TDOR 2025

Today we honored our dead. Gave thanks for the breath in our own bodies. And grieved the possibilities, the futures, that we’ve lost. I went to a service where I heard my elders give calls to action. Told us to get together, stick together, and don’t let our grief make us immobile. To harness our rage. To act out of an ethos of love. 

As the names of the folks we’ve lost to violence and/or suicide ran across the screen in the church, I felt a familiar ache. One I feel everytime I’m faced with the overwhelming barrage of Black death-- queer, cis, trans, and heterosexual alike. A professor once told me one of us is killed something like every 48 hours in this country. That’s heavy. That’s a weight all Black people carry as soon as we’re awakened to the fact of our Blackness-- our difference. Add any intersection of marginalization to that, and it’s even heavier. 

We can’t bear this weight alone, as individuals. We have to bear it in community. We have to do something with our grief, rage, and pain. Whatever your role is in this fight-- whether it be organizer, activist, caretaker, storyteller, or even just a safe place to land-- figure out what that is and plug into your community.

On this day, I’m reminded of a speech I gave at a panel in 2019 where the #FreeCece documentary was screened. I think it’s relevant to this moment and I want to share it here:

“As an activist, I’m used to giving passionate speeches and trying to inspire people to action. I’m used to addressing crowds in times of hardship and asking my community to hope with me and dream with me and fight with me. But as a Black trans person in this country, continuously witnessing the violence and systematic plunder facing my communities, that hope and vigor is hard to hold onto. It’s retraumatizing. It’s hardening. It’s overwhelming. Fear and grief and exhaustion take over in their place. I wonder, what will it take for us to win? What more do we have to do for our lives to be safe? What more do we have to do until these cages and graves that house our people are empty?

As more and more death and destruction plague our communities, organizers and abolitionists everywhere are grappling with these same questions. Someone in the documentary posed the question, “what would real justice, real healing, real accountability look like?” The tactics we use to try to hold institutions accountable for the violence they inflict on us--  on Black trans lives, and on Black lives in general-- typically involve mass protests, sit-ins, walk outs, marches, rallies, etc. What are the tactics we’re using to hold each other accountable when someone in the community causes harm? What are the tactics we’re using when Black trans women are murdered in our neighborhoods?

What do we do for Rae’Lynn Thomas, a 28 year old Black trans woman who was murdered in cold blood by her stepfather, James Byrd, in August of 2016, in our city? As abolitionists, who truly know in our hearts that caging people will not bring us real justice or healing or accountability, what do we do with James Byrd? How do we support Rae’Lynn’s family in the aftermath of this harm? 

We regularly take to the streets and we yell to each other to show up for Black trans women. We yell to each other, and promise, that when Black trans women are under attack we will stand up and fight back. How are we showing up? How are we fighting back? 

I point to Rae’Lynn’s case because it’s so close to home. I think we have to start at home if we want to have any impact on the rest of the world. We have to start building networks in our communities that can respond to emergencies and intracommunal violence without relying on the state. We have to learn to rely on each other. We have to take to heart the words of Assata Shakur that we so often quote in harmony, that we must love and support one another.

We have to do more than just recite the names of the dead over and over again. We have to do more than grieve every time we come together. We have to be proactive. If we don’t build the infrastructure to respond to violence in our communities now, the lifespan of Black trans women will only continue to decrease. If we don’t come together and strategize to care for the Black trans folks in our lives and in our communities while they’re still here, we’ll only continue to lose. And I don’t know how much more losing our hearts can stand. We’re tired. We have to save ourselves. We have to fight. And we have to win. It is our duty.”