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Today was the twelfth annual Transgender Day of Remembrance in hundreds of cities all over the world. A couple dozen cities, including San José, have memorial events tomorrow (Sunday); a few have events on Monday the 22nd.

I didn't attend any of today's events, and don't know if I'll be up for tomorrow's in San José. But I was thinking about it on and off all day today; I'm sorry I didn't post about it this morning.

About 180 people are on the Trans Murder Monitoring project's list of trans people who were murdered in the past year, worldwide. (And that's only the ones that were reported in such a way that the project found out about them, of course.) There's a PDF file giving more details for each person on the list.

Ethan St. Pierre's TDOR site has another list, with photos of victims (just their faces, and they appear to be photos from when they were alive) and links to news sources. There may be differences of opinion about exactly who belongs on such a list; for example, there's a 16-month-old boy on the St. Pierre list who was killed by a 20-year-old man who was “trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl.” There's no way to know whether or not the kid was trans in the usual sense—but regardless, his death makes abundantly clear that people can get killed for engaging in nonconforming gender presentation, whether they're doing so intentionally or not. (Thanks to Shmuel for pointing to this list and this instance.)

Anyway, my real point is that this is a good time to pause to remember those who've been killed, and to fervently hope that we'll someday live in a world where this kind of thing doesn't happen.