November 20th, 2024

This Trans Day of Remembrance, we’re calling for action to honour our loved ones, and the recentering of our movement around Black and Indigenous trans women and femmes, sex workers, and our youth.

Hate-motivated violence isn’t an abstract phenomenon. It is the result of our history, culture, and politics, and it’s a tool of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

Trans Day of Remembrance was born from the effort to honour Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett, who were murdered at the intersection of transmisogyny and anti-Blackness. 

Each year since, impassioned trans siblings have made a collective practice of remembering, combing news reports and taking community calls to list the names we read.

And, each year, transfemicides account for the startling majority of reports. This year, close to all we lost were racialized, and nearly half were sex workers. Our movement must put our most marginalised first and never compromise in defending these lives.

350 trans murders were recorded this year, rising to 427 with suicides. We know so many more are unrecorded.

Names of our trans siblings lost to genocides in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo, and across colonised borders will go unread at our vigils. 

Here in so-called BC, the coroner’s office makes no systemic report of our crises of health and discrimination, or the intersections between trans deaths and the toxic supply, carceral measures, and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism.

If action is any balm for our immense grief and anger on this day, please write to the Minister of Health, joining our call for trans women and femmes to receive the healthcare they need, and for coroner’s reports of the deaths of our loved ones.

You can find our letter-writing campaign at sagah.ca/bc.

Please also take time to engage with the organisations which support trans sex workers locally, including PACE & SWAN; UNYA, which makes space for Two-Spirit youth; and mutual aid initiatives which are accepting warm clothes and camping supplies for our unhoused siblings to brave the winter.

We are still here, and fighting hard to stay.