On November 20th of every year, the transgender community commemorates the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a memorial to honour those who have died as a result of anti-transgender hatred or prejudice through violence or negligence. This is a list that grows by an average of 18 known instances per year.

The event was started in order to honour Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 inspired the “Remembering Our Dead” web project by Gender Education and Advocacy, Inc. (www.rememberingourdead.org) and a candlelight vigil the following year. Rita Hester’s murder — like many anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved.

Not every person represented in the Day of Remembrance identified themselves as transgendered (transsexual, cross dresser, or gender-variant in a number of other ways), but each fatality was a result of trans-phobic bias or by extension homophobic bias, but pertaining specifically to one’s gender expression or identity.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is designed to raise public awareness of hate crimes against transgendered people, something that is often missed in the current media. The event publicly mourns and honours the lives of our brothers and sisters who might otherwise be forgotten. It reminds non-transgendered people that we are still someone’s son, daughter, parent, friend and lover.

Names on the list are sometimes as nondescript as “John” or “unnamed male in womens’ clothing,” which is sometimes all that is ever disseminated in the media. Others are familiar pioneers in GLBT history, such as Marsha P. Johnson, who is credited along with Sylvia Rivera as helping to initiate the Stonewall Riot that touched off the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. There are widely-known stories, such as those of Gwen Araujo or Brandon Teena (the latter was the subject of the movie, Boys Don`t Cry), and lower-profile heartbreaks, such as the death of Robert Eads from ovarian cancer simply because he could not find a medical professional willing to treat him. There is even a local connection, in Gracie Detzer, who was strangled and drowned in her own bathtub in Edmonton, in 1997.

While the official list contains over 360 names from 1970 to present, it is also clear that there are far more unreported cases worldwide – it needs to be kept in mind that these statistics were not actually compiled until 1998. In many cases, the victims of anti-transgender violence are not identified as such, due to the silence of their families, fear of the police among friends of the victims, and the refusal of the police to investigate these murders and/or report them as hate crimes.

One hesitates to talk about numbers, as human beings are worth far more than that. But the statistics are nonetheless staggering, and have to be acknowledged as such. The deadliest year was 2002, with 34 reported deaths, followed by 2003 with 32 (the months of December 2002 and August 2003 both reported 6 deaths each), and it is thought that the dramatic increase in recent years is solely because violence against transgendered persons is now being reported and the statistics are now being gathered.

It should also not be forgotten that gender biases and issues affect us all - the women who experience being swept aside at times by apparent male privilege, males who are bullied and ridiculed for being perceived as too effeminate, women who experience assumptions made about them because they are labeled as being too “butchy” - gender stereotyping provides one more means by which people can be marginalized and discriminated against, sometimes dramatically so, as the Day of Remembrance reminds us.

More than once, for example, an infant was murdered by a parent who felt that the child was too “sissy” (Ronnie Paris Jr., Mikey Vallejo-Seiber) or because they were born with ambiguous genitalia (at least one unnamed infant). One man, Willie Houston, was murdered in a violent assault in a Tennessee department store because he held the hand of a blind male he was assisting, while holding his wife’s purse (she was trying on clothes in a fitting room). The case of Virginia Grace Soto - who has fortunately survived the experience in August of this year of being incarcerated with male inmates because of assumptions about her gender despite having always been biologically female – reminds us that there can sometimes be sobering and stark realities in the way gender is policed.

In 2007, we remember victims of some excessively violent crimes: Blunt force trauma to the head, a beating by 9 youths who then slit their victim`s throat, a woman stabbed 5 times by a street vendor, another found in a pit with her face completely disfigured, yet another repeatedly struck by a car. We also remember people like Victoria Arellano, a transgender woman who had been detained as an illegal immigrant in the US; they denied her the medications she needed to stave off HIV-related pulmonary infection and pneumonia and left her to die over the course of two months, mostly tended to only by the other male detainees with whom she’d been incarcerated.

The 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance is being held in the third week of November, and allies are invited to stand with us to remember the hundreds of people on record so far, and work toward a greater awareness to help stop the ongoing cycle of hate. Together, we can express love and respect for trans people in the face of national indifference and hatred, whatever our differences.

Memorials will be held in Calgary on Sunday November 18th, 2:00 at the Old YWCA Centre (223 - 12th Ave SW) and in Edmonton on Tuesday November 20th, at 7:30, at The Pride Centre of Edmonton (9540 - 111 Avenue). Cameras are strictly forbidden at both events.