by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Nicolette Ybarra and
Connor Maddocks
Nicolette (right)
with Jolene (left) and Dee (center)
Marchers near the
Pride Flag
Sierra Bush
On Thursday,
November 17 I went to the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender
Community Center for the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. I’ve been to
these events before and found them profound and moving, even though at the
start of the last one I told one person there I looked forward to the day when
we don’t have to have them anymore. For the Transgender Day of Remembrance is
just what its name implies: a memorial ceremony in which the victims of
anti-Trans violence in the United States and elsewhere in the world are honored
and acknowledged.
The event was
advertised as lasting from 6 to 9 p.m., but it began with an assembly outside
the Center and a march through the heart of Hillcrest, with people bearing
candles to honor the Transgender victims of hate crimes. One woman who saw the
march later joined it, followed it into the Center and became one of the
volunteers who read the names of victims. She called the event “awesome” and
told the audience at the program, which started at 7 p.m. in the Center’s big
hall, that she had been moved to join in and read a name.
The Transgender
Day of Remembrance was started in 1998 by Gwendolyn Anne Smith to honor the
memory of Rita Hester, a Transwoman who was killed that year. It has grown into
an elaborate commemoration put on in various cities across the U.S. and
elsewhere. The names of the victims, along with whatever is known about them —
their ages, where and how they were killed, and some personal information to
put a face on each one — are posted to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation’s (GLAAD) Web site at http://www.glaad.org/tdor,
and groups in various cities download this information and use it as the basis
for their own event.
This year the
official GLAAD site listed 15 U.S. victims of Trans-related murders, though as
more information came in about additional incidents the list was expanded to
include 26 names. Unlike in previous years, the 2016 San Diego Transgender Day
of Remembrance included only Trans people killed in the United States, though
the organizers were well aware of incidents in other countries. Indeed, though
the GLAAD list contained just one victim from Mexico, the San Diego organizers
knew of at least 10 and decided to honor them by having two featured speakers
from the Trans community in Tijuana.
“In Mexico, the
country of my parents and my grandparents, the country with whom many of us
have a connection either to its people or its culture, the country right next
door, there has been since September of this year a wave of Transphobic hate
crimes, with many of these actually leading to murder against persons of our
community, the Transgender community,” said activist Nicolette Ybarra. “And I
say our community, because regardless of
this or that border, we are to be found everywhere. For we are truly a
worldwide community, and the welfare of our Trans brothers and sisters over there,
as well as elsewhere, is also of concern to many of us here.”
According to
Ybarra, at least 10 Trans people were killed in Mexico in the 2 ½ months
preceding the event, even though the GLAAD Web site listed just one Mexican
victim for all of 2016. She said that would be proportionate to 30 Trans
murders in the U.S., a country with three times Mexico’s population.
Ybarra compared
her status as Transgender with her activism in the U.S. and Mexico, and said
that in both she crosses arbitrary “border” lines. “I have always had a
relationship with the border,” she explained. “Or, rather, with many borders.
With the border between male and female; with the border between just simply
‘infected’ with HIV and actually living with the disease and the stigma; the
border between Spanish and English; and of course, in geographical terms, the
border between the United States and Mexico.
“My position
relative to the border has varied over the years,” she added.” Sometimes on one
side, sometimes on the other, and sometimes on both, it would seem,
concurrently. Now I’m sure this sounds complex, but I’m also sure that this is
something that we as Trans folks can more readily understand, because it is
within our own individual journeys as we transition, we face and deal with
multiple issues, often all at the same time. These different states of being
along the journey of my life have led me to become aware of and concerned with
various communities and issues, in particular that of the Transgender
community, both here and also beyond the border.”
This year’s
Transgender Day of Remembrance was also held under the long shadow of Donald
Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. Presidential election just nine days
before. In a November 15 column in the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/trump-disaster-modern-masculinity-sexual-nostalgian-oppressive-men-women),
Jacqueline Rose wrote that, among other things, Trump’s supporters
boldly asserted an old-fashioned definition of masculinity that regarded
Trump’s insults towards women, and his claim that he could sexually assault
them with impunity, as sources of pride, not shame. Trump, Rose wrote, “tapped into the deepest, most disturbing strata of the
human mind. And men, as well as women, will be the casualties.”
