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Transgender Day of Remembrance 2025

by Veronica Polyniak on 2025-11-19T15:00:00-05:00 | 0 Comments

On November 20, 1998, Rita Hester, an African American transgender woman, was murdered in her apartment by an unknown assailant. As a beloved member of Boston’s LGBTQ+ community, hundreds of people gathered at a candlelight vigil to honor her memory. Although her murderer has never been caught—leaving the motive unconfirmed—it is widely suspected that she was targeted because of her gender identity.

In 1999, after a conversation about anti-transgender violence with friends, advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith called for November 20th to be recognized as Transgender Remembrance Day (TDoR). The first event was held in the Castro District of San Francisco. The day served as a grim reminder of the violence directed towards transgender people and those who had lost their lives as a result of it.

Since the initial gathering, the day has been observed all over the world, with advocates calling for awareness on anti-transgender violence and the value of community-building. At Shippensburg University, the PAGE center hosts an annual candlelight vigil to bring awareness to this ongoing issue and to honor the names of all those murdered over the past year.

In remembering the pain associated by this day, it is also important to recognize the history and enduring strength of the transgender community.

Below are books available at the library to learn more about this topic and find out how you can uplift the voices of your peers.

Transgender Voices by Lori B. Girshick; Jamison Green (Foreword by)

ISBN: 9781584656838

Publication Date: 2009-06-30

In this extraordinary book, based on 150 in-depth interviews, Lori B. Girshick, a sociologist and social justice activist, brings together the voices of sex- and gender-diverse people who speak with absolute candor about their lives. Girshick presents transpeople speaking in their own voices about identity, coming out, passing, sexual orientation, relationship negotiations and the dynamics of attraction, homophobia (including internalized fears), and bullying. She exposes the guilt and the shame that "gender police" use in their attempts to exert control and points out the many ways transpeople are discriminated against in daily life, from filling out identification documents to gender-segregated bathrooms. By showing us a variety of descriptions of diverse real lives and providing a thorough exploration of the embodied experiences of gender variant people, Girshick demonstrates that there is nothing inherently binary about gender, and that the way each of us experiences our own gender is, in fact, normal and natural.

Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson

ISBN: 9781517904678

Publication Date: 2018-10-23

A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today's transgender children are a brand new generation--pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender. Beginning with the early 1900s when children with "ambiguous" sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children's sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and '70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children's bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender's plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies. Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century--a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg

ISBN: 9780807079416

Publication Date: 1997-06-30

"The foundational text that gave me life-changing context, helping me to understand who I was and who came before me."--Tourmaline, activist and filmmaker Transgender Warriors is an essential read for trans people of all ages who want to learn about the towering figures who have come before them--and for everyone who is part of the fight for trans liberation This groundbreaking book--far ahead of its time when first published in 1996 and still galvanizing today--interweaves history, memoir, and gender studies to show that transgender people, far from being a modern phenomenon, have always existed and have exerted their influence throughout history. Leslie Feinberg--hirself a lifelong transgender revolutionary--reveals the origin of the check-one-box-only gender system and shows how zie found empowerment in the lives of transgender warriors around the world, from the Two Spirits of the Americas to the many genders of India, from the trans shamans of East Asia to the gender-bending Queen Nzinga of Angola, from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and beyond. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the available covers.

The Transgender Phenomenon by Richard Ekins; Dave King

ISBN: 9780761971641

Publication Date: 2006-11-15

"Dave King and Richard Ekins are the leading world sociologists in this field. The book brings together a brilliant synthesis of history, case studies, ideas and positions as they have emerged over the past thirty years, and brings together a rich but always grounded account of this field, providing a state of the art of critical concepts and ideas to take this field further during the twenty first century." - Ken Plummer, University of Essex "An outstanding survey of the evolution of trans phenomena, splendidly written, highly informative, scholarly at its best, yet easy to read even for those neither trans nor sociologist. Ekins and King, experts in the field, unroll the panoramas of sex, gender, and transgendering that have evloved during the last decades. For everyone wanting to understand the interaction of women and men and of those who cannot or will not identify with either of these two cataegories, reading this book is a must, and a real pleasure." - Friedmann Pfaefflin, University of ULM This groundbreaking study sets out a framework for exploring transgender diversity for the new millennium. It sets forth an original and comprehensive research and provides a wealth of vivid illustrative material. Based on two decades of fieldwork, life history work, qualitative analysis, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers around the world, the authors distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering ′stories′ to illustrate: The binary male/female divide The interrelations betwen sex, sexuality and gender The interrelations between the main sub-processes of transgendering. Wonderfully insightful, The Transgender Phenomenon develops an original and innovative conceptual framkework for understanding the full range of the transgender experience.

Transgender History, Second Edition by Susan Stryker

ISBN: 9781580056892

Publication Date: 2017-11-07

A timely second edition of the classic text on transgender history, with a new introduction and updated material throughout Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990, the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

ISBN: 9781541605404

Publication Date: 2024-09-24

A "vital" (New York Times Book Review), groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives. Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam chronicles expressions of trans experience that are often left out of the historical record. Drawing on their own experience of transition and gender nonbinarism, Heyam reveals that what constitutes a man, a woman, or gender itself has continually been defined, contested, and redefined. A groundbreaking, radically inclusive trans history, Before We Were Trans reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written--and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

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