Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. Even though I don't identify as a transsexual, I am very proud of every single person who has had the strength to step up and do the business of making their body match their mind.

These murders are so disturbing, in my mind, because of the absolute disgust the perpetrators must have had for their victims. To me, it seems so inconceivable to be threatened by a person to the extent that you want to kill them. What kinds of problems did these perpetrators have? What were they trying to prove? How godly they are? How manly they are? Manly enough to get a blow job from a prostitute, and then manly enough not to let her live once he found out what that person had gone though? Makes me fucking sick.

I've been looking through the lists of dead here, and what I think bothers me the most is the number of "Unknown" people who were murdered. To be unknown in death is the final way to strip someone's humanity. Some of these people had already their families, friends, and financial stability in pursuit of themselves, and to lose what little they had left, a name, is inhuman.

The Remembering Our Dead website lists 353 entries, though I am positive there are hundreds more we don't know about, "Unknowns" who will remain eternally unknown, all because of who they were. I think it's important, on this day, to remember that transgendered people also face an elevated risk of suicide, just like gay and lesbian teenagers. Here, in Southern California, I am lucky that there are several LGBT centers, offering counseling and other services, but the rest of the world isn't like this. That's why it's important to be as out as you can be, so that when young people see us, they know they have a future, and that they can grow up to be who they want to be.

Barbara (William) Brodie

Location: Feltonville, Pennsylvania
Cause of Death: Internal injuries: the liver, abdomen, and lungs were punctured when a blunt instrument was inserted in Brodie’s rectum.
Date of Death: January 3, 1981
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 1981 and Philadelphia Daily News, January 5, 1981

Chiron Collins (Allen Kenneth Byrd)

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Cause of Death: 42 stab wounds to the head, neck, face, and arm by Theodore Roebuck.
Date of Death: May, 1984
Source: Philadelphia Daily News, May 4, 1985
Notes: Theodore Roebuck was convicted of murder, and sentenced to a 40-year state prison term.

Luana (Junior da Silva Lago)

Location: Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
Cause of Death: Drowned
Date of Death: August 4, 1998
Source: Grupo Gay da Bahia
Notes: Police forced Luana and another transvestite sex worker to throw themselves into the sea, after humiliating and torturing them. Luana drowned.

James Jerome Mack

Location: Buffalo, New York
Cause of Death: Beaten with beer bottles, sexually assaulted with a broom handle, strangled with an electrical cord and then drowned in a bathtub. His body was later set on fire in a trash can behind a church
Date of Death: January 21, 2001
Source: The Associated Press, February 23, 2001
Notes: Mack was not himself transgendered, but was the lover of a transgendered woman. On January 21, 2001 he was beaten with beer bottles, sexually assaulted with a broom handle, strangled with an electrical cord and then drowned in a bathtub. His body was later set on fire in a trash can behind a church.