What The Hell Is Wrong With Us?
Around the world today people are observing the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The remembrance began ten years ago in November to honor and remember Rita Hester. Rita was a member of the transgender community in Boston, where she worked locally on education around transgender issues. On Saturday, Nov 28, Rita was stabbed 20 times in her apartment. A neighbor called the police and Rita was rushed to the hospital, but passed away from cardiac arrest only moments after being admitted. Ten years later, Rita's murder - like most anti-transgender murder cases - has yet to be solved.
Carving out public space and time to simultaneously raise awareness of an issue and mourn unnecessary deaths is so important. My only regret about it is that I know how easily it is for many (most?) of us to see a word like "transgender" and immediately think it doesn't apply to us. Even if we feel bad when we hear about people being killed because of who they are, we may think about it as a mourning that isn't for us. We'd be wrong though.
If you think this stuff doesn't apply to you, or if you're still reading this but aren't feeling anything about it in particular, take just a few minutes to read through this page on the Transgender Day of Remembrance website. I don't want to say too much about it because it's best done without a lot of build up, but read through it, carefully, just a few of the brief entries, and then take a second to see how you're feeling. Then come back and keep reading.
Why do we get so freaked out, angry, and even violent when someone who doesn't look the way we expect them to walks into a public washroom? Why are people being killed for what they're wearing? Doesn't that seem unbelievably screwed up?
I know that's not a fair representation of what's happening in these interactions. It's not just about the clothes or which door I walk through to pee. I know that the unrealistic and rigid rules about gender are so deeply ingrained in us and so knotted up with our sense of self that any challenge to them feels (for some of us) like a direct threat to our lives. And I guess I just want to point out that that is what's wrong with us. It's something we all suffer for and something that makes all our lives poorer; it's also something that gets some of us killed.
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