Staklo on Thursday night. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Gabrielle “Cam” Nguyen loved the color pink and dreamed of becoming a debate coach. Luisa Rivera spent decades lifting up the women around her, proud to support her sisters in the struggle. Aziza Barnes was a vibrant poet and playwright whose words soared as they exposed systems that were broken, breaking. Eli Stablein was easy to talk to, with soft, trusting eyes and a face that still seemed young at 49. Roy Mora was just 15 and adored by his mother and his friends every day of his too-short life.
Those names, each with a refrain of "Rest In Power," blanketed New Haven Green Thursday night, for PeerPride's now-annual observance of Transgender Day of Remembrance or TDOR. Organized by Kirill Staklo, Eliot Olson and Fable Burley, the evening marked nearly a decade of honoring trans lives each November , including in a socially distanced, outdoor gathering the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout, it became not just a call to remember and to mourn, but to find strength and safety in shared community.
"There's a lot of darkness," Burley said. "There are a lot of reasons to be sad and scared. Know that as we read out these names, that you are not alone. That we are not alone."
Transgender Day of Remembrance began in 1999 to honor Rita Hester, a Black trans woman who was murdered in her Boston apartment in November 1998. Her mother, Kathleen Hester, fought for justice until her own death at 81 years old. Over two decades later, her case and so many others like it remains unsolved.
This year, it also takes place amidst a growing wave of anti-trans violence across the country, from state legislatures to campaign advertising built around fear mongering and misinformation. As a sort of antidote, PeerPride has focused its efforts on growing TDOR observances across the state, a movement that continues to expand.
Thursday, that sense of community was on display, even as passers-by walked by the group and did a double take. As friends, partners, care providers and supporters of PeerPride gathered by the Green's flagpole, organizers folded and smoothed out a Trans Pride flag, its white, blue and pink bands glowing even in the darkness. Atop it, they placed dozens of electric tea lights, each a flame that had been extinguished far too soon.
Attendees, of whom there had just been a handful minutes before, formed an almost-semicircle, voices rising and falling amid the sound of traffic on all sides of the Green.
As each took a tea light, Staklo stepped forward, listening intently as Burley welcomed attendees with an edge of something wistful and passionate on her voice. Then, lifting his phone in one hand, Staklo began to read out the names of those the world has lost to anti-trans violence, from promising young students to scientists who researched the Covid-19 virus to Detroit-based makeup artists.
This year, there are 58 known victims of anti-trans violence, according to Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE). They include, for instance, 82-year-old Lady Java, an activist and performer who didn't let let enforcement get between her and a routine. Or 22-year-old Megan Jordan Kridli, a Miami-based youth activist who fought for both Palestine and her trans brothers and sisters until the stress and exhaustion caught up to her. Or 26-year-old Quanesha Shantel, a nursing student whose friends and family affectionately referred to as “Cocoa.”
Staklo noted that the number is likely higher: trans people are frequently deadnamed or misgendered in news reports about their deaths. "One of the first forms of death we face is erasure," he said.
As attendees listened, some wiping away tears, Staklo added a moment for Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a steadfast LGBTQ+ activist and doting mother to hundreds of queer and trans youth during her lifetime. In some ways, Staklo said, Griffin-Gracy was a victim of the broken systems—racism, capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy chief among them—that are woven through the fabric of this country.
"We can't survive as people if we don't operate in unity and in community," he said later in the evening, noting the work that Trans Haven does to both advocate fiercely and to build community. He added that the violence and discrimination trans people experience is part of a larger "economic and social attack on everybody" that includes cuts to SNAP benefits, rising unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing.
Michael DeWolfe and Reia Massaro.
It could not come at a more urgent time. Since the beginning of this year, state legislatures across the country have passed over 120 pieces of anti-trans legislation, from bathroom bans to freezes on gender-affirming healthcare and access to reproductive medicine. In Washington, President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of anti-trans executive orders, all aimed at the precipitous erasure of trans people and particularly trans youth.
Connecticut has not been immune to this wave of anti-trans policies: in late July, Yale New Haven Health and Connecticut Children’s Hospital both suspended their access to gender-affirming care for youth. I meant that hundreds of youth felt suddenly unmoored and often unsafe, sometimes starting the search for care all over again.
And yet Thursday, friends took the time not just to gather, but to issue a call to keep showing up and to keep advocating for each other. Michael DeWolfe, head of communications and events at Anchor Health CT, said he was grateful for the chance to be with others in their grief and their practice of remembrance, a reminder of how not alone trans people are.
As both a care provider and a member of the trans community, "showing up is the first thing," he said. "We have a responsibility to be present in our communities and show up."
Reia Massaro, a family nurse practitioner at Anchor, said that her thoughts were with the young people that she serves. This year, as in years past, several of the people remembered are shockingly young, just teenagers on the cusp of adulthood when their lives were cut short.
"This year I'm thinking about the kids that I serve," she said. "Some of them are incredibly resilient. Some of them are not all right."
Nearby, Bridgeport-based advocate Lynn V. slipped in, taking a candle that she held gently in her palm. As a kid, Lynn said, she knew she was trans "from a very young age," but for years was afraid to come out because of the stigma and ignorance attached to it. Thursday evening, she said that she was thinking about the intersections at which so many trans people find themselves—and how to keep building community as one explores those multiple identities.
"It's good to remind people that you exist," she said.
Before closing, Burley rose from where she had been sitting, and began to speak one final time. She shouted out a member of her own chosen mother, Robin, who welcomed Burley into her home at a particularly dark time in her journey. Back then, Burley said, she could have ended up as one of the names "on that list." Instead, she's a thriving and fierce member of her community in New Haven, with a gift for activism that she's still navigating.
"As a community, we are stronger together," she said. Despite the country's legislative landscape—and the anti-trans vitriol and violence that it has enabled—"I am more hopeful than I ever have been that we are gonna make it forward."