Transgender Day of Remembrance
39 precious lives honored
By Joe Delaplaine
Los Angeles
The Transgender Day of Remembrance, now an
annual event, began after the killing of Rita Hester, an
African American trans woman found stabbed in her Boston
apartment on Nov. 28, 1998. The police wouldn't investigate her
death and the commercial media reported her murder with
enormous disrespect and bigotry.
One goal of the Transgender Day of Remembrance is to educate
the larger community about the violence and prejudice trans
people face daily.
In November 1999, a year after Rita Hester's murder, a
candlelight vigil was held in San Francisco. Each year the
memorial grows larger and more international. This year, 92
cities worldwide held events, including 21 cities in France,
Australia, Israel, Scotland, Canada and Italy.
This year in the U.S. 39 transgender people were officially
recorded as killed in particularly brutal and violent ways.
This is despite the under-reporting of many deaths of
transgender people, which are often not officially recorded as
such. Many of these lost lives, many of them people of color,
have been under-investigated by police, if they are
investigated at all.
In this year's Transgender Day of Remembrance, 71 cities in
the United States raised the visibility of this injustice. High
school and college students, from Sarah Lawrence to Humbolt
State, organized events. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
communities large and small held panel discussions and invited
speakers.
Across the country, candlelight vigils were held in Salt
Lake City, Utah, and in front of the Capitol building in
Washington, D.C. Indigenous Two-Spirited people sang and
drummed in Denver as volunteers extinguished candles in a
ceremony called Tennebrae, to honor the dead. People marched in
New Orleans, Boston, San Diego and San Francisco, just to name
a few cities.
In West Hollywood, 300 spirited trans people and their
allies--including youth and many people of color--marched in
the streets, chanting and shutting down the main thoroughfare
for a mile until they reached Matthew Shepard Memorial park.
Once there, speakers demanded their own memorial for trans
victims of this bigotry-inspired violence.
The four-hour event began with a multi-media tribute to Gwen
Araujo, a transgender teenager murdered last year in Newark,
Calif. A panel of trans speakers took the microphone.
In a particularly moving moment, 39 trans people, each
representing a person whose life was claimed this year by
violence, stood and read the names of the dead aloud and a
description of how they died.
Calpernia Adams was the final speaker before the march. Her
boyfriend, 21-year-old Pfc. Barry Winchell, was beaten to death
with a baseball bat in 1999 by another soldier as he slept in
his base barracks at the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division at
Fort Campbell, Ky. He died the next day.
Winchell had been the target of six months of anti-gay
epithets and harassment after he began dating Adams. Soldiers
in Winchell's company reportedly complained to their officers
about the treatment he was suffering. Yet the officers did
nothing. Despite protests by Winchell's family and LGBT groups
and activists, the commander of Fort Campbell at that time,
Maj. Gen. Robert T. Clark, appears to be getting another
promotion as a U.S. Army officer.
At the end of this year's Day of Remembrance here, Shirley
Bushnell, a key organizer of the event and a leader of L.A.'s
Transgender Menace, urged support for the effort to create the
first national memorial in West Hollywood for victims of
anti-transgender violence.
Reprinted from the Dec. 4, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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