(GLAAD)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

TDOR

Vigil for Trans Day of Remembrance this Saturday at Red Deer City Hall Park

Nov 18, 2021 | 11:24 AM

The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance is this Saturday, Nov. 20.

Also referred to as simply TDOR, the day is one for mourning lives lost — historically and over the last year specifically — to anti-transgender and anti-gender-non-conforming violence. It also takes place during Trans Awareness Week (Nov. 13-19).

This year, the Red Deer Queer Community Association is marking TDOR with a candlelight vigil from 6-8:30 p.m. at City Hall Park. Candles will be provided and there will be speakers.

“Transgender Day of Remembrance is an annual event that occurs internationally in November. It is used to memorialize those individuals whose lives have been lost to acts of transphobia, and to draw attention to the continued violence that transgender and gender-non-conforming people endure on a daily basis,” RDQCA says.

“The first Transgender Day of Remembrance took place on November 20, 1999, to honour Rita Hester, who was murdered in Allston, Massachusetts.”

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According to an organization called TransRespect Versus Transphobia (TvT), which tracks data through its Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project, 375 transgender or gender-non-conforming people were killed worldwide between Oct. 1, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021.

That’s up from 350 the year prior.

TvT notes that of the 375, 96 per cent were trans women or transfeminine people, and 58 per cent were known to be sex workers.

In the U.S., where there were 53 in the noted span, people of colour make up 89 per cent of those. According to the list, there were none in Canada this reporting period, though nine have been recorded in our country since this monitoring began 13 years ago.

“Data indicate a worrying trend when it comes to the intersections of misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and hate towards sex workers, with the majority of victims being Black and migrant trans women of colour, and trans sex workers,” TvT writes.

“These numbers are just a small glimpse of the reality on the ground. The majority of the data was collected from countries with an established network of trans and LGBTIQ organizations that conduct the monitoring.”

TvT adds that in most countries, this type of data is not collected by any national system, with many, if not most cases, going unreported — or if they are reported, they receive very little attention.

The full TvT report is available at transrespect.org, and more information about the Red Deer Queer Community Association is at rdqca.org.