do not honor the dead by remembering them for one day. We honor them by fighting for those they left behind. We honor them by finding a strength in the horror at these deaths to try and stop any more from happening. There are things we can all do, big and small, to change this. We can demand justice, support our transgender communities, let the trans people in our lives know they are loved and not alone when it seems like all of society wants us to disappear. We can do something to make this list shorter. Last year it was 422, the year before that 358. Since this October, there have been 34 deaths so far.
But if we come here just to read a list of names and change nothing then why the fuck are any of us here?