vigilance

So last night I ganged up with Katz of Athens Boys Choir and some amazing folks from Portland State University (I'm looking at you, Tash, Zena) and we had ourselves a Day of Remembrance. It was the first time in more than three years that I've read my work publicly, and I have to admit I shook like a leaf getting up to a microphone and reciting "The Seam of Skin and Scales." There were a few things I had in mind to maybe read for people, and the 'net was well represented; Tash Shatz read a piece from TransGriot before the reading of the names of the dead, and it sent a shiver through people. But I'm meandering.

I got up in front of the largest grouping of trans people, let alone their allies, I had ever seen. And I leaned out and made eye contact and I said it, all of it. "We are not mistakes." "No more being afraid." And whoever it shook out there, I think it shook me the most, after seventeen pages of the names of the murdered were read, in chronological sequence, and minutes in I would recognize a name, finally, and then realize it was someone who'd been killed when I was still in high school, and we had years yet to go in the chronicle of the brutalized and lost. No matter how many of us stood out there in the amphitheater, it was such a tiny, bright candle on such a cold night--this brief moment where we were, once in the year, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering, some heads bowed, some held high.

I think it does something to people, to grow up transgendered in this world. It does something to grow up knowing you are considered expendable if not an abomination, that crimes committed against you don't matter, that laws aren't for you, that futures aren't. It does something knowing that in most places the best you can hope for is to be a punchline, and the worst a pulped, shattered, ragged statistic. It does something to grow up constantly having your perceptions of reality called delusional until the only way to survive is to convince yourself that you are indeed insane. It does something to go so far off the map, even leaving aside our own experiences, the batterings small and large, whether we have families who look out for us or families who cut us deeper than anyone, the endless funerals for people we'll never be.
I think it breaks most of us a little, knowing that sometimes the only time in a year we all get together is to read a thick stack of names of those of us who have been ground into the ground, punctured, stolen, crushed and rent apart, all in order to satisfy someone else's ideas of what the world ought to be--and to tell all the rest of us, look out. You could be next.

And yet we were shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering together, and raising our voices. And all of those people we were assured someone had tried to erase--because that's what so many of those murders were, efforts to erase the fact of a trans person from the world with the crudest and cruelest of instruments--rang out, remembered, even the ones called "unknown trans woman" and "unknown person" and "woman in man's clothing, name unknown." Real. Missed. And important.

No matter how many torches and pitchforks, there were were, refusing to forget. Refusing to allow that erasure. And that's what the day is about. It's about mourning those losses, and about telling all of those murderers and aiders and abettors that we are still here, we are not erased, and we will go arm-in-arm into the next day no matter the threats.

Many of us have lost someone in this struggle, whether they wanted to be part of the struggle or not. Many of us have lost parts of ourselves, and many of us have been hurt by people who wanted us on that list. But we endure, and we continue, and we light more candles, and we refuse to stop remembering, because it must be done.

At the end of the night, when we go our separate ways, we take each other home with us, every one--not alone, not over, not forgotten. We make it another day. It breaks all of us a little, living with the reality of the situation, but we keep it up, those of us who survive, and we live to keep a fire burning for those of us who don't.

Sacred dead, you are not forgotten. You matter. And we miss you.
We will carry this on for you. Let the weight pass from your shoulders to ours, for a while, and we will carry this struggle on for you until it doesn't need carrying any more.
Go, and rest. We will not forget.