News Item

Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Success

December 9, 2002

Event largest multi-venue transgender event ever. The 4th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, held November 20th, 2002,  was an event on a scale never before seen in the transgender community.   In over 90 different locations across the world, transgendered people  and their supporters took a stand against anti-transgender violence.

Events were held in eight different countries - Australia, Canada,  Chile, France, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the United States. In the US  alone, events could be found in 31 states and the District of Columbia,  stretching across the country from Massachusetts to California.

Several key locations held events this year, including 9 of the 10 most  populace cities in the United States, over half the areas where an  anti-transgender murder took place in 2002, and 8 of the 9 "most  dangerous" cities according to the statistics presented via the  Remembering Our Dead web site.

There were nearly four times as many events as in 2001, with growth  being seen mostly in the number of High Schools, Colleges, and  Universities hosting activities. Over half of this years' events were  held on school campuses, leading to new and unique ways of getting the  message across. Some schools opted to present chalk outlines of
transgender victims around their school, while Wesleyan College took on  one of the most contentious of locations -- the restroom -- making the  men's and women's rooms on their campus gender neutral for the day, and  papering the walls of these place with slogans and information about the  needs of the transgendered.

The involvement at the International level was notable this year as  well. Italian transgender activists joined forces to host events in four  different cities, and got the largest labor union in Italy to note the  event on their site. Perth, Australia and three locations in Canada  represented the British Commonwealth, and even a small group of
transgendered people in Tel Aviv took a moment to remember those we've  lost at the hand of anti-transgender violence and prejudice.

This was also an event that brought together a number of organizations.  The Transgender Day of Remembrance has long been a project of Gender  Education & Advocacy (www.gender.org), but the Gay and Lesbian Alliance  Against Defamation, Female to Male International, the National  Transgender Advocacy Coalition, and the National Consortium of LGBT  Educators in Higher Education also lent a hand in making the event a  success in 2002. Even old foes of the transgender movement, the Human   Rights Campaign, noted the Day of Remembrance on their web site.

Given that 2002 also has been one of the worst on record for these sorts  of violent acts, it was only fair that the turnout was this high. As of  the day of the event, 27 people had been reported killed since the  previous Transgender Day of Remembrance. 13 of those deaths were in the  United States, with the most recent being that of Gwen Araujo. She was  beaten and strangled to death at a house party in Newark California.

For more information on the Remembering Our Dead project and the Day of  Remembrance, see www.rememberingourdead.org