LJ Slovin is the author of Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, and a Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Today, cities and towns across Canada are marking the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR), an event that has been memorializing trans people who have been murdered since 1999. But as a trans educator, I have struggled with my relationship to TDOR for years.
It’s certainly enveloped in good intentions – honouring those in our community who have been lost to transphobic violence and bringing us together to galvanize support to protect the living. And to be sure, trans people face genuine risks to their lives: the Trans Murder Monitoring project reported that 350 trans and gender-diverse people around the world were murdered in the last year, one of the highest death tolls since the initiative launched in 2009. But TDOR is also a gathering that revolves around trans death – and that risks positioning trans people as little more than victims.
TDOR was created to bring attention to the issue of transphobic violence, which was being underreported, misreported and largely ignored. In the decades since, trans people have become more present in the media and in scholarship, though a focus on danger and death remains. As provinces continue to introduce anti-trans legislation, most recently in Alberta, we need to think seriously about the ways trans people, especially children and youth, are continuously positioned as victims.
Language around risk, care, concern and protection loom large in this current moment of anti-trans backlash, as well as in the activist response to it. Legislators, parents and activists on all sides of these issues see children and youth as vulnerable and in need of protection: Reactionary and conservative adults view youth as at-risk of learning about allegedly “controversial” topics such as gender, sexuality and race in schools, while more progressive advocates warn of the possibilities of harm in censoring this knowledge and in banning access to sports and gender-affirming health care.
Positioning trans youth as being at-risk has been, and continues to be, a strategic move on the part of advocates and educators. This framing of queer and trans youth as vulnerable was intended to inspire others to fight for trans young people and to care about their safety. Like TDOR’s efforts to spark attention and concern about transphobic violence, the attempt to mobilize care for trans youth is very well-intentioned. However, what ideas about transness do we reinforce when we focus on little more than risk and death? If our society only comes to care about trans people because of our presumed vulnerability and heightened risk of death or harm, we tether the very idea of transness to risk, danger and death. If educators, parents and legislators advocate for trans people only because of a drive to protect us, we reinforce the idea that being trans is exclusively risky and challenging.
The idea that trans people, in particular youth, need protection can have its own harmful ramifications. Look no further than the parental rights’ movement and recent legislation in Alberta. At the root of these bills and that movement is the assumption that transness is fundamentally undesirable, an existence that society should shield children from. However, when fears over youth safety can be used to justify violent and restrictive policies that actually target trans young people, we need to examine what is inspiring this move to “protect.” More to the point, when even politicians such as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith can claim that they “care” about trans youth as they enact harmful policies meant to curtail their existence, we need to question the potentially patronizing and paternalistic way we talk about caring for trans people.
Though TDOR certainly operates differently with fundamentally different aims, we can notice a similar protectionist spirit. These events highlight trans death to call for our protection, but this focus on death also makes it difficult to communicate (to the general public, and again, especially to trans youth) that being trans is a desirable way to live.
Being and growing up trans is beautiful, and advocates and allies who want to reject the violent rhetoric of the anti-trans backlash and instead truly care for the trans children, young people and adults in their lives and in their communities should make sure not to lose sight of this reality. We need to do more than symbolically honour trans death – we need to celebrate trans life on all the other days too, by seeing, respecting and talking about it as a desirable way to live.