Politics

This Transgender Day Of Remembrance, Let’s Remember Those We Lost In The Fight For Equality

It's been a tough year to be trans in Australia.

by Sam Langford  20 November 2018
political correctness This Transgender Day of Remembrance, let's consider how Australia can do better.

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Today, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s a sad day, observed annually, to commemorate and remember transgender people who didn’t survive the year.

The day exists to highlight the violence that transgender people, especially transgender women, face every day. Around the world, trans people are murdered at alarming rates. Trans youth face extraordinarily high rates of depression and suicide. And in Australia in the past 12 months, things like the fallout from the postal survey on marriage equality — and hell, things like Scott Morrison opening his mouth — have made this worse.

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Transgender Youth Face Extraordinarily High Rates Of Suicide And Depression

For Australia, this Transgender Day of Remembrance is in large part a day to remember the trans and gender diverse people who didn’t make it through the postal survey. Or those who are still here, but struggling, because the fight for marriage equality didn’t flow on into the same kind of community-wide fight for the support and services trans people in this country need. As we reach the one year anniversary of the postal survey result, and all the attendant book releases and retrospectives, that’s a sad fact worth our attention, our consideration, and our action.

Today is also an opportunity to remember and call out some of the things that have made life for trans people in this country so difficult over the past twelve months. Not just the postal survey, but the kind of conversations that were enabled and encouraged by holding a country-wide vote on the rights of a minority group.

The trans community ended up shouldering an immense amount of the violence of the postal survey. And one year on, this community is still bearing the brunt of that violence. It was just two months ago, in September, that Scott Morrison tweeted his ill-informed bullshit about “gender whisperers” in schools, mischaracterising one of the rare programs that actually supports transgender kids so he could make a political point. It fell to Evie McDonald, a thirteen-year-old kid, to correct him. She shouldn’t have had to.

It was also in September that Hannah Mouncey withdrew from the AFLW draft, saying she had faced too much discrimination and abuse trying to enter the league as a transgender woman. Overseas, the Trump administration — which Scott Morrison has been all too happy to imitate in many ways — threatened to define being transgender out of existence by redefining gender. It has been a terrifying year to be trans, and yet we’re still talking mainly about the trans people who survived.

Greens senator Janet Rice marked Trans Day of Remembrance this year to call on Scott Morrison to “use today to reflect on the hurt and damage his past actions have caused and to apologise to trans and gender diverse Australians”.

It’s not a bad directive for anyone else who is at a loss for what to do on this day. Take a moment to remember those we’ve lost, look back on the ways we failed them, and consider what we can do over the next year to do better by our trans community.

Vigils marking Transgender Day of Remembrance are being held around the country. If you’re based in Sydney, there’s a vigil at Harmony Park tonight. If you’re based in Melbourne, there’s a vigil in Fitzroy. You can find other public events on Facebook by searching Transgender Day of Remembrance or #TDOR.