Remembered And Celebrated

Auden Cody Neuman, Copyright © The University of Victoria's Independent Newspaper "The Martlet"

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Transgender ay of Remembrance ... it's not just about trans people. It's about anyone who's had to learn the rules of gender, or who's suffered the injustices that come from stepping outside of them.

Aman with salt-and-pepper hair and a black jacket pauses outside the lit-up windows of the Cornerstone Café. It's after eight on a Thursday night in the final days of October. I see him peer through the glass, then watch as he reads the signs posted on the door: "Café Closed," "TransAction Meeting here!" Lights from the Fernwood Inn and the Belfry Theater illuminate this junction of Fernwood square. The clatter-crash of a kitchen next door drifts in through the walls.

Inside the café, seventeen bodies sit in a circle on chairs, couches and laps. Hands clutch steaming coffee mugs, the late-night caffeine a telltale sign of activism at work. Laughter bubbles as people chatter and bound ideas around. This is TransAction, a community-based activist group dedicated to bringing awareness of transgender-related issues to Victoria.

"Maybe he wants to join us," a friend says, referring to the curious lurker outside. Perhaps he does, though even as this thought is voiced his figure vanishes into the night.

TransAction is an eclectic bunch - the campus fauna of students, TAs and instructors mingles with members of the broader community. There's an age spread of twenty- to fifty-somethings and a mix of genders and sexualities too diverse to name.

I sip black coffee as the group's chatter draws my attention. The Transgender Day of Remembrance (T.D.O.R.), to be held at Centennial Square on November 20, is mere weeks away; there is much to do.

TransAction formed this September as an offshoot of the former on-campus trans advocacy group, Trans-Alliance. In November 2007, Trans-Alliance organised Victoria's first T.D.O.R. in collaboration with the Women's Centre, the Pride Collective and the Anti-Violence Project.

T.D.O.R. is an international event, and began in San Francisco in 1999. The existence of a Victoria T.D.O.R. in 2007 brought awareness of transgender issues and a sense of community to many people's lives.

"Personally, it helped me meet a bunch of trans people and allies who have supported and helped me in my journey," says Ryan Chapman, TransAction member and former Trans-Alliance member.

Like Remembrance Day, T.D.O.R. is a memorial. November 20 is a day for pause and reflection to honour the brave souls lost to anti-transgender violence. But unlike more traditional days of remembrance, T.D.O.R. reflects upon a battle still raging, an age-old conflict that leaves an ever-growing list of fallen soldiers: the victims of transphobic hatred.

Tasha Dunn: the name topping the list of the dead.

Beside her name is a chilling #1, a digit that kicks off a kind of staccato rhythm in my head - #1 Tasha Dunn, #2 Jacqueline Julita Anderson, #3 Leslie Re'Geanne, #4 Regina Haskins, #5 Karla (José Alexis) Barrahona ... all the way to #237 Ruby Molina.

Dunn has a story to tell. On Valentine's Day 1998, she lay slain and shoeless in a vacant lot in Sulphur Springs, a district of Tampa, Florida. She had been bludgeoned to death. Tampa Police claimed to know no motive, and her murder went unsolved. Yet Dunn is not silent - she speaks across a decade. Her body is her message. She was impoverished, a sex worker, possibly homeless. And she was transgendered.

Targeted for a potent intersection of class, gender and sexuality, Dunn was vulnerable to gender-based violence. Hers is the first name on a list compiled on the International T.D.O.R. website , a growing headcount of those lost since 1998. But first on the list doesn't mean first ever. Dunn's is not the only broken body to speak this story.It started before Dunn lost her shoes, before the gender warriors of Stonewall rioted against the New York Police, before Richard von Krafft-Ebing violated transman Sandor V. in the name of medical science and wrote his monster-making text, Psychopathia Sexualis.

It begins before words like transsexual or transgender found their way into language. It begins before heroes like Leslie Feinberg or Susan Stryker or Riki Wilchins went to war with their pens and their ink and their bodies for trans and gender rights. It begins wherever I look.

