By Claire M. McCown, M.P.S.
Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an annual day of observance honoring the lives of those lost to anti-transgender violence. TDOR is held on November 20th and was started in 1998 after a Black transgender woman, Rita Hester, was murdered in her Boston apartment. Similar to the murders of many other transgender and gender nonconforming (TG/GNC) people, Rita Hester’s murder remains unsolved. While activist organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) publish an annual TDOR list of those murdered over the preceding year, these hate crime statistics likely underreport the number of murders. Many TG/GNC people are misgendered postmortem and their murders are not acknowledged as hate crimes. The murder of TG/GNC people are overwhelmingly racialized as well, with Black transgender women comprising the majority of those slain. This threatening intersection of transphobia, misogyny, and racism place transgender women of color at the greatest risk for violence and victimization.