On Trans Day of Remembrance and Political Grief
By Sam Correia
Author’s note: This article mentions suicide and anti-trans violence. Please take care of yourself and read with caution.
I do a lot of reflecting at the end of the year. I’ve spent 2025 writing down headlines from Erin in the Morning and other trans-focused journalistic publications. This is my small way of keeping an archive and recording the increase in transphobic atrocities in our country. I could take all of those headlines that I’ve written down and put them into a long list: The National Parks Service removing the word “transgender” from the Stonewall National Monument and U.S. vs. Skrmetti, to name a couple. But I’m writing this article now, around November 20th, which is Trans Day of Remembrance, and I wanted to give voice to the people affected by these transphobic laws and attitudes, not the policies themselves.
In 2024, I was in Boston’s Cathedral Church of Saint Paul, listening to the iconic Miss Major speak to the crowd. It was the 25th Annual Boston Transgender Day of Remembrance, an internationally-honored day started to memorialize the murders of two Black transgender women from Massachusetts, Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett. Not only does Trans Day of Remembrance preserve the memories of those two women, but it also memorializes those who have died that year from transphobia.
In that house of worship, hearing the voice of Miss Major and the words of Rita Hester’s family, I was struck by a sense of hope amongst such grief. Not only for the names read of the trans people that we had lost that year, but also the collective grief of the presidential election results that were only two weeks before. It was so hard to feel hopeful at that time, and yet, the organizing groups behind this Trans Day of Remembrance event gave me that gift of hope.
This year, 2025, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy passed away. She was 78 and lived a long life, but it was a loss that rocked the LGBTQ community. She gave so much to her community, but specifically the gift of trans elder representation; while the often-circulated claim that Black trans women only have a life expectancy of 35 is false, we need to be able to see and learn from our trans elders.
According to her obituary in Them: “Griffin-Gracy’s work as an activist ranged from her work on behalf of people suffering with HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, to launching San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange, to her championing of the abolitionist movement… In 1969, she resisted police violence in the Stonewall Uprisings, largely viewed as the launch of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.”4 There are many ways to engage with Miss Major’s story - for example, through the NYC Trans Oral History Project or the film MAJOR! by historian Tourmaline.
Every year leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance, LGBTQ organizations put out a list of trans people who have died from transphobic violence during that calendar year. While writing this, I’ve spent the morning looking up each person on the list of our dead: cause of death, where they were from, age, any scrap of detail I can find. A mourner standing at the gravesites of so many.
There’s nothing I’m going to say that feels as important as just listing out their names:
Tiara Love Tori Jackson, 37
Scarlett, 21
Blaze Aleczander Balle-Mason, 17
Blake Sturm, 25
Robyn James Post, 48
Kasí Rhea ("Kaeyy Holmes"), 31
Onyx Cornish, 18
Aurora Pellegrina ("Alexa", "Luna"), 35
Blair A. Sawyer, 27
Rosa Machuca, 24
Dream Johnson, 28
Arty Cassidy Beowulf Gibson, 23
Nathaniel Pabón Cruz ("Nata"), 27
Kamora Woods, 27
Kia-Leigh Tabitha Roberts, 55
Gabrielle Nguyen ("Cam")
Lily-Dawn Harkins
Christina Hayes, 28
JJ Godbey, 26
Raven Syed
Emma Slabach, 24
Laura Schueler, 47
Hope Lyca Youngblood, 49
Jax Gratton, 34
Tessa June, 21
Jonathan Joss, 59
Charlotte Fosgate, 17
Karmin Wells, 25
Shy'Parius Dupree, 32
Kelsey Elem, 25
Norah Horwitz, 38
Kaitoria Le’Cynthia Bankz ("Kai"), 31
Katelyn Rinnetta Benoit, 15
Jordan “JJ” Maye, 17
Ajani Walden
Sonny Hopkins, 39
Deniz Chucker
Linda Becerra Moran, 30
Rick Alastor Newman, 29
Amyri Dior, 23
Ervianna Johnson, 25
Sam Nordquist, 24
Jill Heathers Bouvier, 54
Megan Jordan Kridli, 22
Leah Jo, 37
Tahiry Broom, 29
Aubrey Dameron, 25
Elisa Rae Shupe
Parker Savarese, 15
Jonny Adamow, 29
Luisa Rivera, 68
Phoenix Cassetta
Meka Shabazz, 46
That list is just people from the US, but there are hundreds more around the world. The horrors are unspeakable, but they need to be faced head-on. Many people on the list above died by suicide. Sam Nordquist was held captive and brutally tortured for 2 months before being killed. He was a Black trans man, and yet his death was not ruled a hate crime.
I’m thinking about what each of these people would write about if they were given space for it. Maybe some of them were writers or artists. I think we need to catalog the loss. Remember and grieve, as quietly or as loudly as possible.
I was unable to go to the annual Trans Day of Remembrance events this year, but I heard that, in the dead of night, someone had vandalized part of the memorial. Trans Resistance MA and The Queer Neighborhood posted the following in response on Instagram: “OUR COMMUNITY WILL NOT BE SILENCED!!! Two days after we installed our Trans Flag Memorial at Boston Common, with full permission and every right to honor the lives of our trans and gender-expansive family, the memorial was vandalized and destroyed. This act of violence didn’t just target flags. It targeted memory, grief, and the right of trans people; especially Black and Brown trans people, to take up space in public and mourn with dignity.” The original memorial had 400 flags, and the reinstalled memorial had 500 flags along with a large team of volunteer community watchers to ensure the memorial stays protected.10
On the Saturday after TDoR, I was going to a holiday drag show at The Wang Theatre with friends to see well-known drag queens BenDeLeCreme and Jinkx Monsoon. Outside were protesters with signs saying, “Christmas should be about the birth of Christ, not drag queens.” This was a comedy show for adults, held on a Saturday night at one of Boston’s most well-known theaters. I’ve seen drag performances at every type of venue around the city, from opening acts at Roadrunner to Sunday night shows at Jacques. I’ve never seen people protesting an adult drag performance. It felts like more than that to me, knowing Jinkx Monsoon is also a trans woman. A joyful holiday show became another moment of grief for me.
So many communities use political mourning as a tool of resistance. In the book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, author Sarah Jaffe provides 5 ways of thinking about grief in the context of political activist: Grief is a Rupture, Grief is About the Future, Grief is not Work, Grief is Anathema to Capitalism, and Grief is a Collective Becoming. In an interview with Tempest magazine, Jaffe states “Grief is less about a process and more about who you are on the other side of it—that the person you were before cannot understand who you become…Grief is this thing that will change you.”
I’m not going to try to turn this around to something hopeful at the end. Not to deny ourselves that, but to wade in the pool of remembering. To sit and mourn. Sometimes that is all we should be doing. But there will also always be people to put the flags back up. And I hope the grief changes all of us.
Sam Correia is the Reference and Community Engagement Librarian at the Duxbury Free Library. Their work focuses on outreach, equity-based programming, accessible resources for all, and radical librarianship. They are passionate about LGBTQ history, community archiving, and collective liberation.