I find it where Aristotle strikes manhood from the male slave and womanhood from the female slave to justify their captivity. I find it where British imperialism constructs colonised men as effeminate or hyper-masculine, and colonised women as passive or oversexed to justify conquest and rule, and where the Bush administration recycles the same dialogues to justify imperialist wars. I find it in the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which, to this day, justifies corrective therapy for gender variant children to prevent them from growing up gay.

This story is everywhere and it's not just about trans people. It's about men and women, girls and boys, cross-dressers, drag performers, intersexuals, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, queers, sissies and tomboys, dykes and faggots, trannies and androgynes, heterosexuals and hockey players and police officers and firemen and couture models. It's about anyone who's had to learn the rules of gender, or who's suffered the injustices that come from stepping outside of them.

Dialogues of improper gender are the cruel tools of history that define who is worthy of autonomy, respect, independence, self-determination, liberty, citizenship, safety, personhood and life.

Just ask #13 Rita Hester, whose shadowy presence gives this story shape.

Hester died in Boston of multiple stab wounds on November 28, 1998. She was attacked in her apartment and died in a hospital. Hester had lived 10 years as a woman, and had feminized her body through surgery, yet both mainstream and gay media sources dismissed her as a cross-dressing man, a pervert, a prostitute and a freak. Like Dunn's, Hester's murder remains unsolved.

Yet, from the memory of this crime came a movement: shortly after Hester's death, Gwendolyn Ann Smith of San Francisco began the Remembering Our Dead project; an online memorial for those killed by anti-transgender violence and medical neglect. The project is a call to arms. "We have lost so many people in our community to the hand of hatred and [prejudice], yet we still are not seemingly willing to fight back," Smith wrote in 1999. "Meanwhile, we die at the hands of a lover, of police, of medical practitioners, and even parents, while the news media calls us "freaks"- and worse ... will we be willing to bear yet another century of violence and hatred aimed at those who do not so easily wear "man" or "woman"? The San Francisco community of the late '90s was not willing. On November 20, 1999, eight days short of a year when Hester died, a candlelight vigil was held in her honor. This was the first T.D.O.R..

Now an international event in its tenth year, T.D.O.R. memorialises those who have been killed. In addition, it draws attention to the violence faced by transgender and gender variant people and the lack of satisfactory coverage of this violence in media.

On September 21, 2008, the 237th name appeared on the International T.D.O.R.s list of the dead. The body of a twenty-two-year-old transwoman, Ruby Molina, was discovered in the Sacramento River.

Molina's death brings the total for 2008 up to nineteen thus far. As Victoria's second annual T.D.O.R. draws near, the memory of Rita Hester continues to call for an end to this violence and hate.

Anna Turje reclines in the sun in front of the Student Union Building doors at the University of Victoria. They - a chosen gender-neutral pronoun - have a picket sign propped against their knees. Books, photocopied readings and a mug with dried coffee at the bottom surrounds them. Turje is six feet of dark-haired genderqueer in a black hoody; sharp eyes peer from behind large glasses above a devilish grin.

Turje, like Chapman, was a member of Trans-Alliance before helping to form TransAction, the more "punk rock" version of the group. Turje also emceed the Anti-Queer Bashing (A.Q.B.) Rally on campus on March 25, 2008.

"We [members of Trans-Alliance] realised that a ridiculous amount of people had died since T.D.O.R.," says Turje. "One event just wasn't enough." Turje points out that queer-bashing and trans-bashing are part and parcel of the same.

"Gay bashings are purported to be based on sexuality, yet queer people are often targeted because they display traits of gender non-conformity," Turje says. "Meanwhile, people who are gender-variant are read as sexually deviant. You can't differentiate between the two when it comes to violence."

The A.Q.B. Rally was a direct response to the death of Lawrence King. On February 12, 2008, less than three months after T.D.O.R., the fifteen-year-old was shot at E.O. Green Junior High in California. King was targeted for his gender expression and sexual identity. Having come out as gay at age ten, he bravely began presenting at school in dresses, high heels and make-up approximately a month before his murder. King's killer was fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney.

"[Turje] and I were saddened and outraged at King's death," says Chapman, who also helped organise the A.Q.B. Rally. "The more research we did the more we became convinced an event had to happen."

