Trans Day of Remembrance Speech

This speech was delivered at Newcastle Civic Center on the 20th of November 2022, as a part of the Trans Day of Remembrance.

This event is here to talk about the violence faced at the end of many trans people's lives. But it must be remembered that this violence begins right at the start of a trans person's life, when they breathe their first gasp of oxygen in this world, and based on one body part, a category is stamped on that person without their knowledge. That category bleeds out into their every social interaction, their every blink in the mirror, every time they step out of their home, every time they come back to their home, every time they shop for clothes or sing or eat or cry or don't cry or laugh or hug someone or get spat at on the street or get told they're beautiful or watch a romcom with a man and a woman after the last romcom with a man and a woman after the last twenty one years of their life looking at men and women and not seeing themselves, and this goes on bleeding until the knife or the bullet or the love and social acceptance makes an unexpected intervention in their life.

To be trans is to live dangerously. And I mean that in all its senses: it's to be a precarious being, to exist as something more likely to be killed than everyone else, but massively less likely to be grieved. But I also mean the fun, quirky way: to be trans is to be daring, to experiment, to play around with things we've been told are fixed and immutable. Two things can be simultaneously true about us: we just want to get on with our lives, to walk down the street without fear of violence because we've got lippy on today; and we also want to fight for something better, something beyond the basics, somewhere new, where human beings can experiment without judgement, and understand ourselves better than we ever could before.

I'm proud to be speaking here on behalf of North East Against Racism, because the fight against transphobia is an intersectional fight. It crosses international borders; our history is inseparable from struggles to win workers' rights in Africa, to protect Indigenous lands in Brazil, to take down dictatorships in the Middle East.

The impulse that drives a man to murder a trans woman for not wearing what he thinks she should is the exact same impulse that drives an Iranian morality police officer to murder a woman for not wearing a hijab in the way he thinks she should. The people who push for incarceration, who want people locked in prisons, or in migrant detention facilities, are the same people who want us locked in rigid gender categories. It's abolition that will bring about trans liberation. The same mindset that views nature as a resource to be plundered and burned is the same mindset that views human beings as resources to be enslaved and killed, is the same mindset that sees gender as something to be regulated by threat of capital punishment.

Transphobia is rooted in colonialism. For one example, the Hijra people in India, who defied gender binaries, were celebrated in their communities, given important roles in local politics. That is, until the British came, and in 1864 imported their Buggery Act from way back in 1533, directly criminalising Hijra people and defining them as second-class citizens. This went a long way towards wiping out alternate gender expression in India, and the colonial law was only rescinded in 2019. When your power depends on exploiting people, you sort them into as few categories as possible, and use any means necessary to keep them locked in those boxes.

Here's how that colonial history is manifesting itself now: of the 327 trans and gender-diverse people murdered this year, 65% were of racialised identities. 36% of all trans people murdered in Europe were migrants. And here's why this must be addressed internationally: 68% of all the murders registered happened in Latin America and the Caribbean; 29% of the total happening in Brazil.

When we go to events like these, and we hear of so much suffering and death, when we hear lists of names of those our societies have collectively murdered by ignoring the voices of trans people, it is easy to feel that this is the way the world is. The way the world will always be. That violence is everywhere, inescapable, and that there's no alternative.

When we think like that, we're forgetting something vital: our identity is proof that something better is possible. I've taken part in direct climate action a few times this year, and I can tell you this: I get the exact same feeling sitting in front of an oil tanker as I do walking down Northumberland street in a dress. To live as a trans person is to disrupt patriarchy, to disrupt colonial white supremacy.

To all the cisgender people here, I ask that you listen to us, read our books, that you acknowledge your position in the systems that incentivize our murder, and that you speak out against discrimination.

To my fellow trans people, I ask that you tell each other you love each other. A lot. That you go for walks in the park and play Scrabble and wear what you want to wear and skim stones across a stream on a cool summer's day. That, in a world that often wants you dead, you choose to live, dangerously.

Thank you.