November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance, and it's an opportunity for all of us to stand up to end violence against all women. Female identified people throughout the feminist movement have been pushing for equality, and have been breaking down the stereotypes of being women in our culture.
No longer are we forced to wear skirts, or cover our faces. This is blurring our gender binary system, by letting female identified women come together and wear what they want, when they want it. Transgendered people are a natural ally in this movement, because we too are blurring the gender binary. Some of us that are transgendered are very clearly male identified or female identified regardless of what we were assigned at birth. But others are less clear from a social standpoint and have a very strong sense of self that exists somewhere in between. This blurring of the gender binary is a wonderful thing, because it lets all of us be who we are and be treated with respect for our identities.
Yet, transgendered people regularly suffer violence, and even death for simply being who we are. We are still classified as having a mental health disorder, even though leading transgendered scholars have proven that it doesn't help us at all. Many of us have a very hard time after transition staying in our chosen profession, and we end up doing all sorts of socially unacceptable jobs, including sex work, which further puts us at a social disadvantage. When police are regularly documented beating us up, when nobody ever looks for our killer, when society doesn't let us go to the bathroom in peace, we know it's time for change.
Yet there is change, we've actually caught, gone to trial and successfully convicted someone for the murder of a transgendered person, which is rare. Federal laws are being talked about, however misguided they may actually be, and yet the number of deaths is rising, not falling. Some counts have the average number of murders of transgendered people at 19 per month! Or put another way, 1 in 12 of us in America will be murdered. But we as transgendered people are the only ones counting, in pretty much every country across the world. I'm a transgendered sex worker, and I want to not get killed for who I am or what I do. As our death count rises, I beg that you consider your prejudices around gender, and let us live in peace. I'm literally begging for my life.
