I INVITE YOU: Let’s look at the continuing relevance of the Transgender Day of Remembrance

For what action am I known more often than anything else at observances of the International Transgender Day of Remembrance? No, it isn’t speaking, though I have spoken at these events. I’m more known for walking out and continuing my observance at home.

It isn’t that I oppose the International Transgender Day of Remembrance (ITDOR). Far from it. What I do oppose is the grandstanding that sponsoring organizations too often do.

Colloquially referred to as “T-DoR”, the most sacred event among transpeople, has too often been turned into a big commercial. It has regrettably taken a carnival atmosphere with booths set up for sponsoring organizations, creating such noise that people have trouble hearing the speakers. Not that it would matter of course, if speakers waste time talking about the progress of their own transitions, something I couldn’t believe my ears was happening. Clearly, both sponsoring organizations and self-obsessed speakers only pretend to observe the Day of Remembrance. They really don’t observe it at all.

It’s because the Day of Remembrance isn’t about the sponsors. It isn’t about individual transitions. For that matter, it isn’t about you and me per sé. It’s about them: victims that made a list of 369 dead this year as published by Trans Respect vs. Transphobia.¹

369 and that list only extends to the end of September. That list grows longer every year. If we thought the Day of Remembrance has produced a reduction in hate crimes, it clearly hasn’t despite almost 2 decades of protest. Why continue with the Day of Remembrance at all?

THE WORLD’S DEAF EAR

Just look at the names in the United States as the Human Rights Campaign described them in advance of this year’s observance. I won’t convey how those people may have died simply because it isn’t actually relevant. It isn’t relevant because we shouldn’t be focused upon the manner of their dying, but the manner of their living.

January 5: Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien, 42, in North Adams MA., producer of transgender pageants.
January 10: Viccky Gutierrez, 33, a Honduran immigrant living in Los Angeles.
February 4: Celine Walker, 36, In Jacksonville FL. We don’t know much of anything about her except that police didn’t treat her as a transwoman. Why so little information?
February 6: Tonya Harvey, 35, in Buffalo, N.Y. One friend told us about her on Facebook, saying, “I knew her since I started transitioning, she was so sweet and loving.”
February 19 (missing in January) Zakaria Fry, 28, in New Mexico. One testified of her loving nature, calling Zakaria her “older sister.”
February 23: Phylicia Mitchell, 45, in Cleveland OH. Shane Mitchell, her partner said she was “funny and kind.”
March 26: Amia Tyrae Berryman, 28, in Baton Rouge LA. We know nothing concerning Amia.
April 1: Sasha Wall, 29, in Chesterfield County SC. Donovan Dunlap mourned her passing, calling her, “my beautiful sister.”
May 9: Karla Patricia Flores-Pavón, 26, in Dallas TX. A friend testified to her good-heartedness.
May 13: Nino Fortson, 36, in Atlanta GA. Nothing is provided in terms of how he lived.
May 21: Gigi Pierce, 28, in Portland OR. Again, nothing is provided in terms of how she lived.
May 25: Roxsana Hernandez, a Honduran asylum seeker who died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
June 1: Antash’a English, 38, in Jacksonville FL. She had described herself as “independent” and thriving on “being the best person” possible.
June 18: Diamond Stephens, 39, in Meridian MS. Her family testified to her “incredible personality.”
June 24: Cathalina Christina James, 24, in Jacksonville FL. Her mother told how she was “big and bold”, loving dance and travel.
June 24: Keisha Wells, 54, in Cleveland OH. A friend called Keisha “the nicest person ever” but a “tough cookie.”
July 19: Sasha Garden, 27, in Orlando FL. She was called a “firecracker” who “didn’t hold anything back.”
July 19: Jessie Sumlar, 30, in Jacksonville FL. Jessie identified as “queer” and performed in drag.
August 30: Vontashia Bell, 18, in Shreveport LA. While nothing is offered in terms of her life, Louisiana Trans Advocates called on Shreveport leaders to stop anti-trans violence.
August 30: Dejanay Stanton, 24. All that was spoken of Dejanay was that she always had a smile on her face.
September 5: Shantee Tucker, 30, in Philadelphia PA. Friends said she had a “beautiful spirit and fun aura.”
September 8: Londonn Moore, 20, North Port FL. People told how she “made everyone laugh all the time.”
Undetermined day in September: Nikki Enriquez, 28, who had died along with 3 other woman. Her cousin Veronica Castillo called her “beloved” and “very outgoing” girl who loved to party.
October 3: Ciara Minaj Carter Frazier, 31, Chicago IL. All that was spoken about her was from friends who said they will always miss her.²

