Rita Hester

Rita Hester, a black woman with long braids and gold jewelry. She wears a silver crown.

“I’m afraid of what will happen if [Palmer] gets off lightly. It’ll just give people a message that it’s OK to do this. This is a message we cannot afford to send.”

– Rita Hester

Transgender Day of Remembrance is a one-day event, not a week or a month, like Pride. When researching this article, there is an apparent reason for that: it is too much. It is too much for any person to bear to have a full week of scrolling through the names. It begins with Rita Hester, who was murdered a week before her 35th birthday, and her murder inspired the first Transgender Day of Remembrance. The First Day of Remembrance was then just a small candlelight vigil held in her honour and has since grown to include ceremonies worldwide.

Rita was stabbed twenty times by an unknown assailant and left where she fell. Her death was so impactful partially because another transgender woman, Chanelle Pickett, was murdered a year before and the murderer was only punished with two years in prison. Such a heinous miscarriage of justice that the state of California, after Chanelle’s murder, became the first and only state in America to outright ban the ‘trans panic’ defence to prevent something like it from happening again. Rita’s murder was only weeks after Matthew Shepard’s and lacked the national outcry. Rita was poor, black, transgender, and a woman and empathy for those groups are much more difficult to come by than empathy for white, cisgender, gay men. None of these things, though, are descriptions of Rita. None of them tell who she was.

Rita often wore black and purple and her friends loved her. She was tall and strong and no one understood how anyone managed to take her on. She had a sister who loved her and a mother who adored her. They used Rita’s proper name, though they never got her pronouns right. Rita used to go to her mother’s house, lay her head on her mother’s lap, and tell her mother she was beautiful. She was open about her identity to family and friends. She was murdered a week before her birthday.

Knowledge beyond that was stolen. Rita Hester’s opportunities and contributions were taken from her, and the queer community is poorer for it. Hers is not the only narrative lost. There are so many stories, and every year the list grows longer, and more are forgotten. Lost are full and rich lives, people who were working to change the world for the better, or people who were always able to make their best friend smile on hard days. So many people slip through the cracks.

None are alone in the grief of this. Worldwide, people join and realize the damage this violence brings to everyone, not only the queer community but also to all communities. These people were siblings, friends, children, activists, partners, writers, painters, and mathematicians; they were not just ours to lose. The world is poorer for their absence.

The woman who organized Transgender Day of Remembrance in honour of Rita Hester in 1999, a year after her death, Gwendolyn Ann Smith said:

“The Transgender Day of Remembrance is not an event for fundraisers and beer busts. It’s not an event we “celebrate.” It is not a quick and easy one-day way for organizations to get credit for their support of the transgender community. It’s not something to trot out on the 20th of November and forget about. We should be working every day for all of us, living and dead.

Why do we remember? We remember for Rita Hester and Chenelle Pickett. We remember for Brandon Teena, for Gwen Araujo, for Marsha P. Johnson. We remember for Deoni Jones of Baltimore, Md., killed last February. We remember for Tyrell Jackson of Florida, killed on April 4, 2012. We remember for Coko Williams, killed in Detroit on April 3. We remember for Paige Clay, killed in Chicago on April 16. We remember for Brandy Martell of Oakland, killed on April 29, 2012. We remember for Tiffany Gooden, killed in Chicago on August 14. We remember for hundreds of others killed around the world in anti-transgender murders.

This day we mourn our losses, and we honor our precious dead — tomorrow and every other day, we shall continue to fight for the living.”

[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]

Borrego, D. (2012, November 26). Who was Rita Hester? Open Democracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/dee-borrego/who-was-rita-hester

Fox, J. (2012, November 16). Transgender Day of Remembrance to honor Rita Hester, other victims of violence. Boston.com. Retrieved from http://archive.boston.com/yourtown/news/downtown/2012/11/transgender_day_of_remembrance.html

Jacobs, E. (2008, November 15). Remembering Rita Hester. Edge Media Network. Retrieved from http://boston.edgemedianetwork.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=music&sc3=&id=83392

Lerum, K. (2009, November 20). Introducing (and remembering) Rita Hester: Transgender Day of Remembrance. The Society Pages. Retrieved from https://thesocietypages.org/sexuality/2009/11/20/introducing-and-remembering-rita-hester/

Nangeroni, N. (1997, May 17). The Chanelle Pickett Story. Gendertalk. Retrieved from http://gendertalk.com/articles/victims/chanelle-revisit.shtml

Rita’s Story. (2007, November 19). TransGriot. Retrieved from http://transgriot.blogspot.ca/2007/11/ritas-story.html

Samantha, A. (2015, November 20). The Trans Murder That Started A Movement. The Daily Beast. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/20/the-trans-murder-that-started-a-movement.html

Smith, G. A. (2016, February 2). Transgender Day of Remembrance: Why We Remember. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gwendolyn-ann-smith/transgender-day-of-remembrance-why-we-remember_b_2166234.html