These are bad days.
Four trans and gender variant people - Sanesha Stewart, Lawrence King, Cameron McWilliams and Simmie Williams - are dead in less than fifteen days, two of them startlingly young. Four lives cut short so much before their time because they dared to exist. Four more names added to the already long rolls of the Days of Remembrance. I’m terrified to think of how many more will be there before November rolls around.
I’ve been struggling to find words for a while now. The everyday news, the small victories, the work when it can be done - this all pales in comparison something like this, the sharp reminder that there are people out there for whom our very humanity is so terrifying that we need to die. It’s another reminder to all of us that it could be me next time, that it could be my face in the tabloids with the wrong name, wrong pronouns and tawdry examination of my wardrobe, or to simply disappear, as it is now suggested may have happened to Gabrielle Pickett, sister of previously murdered transwoman Chanelle Pickett. It’s impossible to escape this hate. I have known too many people who have experienced terrible things for daring themselves. I think about the people I’ve known over the years that have simply disappeared. For this community, the bar of what makes one lucky is so much lower.
I’ve been absorbing myself in the day-to-day things of late, a new job and a new academic year. It’s just - there’s nothing that could be said that’ll make a difference on this one. No amount of law reform will bring these people back. little light made a post in her typically beautiful style a couple of weeks ago trying to find some semblance of hope in times like these:
In the end, it’s still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.
I wish I had that belief, that sense that an end to this systemic murder and abuse was possible. One tries where it is possible, and perhaps makes a drop in that ocean, but after weeks like these, I fear that we’ll be seeing our sisters and brothers killed for many years to come yet.