For further details you can follow the links at HRC here. But you can see how sketchy our sense of these people really is when we read on the surface. Most descriptions we read only tell us what others thought about these people and little about who these people were. We haven’t really come to humanize them. We’ve delegated them to names associated with opinions, then set them aside. The world list is even worse. Out of the 369 murders noted worldwide, 54 don’t even note names at all. They don’t exist as people in the press and probably not to law enforcement either.³

But think. How many of those 24 U.S. names did you even bother to read? Chances are, you just skimmed over them.

But then again, the U.S. list consists of only 24 compared to last year’s 29.⁴ Isn’t that an improvement for America? Oh come on, give me a break.

If that’s how we think, then we really are all about statistics instead of people and that as a community we’re wasting our time fooling ourselves. We haven’t done much of anything to humanize anyone just by telling one another, “Say the names.” Look at the person next to you at the next TDOR observance. Is this a statistic or a human being to be respected? Do you remember that person any better than you would any of those names unless you spend time with them and get to know them? Nope. And the same would be true of that other person when it comes to you.

So if we don’t do any better at humanizing the victims than the press does, how should we expect anyone in authority to do so? Why shouldn’t they turn a deaf ear to us if we turn a deaf ear to one another, even to the point of silencing others? Let’s not pretend that we don’t. We do.

Some weeks ago this writer offered an idea: that support groups should take up a cause to provide a “registry of souls” (link) by which members may deposit their ideas, their joys, the things they learned so they could teach others. Such registries could go a long ways to make our dead less than the statistics we have made them to be. They could also provide a resource for expanding our social spheres within the community as starting points for conversation.⁵

But we have to be willing to make friends in the first place. I wish I had a dime for every business card I had given in a conversation I had started while working a room only to never hear from that other person again. You can predict what happens if I stumble across someone I had previously met. They typically scowl and say they never heard of me and treat me like an evil freak for intruding upon their clique just like those outside my “community” do. Face it. We’ve become nothing more to one another than names on “social media.” Despite the claims of services like Facebook and Twitter to bring us together they actually exploit us through addiction to social media and clickbaity clientele while selling our personal information to marketers and foreign entities.

Names at ITDOR can’t fare any better. I tell you soberly. Social media has only succeeded in producing its own elites, weeding out all others by saturating minds and schedules with memes. “Friends” consist of those who find your message agreeable. If they don’t, they’ll attack you, unfollow you, or block you. Rarely will anyone on social media accept an invitation to dinner. From social media we learn that we waste our time by engaging in social media.

Consequently, we learn to do the same in real life and become more isolated in a Kafkaesque world than ever. Just like I’ve forsaken social media (no account for Lynnea Urania Stuart exists anymore) I reserve no expectation that anyone will remember me if I’m murdered. Why should remembrance of me in death be any greater than remembrance of me in life? It’s preposterous.

Yet I still continue to observe the International Transgender Day of Remembrance.

IT’S IN OUR TOLERANCE (OR LACK THEREOF)

Is that a paradox? Not really. ITDOR appeals to the conscience. It always has. It always will. It also teaches us not to tolerate. I don’t believe in social tolerance.

Yes, I realize that my saying so will make people think I’ve gone off the deep end by saying so. But there’s reasoning behind the “madness”.

Tolerance carries within it a hidden paradox, one understood by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies.⁶

The Paradox of Tolerance states that unlimited tolerance inevitably leads to the obliteration of tolerance.⁷

How’s that again?

