Day of Remembrance Keynote Address
Delivered by Alex Roan at the Transgender Day of Remembrance Ceremony held in USM's Glickman Library on 11/16/07.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance began in San Francisco in 1999 with a candlelight vigil to honor Rita Hester, who was murdered in November of 1998. Each year since then, a day in November is set aside to remember those who were victims of violence during that year. Although not every individual we remember identified as transgender, transsexual, genderqueer or otherwise gender variant, each was a victim of violence based on someone’s perception that their expression of gender was not acceptable—and that this unacceptability somehow justified an act of violence. According to the “Remembering Our Dead” web project, “Over the last decade, one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating.”
I admit that sometimes gender-based violence seems like a distant problem—an issue that has little connection to my own life. I think of Brandon Teena’s murder out in rural Texas, for example; tragic, but seemingly a world away from Portland, Maine. But, did you know that Rita Hester was stabbed to death less than a two-hour’s drive from the building we are gathered in right now?—she died in Allston, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Though Rita had never lived as a man for all the years she resided in the Boston area, the Boston Globe reported the death of a “William Hester,” a name unfamiliar to Rita’s friends and all those who knew her in the community. The Globe went on to describe, “[He] was a man who sported long braids and preferred women’s clothes…”
Not only was Rita’s life taken in a brutal act of violence, but the whole of her gender identity was then ignored by the media, who, with a few careless lines of print, obscured and disregarded her experience of gender.
So why are we all here tonight? Why do we need to remind ourselves of one more brand of tragedy in a world that has so many problems? I’d like to give one possible answer to that question. The casual disregard of Rita’s identity that I just mentioned is something that I think all of us under the transgender umbrella (and probably most people in general) can relate to to some degree. How many of us have faced discrimination because of our gender, or have been told that we are not masculine enough, not feminine enough, or that we are not really transgender, but just “going through a phase”?
We are here tonight to honor those who have lost their lives due to anti-transgender violence, and we are here to affirm our own identities and the right we have as human beings to define, express, label (or choose not to label) our genders as whatever we feel best expresses who we are at that moment in time.
As we remember those individuals whose lives have been lost, I invite you to make a commitment to yourself to live your own life to the fullest in a way that those we remember did not have the opportunity to do. I read a quote recently that said, “Oppression can only survive through silence.” By our presence here tonight, we are showing that we will not be silent, and we will not forget the victims whose voices were silenced all too soon. Let us use this occasion as inspiration to take action in whatever way our circumstances allow, in the hope that someday there will be no new victims of violence to remember in a ceremony like this one. Until then, let us boldly persevere in our efforts to challenge oppression and prejudice of all kinds so that we may see the day when no one is pressured to conform to a binary system of gender, a day when an individual’s gender identity can be as unique as each of our personalities (or each of the snowflakes that we could see around here any day now).
We are here to honor the individuals whose lives have been lost this year, and I believe that by celebrating our own diverse gender identities, we affirm their identities, and that through our actions, they will not be forgotten.