Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today marks the 10th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance:

The Transgender Day of Remembrance was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Rita Hester’s murder — like most anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance site has a list of those who were killed in 2008 because of anti-transgender bias. The most recent was Teish (Moses) Cannon, shot in Syracuse, New York, November 14, 2008.

Because this is a parenting site, I must once again highly recommend Cris Beam’s Lambda Literary Award-winning book, Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, which tells the tales of four homeless transgender teens she first met while teaching at a school for LGBT youth in LA. One of them, Christine, became her foster child. It is not only a book offering insight on an important topic, but a wonderful read, weaving personal tales with broader themes into a gripping narrative. (I’ve written more on it here.)

Two practical guides worth a read are The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals, for parents with transgender or gender variant children, and The Kids of Trans Resource Guide, by Monica Canfield-Lenfest, for children of transgender parents. I reviewed both in July.

My thoughts are with the trans community today.