A New York Times
Web post on Rose’s article (http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/11/20/donald-trumps-victory-threatens-to-upend-progressive-notions-of-masculinity/)
quoted a specifically anti-Trans tweet by Joe Walsh, a former Congressmember
from Illinois and now a Right-wing talk radio host. “If you want a country with
63 different genders, vote Hillary,” Walsh tweeted on November 6, two days
before the election. “If you want a country where men are men and women are
women, vote Trump.”
Many members of the audience at the Transgender Day of
Remembrance expressed fear of what a Trump Presidency could do to the status of
Trans people in the U.S. But there was also a spirit of defiance, as if they
were there to show the nation and the world that even the election of a
President based on openly racist, sexist, homophobic and Transphobic appeals
would not deter them from speaking out and saying that Trans lives matter.
Connor Maddocks, Center staff member and a key organizer of
the event, used the threat of Trump’s presidency to call for unity within the
Queer community. “With this election that we’ve just had, with the way
things are going in our world, more than ever we all need to be together and
work together,” he said. “And we need to stop tearing each other apart within
our community. We have got to stop putting each other down and tearing each
other apart and saying things about each other on Facebook that are not nice.
How can we expect the rest of the world to stand with us and respect us if we
don’t do it in our own community?”
The highlight of
the Transgender Day of Remembrance, as usual, was the solemn ceremony of the
reading of the names of the victims. Each name was followed by the lighting of
a candle and the sounding of a bell. The people reading the names were asked to
do so in the first person, as if they themselves were the victims. They
eloquently turned the bare facts listed on the cards with the information about
each victim into moving human stories, emphasizing the tragedy that prejudice
and hatred had snuffed out these lives too soon.
At least four of
the information cards indicated that the victims had been “misgendered” —
meaning that media reports had referred to them by their birth sex rather than
the gender they preferred or were presenting as when they were killed.
Nicolette Ybarra had mentioned this in her speech as well. “In the reports of
some major media outlets,” she said, “when a Transwoman is murdered, she is
labeled as a man; or, more salaciously, as ‘a man in a dress.’ In death, as in
life, she is still a man in the eyes of many. And in addition to this
Transphobic attitude about our existence, our sexuality, and our identity, the
fact is that there is no trustworthy central database to keep track of
Transphobic and homophobic hate crimes, which can feed into our being
mischaracterized, misunderstood and mistreated, in life as well as in death.”
The name I was
given to read was that of Sierra Bush, a.k.a. Simon Bush, from Boise County,
Idaho. The card I was given gave their age at 18 and said they were “gender
non-conforming” (which is why I’m referring to Sierra with the plural pronoun),
though a report on their memorial service I later found online (http://people.com/human-interest/sierra-bush-idaho-student-dead/)
gave their name as Sierra and identified them as “she.” Sierra’s body was found
near Idaho City, Idaho on October 22, 2016, though they had been missing for
over a month. Sierra’s parents told police they thought Sierra had been
kidnapped.
The online
report on Sierra Bush’s death, written by Alexia Fernandez and published
October 28, contained a comment from Boise Police Sergeant Justin Kendall.
“Sierra’s disappearance has been suspicious from the beginning and this
is a tragic discovery for everyone who knows her,” Kendall said in his
statement. “Every missing person’s case is initially investigated as being
suspicious, and Sierra was not the type to disappear without telling anyone.
For weeks, our detectives have been following up on leads and our investigation
is ongoing.”
The story also
filled out more details on Sierra Bush’s life than I had been given in the card
from which I read. It said that they were a freshman student at Boise State
University, studying engineering in the Honors College and participating in a
wide range of school activities. Sierra’s memorial at the Boise State campus
was so well attended, Fernandez wrote, that the organizers had to bring in
extra chairs to accommodate the large crowd. The story also contained quotes
from Sierra’s friends that fleshed out their portrait and showed how
inspirational they had been.
“One of my
favorite quotes from her is, ‘If I can be as weird as I am, you can be as you
as you are,’” Sierra’s friend Samantha McGraw told local TV news station KTVB.
McGraw said she and Sierra’s other friends are committed to carrying on her
legacy, which McGraw described as “loving yourself, being what you want to be
and not letting anybody stand in the way of your dreams.”