If we extend tolerance to those who are intolerant without defending a tolerant society against the intolerant, the intolerant will destroy the tolerant, and consequently, tolerance itself.⁸

Tolerance has an inherent flaw within the very concept of tolerance. To visualize what tolerance is socially, consider what it is in manufacturing. When we examine a schematic we often have to consider the tolerances in which we must work. They consist of some allowable variation from a particular standard as laid out on a schematic. Such tolerances are measurable, either in fractions of an inch, fractions of a millimeter, or in percentages. Some tolerances, as in the alignment of pumps, are so precise we measure hundredths of inches. Millrights make a living by such precision.

When we apply the same to society, we’re left to determine that there must also be a standard for what humans may be. It doesn’t stop with those maxims that have guided our moral sense. It extends to existential attributes as well. The trouble with social tolerance begins because we have no objective means of measuring where “red lines” have been crossed in terms of who someone may be. Society is always in flux and so are individual tolerances. But the real trouble with tolerance relies upon a deeper premise: that the tolerant must presume some inherent right to judge who the next person should or should not be.

That doesn’t say we shouldn’t have courts of law. There’s a difference between judging who the next person is and judging the harm the next person does. Harm is measurable. Measuring who a person is belongs to the divine for it’s beyond human capacity to judiciously measure another human.

So if I don’t believe in social tolerance, in what do I believe?

The answer is simple. I believe in liberty. While tolerance presumes the right to judge and measure a human being, liberty allows no such presumption.

Liberty also demands respect for the liberty of others. Because of that respect we must also defend liberty against those who use the rhetoric of “liberty” to curtail the liberties of others, thereby turning liberty into license.

Liberty turned into license is exactly what we see when people marginalize others in the name of “religious freedom.”
It’s what we see when one group is branded as pariahs, then another, then another… and rest assured that there will always be another group to stigmatize.
It’s what we see every time someone sees another in need, turns up his nose in arrogance, and further victimizes that person.
It’s what we see every time someone comes before a court of law and claims the panic defense as “justification” for the most horrific crimes.
It’s what we see whenever someone is denied employment, housing, education, or medical care because a group has dehumanized another as “freaks”.

These actions are about only one thing: a cult ethic in which members seek power, prestige, and prosperity for itself while carelessly destroying their neighbors to get what they covet and eliminating what they don’t care to face; all the while pretending they don’t do such things and condemning anyone as a “false witnesses” for saying they do.

THE REAL PURPOSE OF THE DAY OF REMEMBRANCE

Liberty turned into license is also what has given us these monstrous lists of the transgender dead. If the list is just that, a list, who have we really remembered? Of whom do you think when you observe the International Transgender Day of Remembrance? It isn’t a day for grandstanding. It’s a day to offer what has too often been denied to victims in their lifetimes: the affirmation of their right to be.

We don’t just affirm their right to be. We affirm it for all. For they who turn liberty into license embrace a pernicious disease that transforms them into oppressors… and God help the genuinely oppressed. Our lists of the murdered are testaments of who the victims of oppression really are.

So please join me in the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. If grandstanding is too off-putting, then observe it with some friends or observe it alone. Set up your memorial, light a candle in the window, any way that speaks to you and to others. It’s about liberty. Real liberty.

___________________________

REFERENCES:

Featured Image: A lone candle burns in remembrance of the transgender dead (Image by the author)

(n.a.) “Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR) 2018” Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide (press release and names list updated September 30, 2018, accessed November 14, 2018) https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-trans-day-of-remembrance-2018/.
(n.a.) Vilence Against the Transgender Community in 2018” Human Rights Campaign (website accessed November 14, 2018) https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2018.
Op. cit.
Op. cit.
Lynnea Urania Stuart. “Transgender Registries of Souls: the need for archives of resistance” Trans Muse Planet (October 7, 2018, accessed November 14, 2018) https://thetmplanet.com/transgender-registries-of-souls-the-need-for-archives-of-resistance/.
Jason Kottke. “The Paradox of Tolerance” Kottke.org (August 17, 2017, accessed November 14, 2018) https://kottke.org/17/08/the-paradox-of-tolerance.
Ibid.
Ibid.