Today is the 11th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. A list of those who are known to have been murdered because of bigotry and fear during 2009 can be found here and a list of events marking the day worldwide is here.
I’m useless at writing about such things, but here’s Gwendolyn Ann Smith, who started the TDOR project, and here’s a very powerful video.
That was very sobering. 🙁
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I don’t know this. Why so many in Brazil, compared to elsewhere around the world? Is there some combination of problems in that country that leads to so many murders of transgendered persons?
Vy:
I have Brazilian readers who can probably answer that better than I can, but my guess would be that Brazil has a combination of high tolerance for trans people in many areas of society, which encourages them to be more open, combined with a large degree of religious intolerance in other areas. It is also a very large country with a big population.
That makes a lot of sense, and sounds very plausible.
Two stories involving transpeople made the headlines during the last month here, more or less at the same time.
The first one on the national level: the governor of the Lazio Region, a married man, resigned from his post after he disclosed that he had been blackmailed by some carabinieri who had filmed his encounters with transgender prostitutes. There were hints of a much larger circle of prostitution and drugs, with many more big names and corrupt policemen pulling the strings.
Today one of the two sex workers has been found murdered in her home.
The other is less tragic, but still sad. There’s a district in the outskirts of Florence called Le Piagge. It’s a very poor area, far from the usual postcard images of Italian renaissance. There was a very peculiar catholic priest there, of the rare breed who love their neighbor even more than church doctrine. He was a voice for the poor and the oppressed, an unrelenting campaigner for social justice. Among other things, every year his community celebrated the TDOR with a candlelight and a memorial mass. Recently a couple asked him to marry them. They were already legally married since 1982, because post-op transsexuals have the right to marry in Italy, but they wanted to fulfil their dream and be married in church also.
He accepted, fully understanding the probable consequences, and has been suspended by the bishop and asked to leave the very next day.
Upon my memory.
In the vertex
of a delicate
comfort there’s
the luck that
remembers my
memory, and
this sadness, in
the life, appears
near a little
emotion.