Transgender Day of Remembrance (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and other city officials are expected to be among those participating in the city’s annual Transgender Day of Remembrance set to take place Monday, Nov. 20, at 5:30 p.m. at the Metropolitan Community Church of Washington.
Similar to past years, organizers say the event will commemorate the lives of transgender people who died at the hands of hate violence in the U.S. and abroad over the past year. The commemoration will include the reading of their names and a brief description of where they lived and the circumstances surrounding their deaths, organizers said.
Among the organizers of the D.C. TDOR is Earline Budd, executive director of the local group Empowering the Transgender Community, or ETC.
A statement released by the Baltimore Transgender Alliance says that group will hold a Transgender March of Resilience on Nov. 20, which it says will be a celebration of the transgender community.
“Traditionally, the 20th of November is Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual tradition of honoring our dead that started in 1998 following the murder of [Boston trans woman] Rita Hester,” the statement says.
“This holiday has served our community as a time to mourn and reflect upon the lives senselessly lost to transphobic violence in the previous year,” the statement continues. “However, the impact of silence is lost on those who already feel voiceless – Our tradition, the Trans March of Resilience, subverts this holiday and serves to celebrate the resilience of life in our community,” it says.
The statement says participants in the march will gather at the corner of North and Charles Streets at 5:30 p.m. on Nov. 20. More information about the event and the route of the march can be obtained by contacting Evan Lori Mahone at 410-877-4722 or by emailing info@bmoretransalliance.com.
The D.C. and Baltimore transgender events were scheduled to take place one week after the FBI on Monday released its annual hate crimes statistics report for 2016. The report shows that of the 6,121 hate crime incidents reported for 2016, 1,076 were based on sexual orientation bias and 124 were based on gender identity bias.
The Human Rights Campaign, which analyzed the report, noted that the reporting of hate crimes to the FBI by local law enforcement agencies across the country is not mandatory and the numbers released “significantly undercount the incidents targeting LGBTQ people.”
“The Trump administration, state and local jurisdictions must do more to prevent and respond to hate crimes,” said HRC Government Affairs Director David Stacy. “The numbers in this report are harrowing, and we know that a majority of hate crimes go unreported to the FBI and aren’t reflected in this report,” Stacy said.
