2020 Transgender Day of Remembrance
Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside for honoring and remembering transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse individuals who have lost their lives to anti-trans violence in the last year.
2020 has been one of the most turbulent years of our lives, with all of us struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the devastations of climate change, and an unsettling (and yet unsettled) U.S. election season. For transgender and gender-diverse people, however, it has been a particularly painful year: 2020 is the deadliest year on record for trans folx, with data showing that anti-trans violence is on the rise globally, nationally, and locally.
We do not know how many gender non-conforming and non-binary persons were victims this year, even in the U.S., because 66% of U.S. states still do not legally recognize non-binary identities and so this data can be notoriously difficult to track down. What we do know is that there have been more than 350 known murders of transgender and gender-diverse people this year alone. This is a conservative global estimate as many victims live in countries which do not recognize their true gender, are sex workers whose murders are not reported, or are persons misgendered in the reporting of their death.
In the U.S., there have been an estimated 37 transgender/gender-diverse persons killed - 9 of which were murdered after October 1 (the annual cut-off date for TDoR data). That means since October 1, almost 25% of the anti-trans murders in 2020 of transgender Americans have taken place. For perspective, that’s more than one transgender person killed each week since October began. Three of those murders happened this week, during Trans Awareness Week. Their names are: Yuni Carey, a 39-yr-old Latin-American salsa dancer and performer, Scott/Scottlyn Kelly Devorge, a 51-yr-old white gender non-conforming Georgian, and Lea Rayshon Daye, a 28-yr-old Black woman from Cleveland.
Anti-trans violence continues to specifically and disproportionately target trans people of color (79% of U.S. victims) and transgender women and trans-feminine non-binary folx (98% of victims globally). 38% of these murders took place on the street and 22% were murdered in their own home. The average age of these victims is only 31 years old. These numbers hardly begin to measure the true impact of violence against trans folx, because this data is not systematically collected in most countries.
Behind these numbers and percentages there are people whose lives we value and who we, as societies, failed to protect. The names of the victims in the United States are: Brianna “BB” Hill, 30; Nikki Kuhnhausen, 17; Yahira Nesby, 33; Mia Perry, 26; Dustin Parker, 25; Monika Diamond, 34; Lexi, 33; Johanna Metzger, 25; Nina Pop, 28; Helle Jae O’Regan, 20; Jayne Thompson, 33; Tony McDade, 38; Selena Reyes-Hernandez, 37; Riah Milton, 25; Dominique “Rem'mie” Fells, 27; Brian “Egypt" Powers, 43; Brayla Stone, 17; Merci Mack, 22; Shaki Peters, 32; Bree Black, 27; Summer Taylor, 24; Marilyn Cazares, 22; Tiffany Harris, 32; Queasha D Hardy, 22; Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears, 32; Kee Sam, 24; Aerrion Burnett, 37; and Mia Green, 29.
Nikki Kuhnhausen, the second name in this list, was a Washington teen. Her death has been memorialized in WA state’s long-overdue bill banning “trans panic” defenses (a defense used to mitigate murder charges when someone murders a trans person). The WA bill passed in February 2020 and is nicknamed “Nikki’s Bill” in her honor.
The entire list of the 350 individuals we know to be lost this year can be found here. Find more information about TDoR and this year’s data here: https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-tdor-2020/.