NovoMetro.com – Lesley Seacrist
This isn’t a movie. A two hour feature where lipstick is applied, stereotypes glimmer in cheap sequins, and the violent death scene is cut away just before the first blow. No, transgender violence can’t be described in a feature film.
No one sees the whole story on television either. What they see instead is a high school photo in a newspaper. And while local news reports crack open the story of an unidentified transgender person stripped naked and left in a pit, in a parking lot, in the street, in their home disfigured, stabbed and shot repeatedly and strangled, the violence carries on.
That’s the point of a candlelight vigil planned by a local advocacy group in honor of a murdered transgender person whose name hasn’t been released yet — because no one is sure who it is.
This Sunday, the 18th of November, at Preservation Park’s Niles Hall in Oakland, the 2nd Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance will commemorate the people who experienced a lifetime of hatred, and ultimately fell to anti-transgender violence over the past twelve months.