Transgender day of what?
Comments (0) Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day “set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” There’s an expectation that The Trans Community is supposed to come together and mourn our dead, celebrate our living. (Indeed, I’ll be performing tomorrow night at Center on Halsted’s Night of Fallen Stars, set up to do just that.)
I mentioned last year that I felt really disconnected from the TDOR, and I’m not sure my feelings have changed.
QueenEmily at Questioning Transphobia wrote a post, the drowned and the saved, today in which she said
There was an Italian atheist Jewish writer called Primo Levi who wrote about his experience of Auschwitz, over and over. In his last book The Drowned and the Saved, he drew up a distinction between “the drowned” (those who died) and “the saved” (those who lived). He argued that only the drowned could give true and full witness to the horror of the Shoah.
I’m not comparing the murders of trans people to the Shoah directly – the murder of trans people, which horrific, is not institutionally organised towards genocide in quite the same way. But what I want to point out is the structure of witnessing. Even Levi, a man who lived through the camp, at the end of his life felt inadequate to witnessing, unable to have fully experienced the violence he wrote about. Even his proximity was not enough.
She goes on to say that, even with her own experiences of transphobic hatred, it is impossible to properly give witness to those murdered, particularly across cultural or racial lines (most of those murdered this past year where latino or black, and in Central or South America). But that we should try, anyway, because it is our duty and responsibility to the dead.
emotion, queer, trans
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community, harassment, jewish, judaism, tdor, trans, transphobia
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