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On the same day that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) officially banned trans women from bathrooms in parts of the U.S. Capitol, people gathered across the world to mark Trans Day of Remembrance, including several dozen people who turned out Wednesday for an event held at the Howell Carnegie District Library.
The vigil was among at least half-a-dozen held across Michigan, to honor the memory of those transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. According to the Human Rights Campaign, at least 28 transgender or gender expansive people have been victims of a violent death in 2024.
Pictures and biographies of each of those victims hung along one wall of the library’s meeting room, an ever present-reminder of the humanity behind the statistics.
Organized by Queer Families of Livingston, the event was kicked off by Howell Mayor Bob Ellis, who greeted those in attendance.
“I think it’s tragic that we’ve lost so many people this year, but it’s also a time that we can get together as a community and show our love and support and provide some amount of hope that things will get better. I think things have improved to some extent. Things may look dark right now, but I’m optimistic that this is a temporary reversal and things will continue to get better,” said Ellis.
One of those speaking was Daily Andrews, the director of clinical services for Stand with Trans, who acknowledged that the group gathered at a time of rising anxiety.
“I know that there’s a lot of fear, a lot of stress, a lot of worry. I know, personally, as a trans, non-binary, queer person that’s gay married,” they said. “I also am very stressed, but I also have had a lot of hope and care from a lot of people in the community, because we’ve been resilient, we’ve overcome a lot, and our existence is joy and our joy is resistance.”
Andrews, who noted that over 41% of transgender Americans have also attempted suicide in their lifetime, a rate that’s nine times higher than their cisgender peers, spoke about legislation across the country that targeted trans individuals and made them vulnerable, including bathroom bans, but more importantly bills to ban gender affirming care.
“They continue to just put these bills up and just kind of throw them at the wall and hope that one sticks,” said Andrews. “And it’s really discouraging, and it’s really scary. But again, we’re still here.”
They encouraged the audience that as they entered the holiday season to, when possible, push back against the misinformation they might hear from their own family members.
“It can be really hard to sit next to your transphobic aunt, but I think that it is an opportunity to challenge, when they start saying, ‘Oh, you know, those trans people, they just go to the hospital and leave the same day with hormones and surgery’ and you’re like, ‘That’s not real. That doesn’t happen.’
Some people will listen, some people won’t, but I think challenging some of that rhetoric and challenging people’s perspective is important,” said Andrews.
Picking up on that theme was 18-year-old Jayme Farmer, a freshman at the University of Michigan, who spoke about his journey toward fully realizing who he is authentically and not letting others, including family members, define who they are.
“I didn’t even fully identify with being a man, which led to me realizing that I could still use he/him pronouns and still present, not just stereotypically masculinely, but however I wanted, and present not just stereotypically masculinely, but however I wanted, and it didn’t mean anything,” said Farmer. “It didn’t make me one way or another. It just made me me. Now I don’t even use labels outside of queer spaces. Now I’m just me. I’m Jayme, and I think it suits me.”
Afterward, Farmer told Michigan Advance that he somewhat struggled with telling his personal story at an event focused on loss and remembrance.
“The hard part was trying to find the balance between telling my own story and uplifting the voices of the people that I was there to celebrate and to look back upon and support,” he said. “I think that I was really scared about talking too much about myself and taking the attention away from the reason why we’re here, which are the trans folks and trans youth that we’ve lost. But at the same time, I thought that it was important that these perspectives be heard.”
Farmer also felt it was important to talk about the personal struggle that often comes with one finding their identity, and not as is often presented, something that is decided on a whim.
“It was an identity that formed over years of my life. And even in the beginning when I first started to come out, it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, I think I want to be a boy. Hi, guys. I’m a boy.’ It was something that I had been ruminating on and agonizing over for months, about if I knew how I truly wanted to present. So then, oftentimes from the outside, it can seem like such a sudden switch, but you don’t know about the internal battle that happens and the internal work that has to happen in order to get to a place where you can confidently say that you have a different identity than what everyone else around you perceives you as happening.”
Trans Day of Remembrance, held annually on Nov. 20, began in 1999 to honor the life of Rita Hester, a transgender African American woman who was murdered the year before in Allston, Massachusetts. In the intervening two-and-a-half decades, the day has since become an international observance.
In 2012, Barack Obama became the first president to officially acknowledge the day, and while that did not continue during the Trump administration, it returned under President Joe Biden, who again issued a statement Wednesday marking the occasion.
“There should be no place for hate in America – and yet too many transgender Americans, including young people, are cruelly targeted and face harassment simply for being themselves. It’s wrong,” said Biden. “My Administration has taken significant action to strengthen the rights and protect the safety of all Americans, including working across the federal government to combat violence against transgender Americans.”