#1
We,
ancient and still becoming,
tired and resilient,
children and elders
precious to each other,
We remember
across borders,
through words that fit and don’t,
in the midst of layers and intersections,
violences of so many kinds.
We remember lives, names, stories.
We remember our parts
in the webs we grieve –
the ways and times we have been more of a friend
to white supremacy or colonialism,
capitalism or misogyny, ableism or fatphobia,
anti-sex worker biases or cultures of policing,
or our religious institutions complicities that weave through them all
than to those on this day we call kin.
We remember what causes us to betray.
We remember we are capable of solidarity, true and lasting.
We remember more than death, more than what deadens,
but we will not let their cruelty be forgotten, erased, dismissed.
We remember good days for each other.
We remember love that surprises.
We remember our beloveds, resting, haunting, remaining.
May there be comfort among the grieving,
reflection among the privileged,
and loyalty, courage, and power
to move and make us,
hold and heal us
in the directions of
trans flourishing,
collective and within.
#2
Trans day of remembrance and resilience – an intimate and serious thing.
A necessary ritual for the ones grieving all year long
the perpetuation of unnecessary death.
May remembrance not be in vain nor in vanity,
coupled with conscious complicity in the structures that enable and encourage the destruction of life.
May participation in mourning precipitate working for change alongside the living.
Let this grief make way for resisting whiteness centering itself this day and others.
Let this ritual be a practice of collective refocusing on the roots of sexism and transmisogynoir in manifestations of anti-trans violence.
Let the visibility of this day,
the complicatedness of what it has become,
the chance to recenter its attention,
tell the entire truth
about what creates the conditions for such death:
The class realities. The prejudices and policies against sex workers.
The theologies. The misogyny.
The politics of respectability.
The colonialization.
The transphobia in all its forms.
And the white supremacy from which so much of it is birthed.
Over these,
and all they steal,
we weep.