Memorial Ritual as Fear Engine

What is Transgender Day of Remembrance Actually Remembering?

Transgender Awareness Week rolls around every November, capped off by Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) on November 20. This day, according to GLAAD, “honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” California governor Gavin Newsom issued a proclamation commemorating “the lives tragically lost to bigotry and violence against transgender people.” Washington, Illinois, New York, and other states issued similar proclamations honoring lives lost to anti-trans violence.

One is left to wonder whether America is a society of bigots, hunting down and killing trans people in the streets. The reality is somewhat different, according to stats from the decidedly pro-trans Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the FBI.

HRC records that 32 transgender people were murdered in the U.S. in 2024, 42 percent of whom were killed by an intimate partner or somebody else they knew. It’s impossible to know whether any of the 32 victims were murdered because they were transgender, that is, “in acts of anti-transgender violence.” Exactly zero transgender people in the United States were murdered because of their identity in 2024, according to the FBI’s analysis of Hate Crime. Over the past 10 years, the FBI has recorded 15 murders motivated by anti-trans bias.

Fair Play For Women’s analysis, “Trans Murder Rates”, looks at data from Europe, notably the United Kingdom. Murder rates in general for Europe are low, and a trans-identified person in the UK is no more likely to be murdered than anybody else.

The Transgender Europe (TGEU) Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project reports more than 5000 murders worldwide from 2008 through 2024. Over that 16-year period, where occupation is known, between 50 and 60 percent of the victims worked in prostitution; in 2024 it was 46 percent. Prostitution is a notoriously dangerous and often-fatal line of work for anyone, including for the women and underage girls who constitute the majority of both sex workers and the victims of the violence associated with it. Where, one might ask, is their day of remembrance?

And how is it possible to know, when so many victims of so-called anti-transgender violence work in this inherently, universally dangerous trade, how many of their deaths were motivated specifically by anti-transgender hate?

What the global numbers actually tell us

The TGEU Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project consistently shows that roughly three-quarters of the murders they report occur in Latin America, with Brazil alone accounting for nearly a third of the totals.

In Brazil specifically, Associação Nacional de Travestis e Transexuais (ANTRA)’s human rights dossier reports that around 90% of travestis and transsexual women depend on prostitution to survive. Travestis are males who realize early in life that they are attracted to other males, adopt a feminine social role, and are heavily concentrated in survival sex work, according to a summary of studies on the subject from the University of Wisconsin’s Latin American Studies department. Furthermore, “The travestis of Brazil are a distinct group. They are biologically male and do not deny this…Travestis are not transvestites, nor are they transgendered. These terms are very Western in worldview and do not reflect Brazilian culture.”

There are an estimated 6000 to 8000 travestis in Brazil, most of them desperately poor.

The appropriation of other people’s suffering

We can’t know precisely how many victims of allegedly anti-transgender violence are actually travesti — the TMM dataset doesn’t capture that. But because recent TMM updates show that roughly three-quarters of reported murders occur in Latin America and nearly a third in Brazil, where many victims are travestis working in street-level sex economies, we can say this much: A large share of the names read at Transgender Day of Remembrance vigils in the U.S. and Europe represent murders of impoverished, highly marginalized, same-sex attracted males working in prostitution who do not call themselves women.

These men deserve honesty and attention. What they do not deserve is exploitation in life and in death by a campaign to scare trans-identified Westerners into thinking their lives hang by a thread. This isn’t remembrance. It’s the repurposing of other people’s suffering.

What genuine remembrance would look like

If Transgender Day of Remembrance were about truth, it would focus on the exploitation of poor youth in the sex trade and the conditions that can make prostitution a death sentence. It would state plainly that a disproportionate number of the victims counted as transgender are gender-nonconforming gay and bisexual males trapped in violent street economies. It would treat their deaths as a moral scandal in their own right—not as props for Western political theater.

TDOR might also commemorate people in this country like Yarden Silveira, a young man on the autism spectrum who struggled to accept his homosexuality and killed himself after suffering severe, agonizing complications from gender-related genital surgery.

Instead, TDOR is an opportunity for activists to put themselves at the center, cultivate fear, and harden ideological boundaries. The kids who most need clarity and steadiness are handed paranoia instead.

A better way forward

We can mourn real suffering without leveraging it for political points. Grief deserves honesty. Memory deserves respect. And young people deserve adults who won’t use fear under the guise of remembrance.

If you want real remembrance, demand real clarity. Share this piece, talk about what these numbers actually represent. Support the work of the LGB Courage Coalition as we push back on ideology that feeds on fear and erases gay and lesbian reality.