This Transgender Day of Remembrance, I'm struck by two cruel realities—not only that this has been the deadliest year on record for murdered transgender or gender-variant individuals, but that the phrase "deadliest year," in this context, has been used with such chilling regularity, year after year. I'm immensely fortunate to have a blog that is read by so many compassionate, intelligent, forward thinking people. In a very real sense, I'm preaching to the choir here. That said, I beg every person reading this post tonight to reach inside and bring forth an extra measure of that compassion, intelligence, and forward thought, and re-commit to changing the world for our transgender brothers, sisters, and non-binary family. We don't need to "understand" transgender issues in order to put ourselves between a vulnerable trans or non-binary person and hostility or violence. All we need is empathy. We don't need to "accept" or be completely "comfortable" with gender variance to speak up when a trans person is used as the punchline for an obscenely unfunny "joke," or as offal "humour" fed to raucous crowds by millionaire comedians out of a payday. All we need is baseline human love, and an awareness of how poisoning the social climate in order to "other" certain groups has led to violence, murder, even genocide, throughout human history. Be kind, even when it might be more fun to be cruel. Just because we can get away with it doesn't mean it's right, or that someone else won't pay a terrible price in the long run. Don't roll your eyes at days like Transgender Day of Remembrance. All over the world tonight, and most nights, people are reliving the loss of beautiful souls they've known and loved—souls whose only reason for extinction was being born different, and being unable, or unwilling, to be something they aren't. Peace to all those who suffer tonight, and comfort to all the bereaved and the mourning.