Chapman describes the rally, which occurred at the Petch fountain in front of McPhearson, as "an embodiment of our outrage at the violence that gender-variant people experience."

The March event consisted of speeches, a die-in, a gender analysis workshop, a screening of Gwen Haworth's film, "She's a Boy I Knew" (2007) and a community art project to record experiences of genderism and gender or sexuality-based violence. According to Chapman, community ties created at T.D.O.R. 2007 helped make the rally possible. "We had allies and gender-variant people and community members speak out about deaths and legal cases and personal experiences," said Chapman. "For me it was a very different experience than T.D.O.R., where I still felt isolated and alone."

Violence is not the only challenge faced by trans and gender-variant people.

Misunderstanding and discrimination in institutional and public settings places barriers in the way of safe and healthy living.

T.J. Naven, a trans activist whose work has included organizing T.D.O.R. events in Ontario and helping égale Canada in efforts to create a national trans resource directory, says violence is only part of the picture.

"Suicide, self-harm, addiction, lack of resources and education, and lack of access to housing, medical care and employment are all common in the trans community," Naven says.

These factors contribute to a sense of a lost older generation. In Victoria, the face of trans activism is often the face of youth. Danna Waldman, a TransAction member in her 50s, cites the statistics she learned from trans academic Dr. Viviane Namaste.

"AIDS is an organic factor in removing trans men and women in my age group through isolation, hospitalisation, disease-induced suicide and death," Waldman says. "There are [H.I.V.] infection rates of up to 100 per cent in North American cities among trans sex trade workers."

Medical, penal and law enforcement institutions are further sites of discrimination, says Waldman.

"Transfolk are dying in hospitals and prisons due to institutionalized neglect and punishment," Waldman states, calling to memory the case of Tyra Hunter, who died in 1995 after being denied medical care by paramedics because she was trans. "In the case of incarceration of both pre and post-op trans women in male prisons, they are refused access to life-and-death medical necessities, like dilators and hormones."

The reality intersecting the sites of discrimination in the lives of many trans people cannot be ignored. Limited access to jobs, education and housing places people on the streets or in the sex industry, increasing their vulnerability to violence, addiction, suicide, H.I.V. / AIDS, punitive legal action and the ravages of poverty.

Racism in anti-trans violence also cannot be ignored, as many of the names on the Remembering Our Dead website recall. A high percentage of those targeted, including Hester and Hunter, were trans people of colour.

"We can't disconnect the oppression that trans people face from the oppression of all marginalised groups," Naven says.

Combating violence against gender-variant people is the main purpose of T.D.O.R., yet this is not its only goal. Representation, visibility, awareness and community are also key issues. TransAction dedicates itself towards these goals.

Victoria T.D.O.R. 2008 will not be only a day of remembrance, but two weeks of celebration, education and memorial for local gender-variant people and their friends, families and allies.

"I'm excited about the number of events we're having," says Chapman. "There will be public events to create greater awareness and visibility, but this year we have an awareness of safety leading to more private events as well, where people can come to experience safer spaces without outing themselves to a broader community."

In the events that span a period from November 7 to 22, there will be an open microphone night, workshops on zine-making, gender analysis and safer spaces, a movie night, an All Bodies Wrestle & Swim and, of course, the vigil at Centennial Square.

T.D.O.R. and trans and gender advocacy are not just for people who identify as transgendered, transsexual or genderqueer.

"Gender affects us all; we are all limited and contained by it," Turje says. "This is about every boy who feels humiliated when his mom asks him to hold her purse, or every girl who feels pressure to stop playing sports. It's about power imbalances in dating that might expose a woman to rape. It's about so many things." Turje emphasises that the more we interrogate the ways gender controls our lives, the more we will be able to imagine a world where we will have the freedom to express all sides of ourselves without fear. If there is a message that the bodies of the 237 speak, a lesson in this long history of gender violence, then surely this is it.

History needs to claim no further souls to make its message clear. By the light of the candles on November 20, a prayer was said and a determination made for the 237 to rest in peace at last.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.