On November 20th, we cannot mourn the past without interrogating our present. It’s easy to grieve the dead; it’s harder to come to terms with our complicity in their oppression, with the parts of ourselves that would still regard a transgender woman of color in Brazil as the bridge too far. As Audre Lorde wrote, “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears.”

If transgender people remain stubbornly in the shadows of progressive politics, it is because we are still the terror inside the liberal imaginary, we are still the wearers of those loathed faces. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Light a candle today. Shine it on yourself.

Samantha Allen, “Transgender, Dead, and Forgotten“