CULTURE/SOCIETY: Transgender Day of Remembrance: Why We Remember

Transgender people are those whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. In 1999 a handful of transgender people sought to highlight the need for awareness around anti-transgender violence, which refers to attacks against people who are perceived as transgender -- regardless of how one may personally identify. To that end, we held the first Transgender Day of Remembrance event in the Castro district of San Francisco, holding the names of those we'd lost in silent testimony.

That was 13 years ago. Today, Transgender Day of Remembrance will be presented in the United States and Canada, Australia, Poland, Russia, the Philippines, South Korea and many other locations across the Earth. The notion of remembering our dead reaches into places that those few who gathered in 1999 could hardly have envisioned.

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