Drinking Fire, Weaving Names: Trans Day of Remembrance.

I’ll never forget my first year reading the names of the trans people lost to violence and misery.

I had just received my own name that day. I went from the courthouse to the local bar I frequented and sat quietly diluting my warm drink with the cooling tears of relief. I felt joy and ownership over myself. I had claimed my name and learned to own it through the alcohol and my tears burning my throat.

Nov 20, 2019. On my way to the bar from the courthouse.

I left my joy at the bar as the sun set and I met other trans folks and local activists in the city square to hold candles and read off from a list of people whose names were taken from them. We read them to a drumbeat together with the percussion of a chisel etching names, faces, and stories onto a fear and grief we already knew swallowed down inside ourselves. There I was again, holding a cup of fire and learning the value of names as they burned their way into my body.

Each year, I have read off from a list of names of trans people unjustly taken from us by societies that determined they had no place in them. I think in the past, I blamed the world for this cruelty but I’m a year older and wiser and I realize now the world wants us to exist.

Why, otherwise, would we continue to appear?

We are, after all, the dandelions of society — vibrant, resilient, and functional flowers dubbed a weed amongst society’s carefully tended gardens. The world clearly wants us to thrive. We are as natural and persistent as any other force of nature and our Trans Day of Remembrance has been rooted in the memorializing all of us that should have been able to grow into something new, beautiful, and natural in our world.

For my part in this, I feel as though I took the memory of those individuals we lost and did not properly honor it for what it was: a challenge to approach mourning differently in a way that recognizes the potential of each name snuffed out too soon. I feel guilty of performing the ceremony without question: a Trans Day of Remembrance that leaves people feeling more sad, helpless, and alone does nothing to truly honor all the lost potential of our trans siblings.

That’s why this year, and every year from now, must be different. Those names should not be etched on the grief we know and carry — they should be etched into the very flesh and fabric of the society that haunted them in their lives. They should become small seeds of transformation popping up everywhere, just like dandelions.

Drinking Fire

The Trans Day of Remembrance was born from tragedy in the 90s, a way to protect the name of Rita Hester who had been killed in 98 and the trans people who had died in the year following. This, then, became the ritual we know today: vigils, candles in plastic cups, and all of us drinking the burning reality of the challenges ahead and the people who will never see the brighter future we’re working towards.

And this, I think, is where it’s time for us to make a change. I wonder exactly, how many people can name the names from last year. Hell, I wonder how many people can name one name from last year. Trans Day of Remembrance has become a stark reminder that if this world takes us our names will be remembered only in the ethereal grief carried by others and that shifting earth is a poor substitute for the way that those lost names could have impacted this world.

I was meant to be one of them after all.

My transition story starts with a plan to kill myself. To say I was angry wouldn’t do my feelings justice. I was not just angry, I wanted to punish this world for how it had treated me as a child — the rapes, the abuse, and most of all the fear. I wanted my grave to be a mirror for its cruelty so that it would be forced to reckon with it whenever it remembered me.

The plan was simple: I would move away from my family, get transitional care in Maryland, and then I would do the deed. I’ll spare the details of my plan. The point was that when they buried me there should be no way to avoid my real name. They should have to reconcile all the stories they told themselves about who I was with the corpse in front of them. Where they overlooked me and my suffering, I wanted to make sure their eyes would never see anything but what happened to me.

It was all going so well until I started my transition. I started to get better. I grew curious about myself and who I’d become. I realized, over a few months, that if I killed myself then I was committing the same sin I wanted others to choke down: taking a name from this world before its story could be told.

I am grateful, every day, that I get to experience this story and my place in it. When I read the names for this year, I think about all those stories that will never see an ending. There will always be unanswered questions, plots unresolved.

Weave The Names In This World

Many people, I think, genuinely mean well and need a bit more instruction than simply “fight” and seek “justice.” It’s time for us to define, in some small way, what justice must look like for the names on this list.

That does not mean we cannot honor those lost stories and songs. An appropriate memorial for them represents not that they were lost, but that they were in progress. We should, then, weave the threads of their stories into the stories of others.

I want to take you to a bench in New York City. This bench has seen so much life. It was there for one couple’s first kiss looking up at the stars between the trees punctuating the concrete sidewalk. It hosted the grief of a daughter getting the call that she would never see her mother again. Its oil stained paint holds the memories of so many people having their first slice of proper New York Pizza. And it also has a name on it: a name that people will remember when they meet here again for anniversaries and when they tell their stories about those moments. Maybe, 10 or 15 years from new, people will say “Let’s meet on Cam Thompson’s bench again.”

This bench doesn’t exist. But it could.

In this year’s names, Cam’s bio says she “never met a stranger,” and I can’t help but imagine that someone like that would weave so nicely into all those comings and goings of not-strangers whose lives will be touched by her name if not her presence. We could make that happen. Her name could grace one hundred benches and other meeting places.

The list includes fashionistas, dance instructors, educators, advocates and more. How we could take up the mantle of those names not as an act of grief but to make sure those names truly belong in the tapestry of this world in a way that will play an immutable part of stories that will continue? Maybe, just maybe, those names will help change things.

I wonder if a child’s first pair of donated ballet slippers, a permanent part of their story, could come with a name included in that sponsorship. I wonder what this world could be like if that cup of coffee was “from Kamora Woods.”

How many lives could it change if we remembered someone by donating copies of their favorite books to the world? How many children will have that book in 20 or 30 years? How many authors will remember that as the book that sparked their love of writing?

These people would have touched the world with their presence, maybe in small ways, but never in zero ways. This society betrayed them, and in return we should weave their memory into it so that they will never be forgotten.

Name Day

Perhaps the most sacred day in any trans person’s life is the day they take their own name. The day a name finally lands on a someone is almost religious. Weeks, months, and sometimes even years of struggle and trial and error went into crafting those names and honing them until they felt just right. I wish I knew the stories behind these names on the list this year.

I want to know more about what Onyx felt so attached to in that striped, dark stone. I want to hear how Ra’lasia came to adopt such a beautiful name and the meaning it had for her.

I wonder if on the day they claimed those names as their own, they too drank fire just the same as I did as they released years of being told who they were, what they were capable of, and where they belongs.

Did Deniz feel a sense of direction when that name landed on them?

Our task as the carriers of those names is to let the name, if not the person it attached to, continue to have an impact on this world. A whisper of smoke from the fires they drank — a little piece of their story still smoldering, still lighting the world.

Let’s Meet Here Again.

In one year let’s meet here again. Let’s collect the new names and tell stories of the ways we wove last year’s names into the world. Let’s talk about the park benches, the ballet slippers, and all the ways this world will have changed for the names on these lists.

Let’s bring those smoldering embers back together and dance around the light they’ve created in this world. Then let’s read the names for this year. Let’s drink the fire of sorrow and salt, and let’s carry those embers out into the world to weave them and their memories into the story of a society that tried so hard to make sure they were forgotten.

Let’s make this something sacred, an act of defiance, sure, but a ritual that honors the power of humanity and names rather than asking us to swallow them and all the grief attached in the name of memory. Let’s make this world bear the burden of memory until, finally, we reach that day when there are no more names to read.

That will be a beautiful day. I hope I’m sitting on that park bench in New York City when I hear the news. I’ll get up from that bench, go to the nearest bar, and I’ll drink fire again as I happily cry thinking about how many stories are still going on in this world.

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