Remembrance under Siege
In the LGBTQIA+ commemorative calendar, for which so many of us now are beholden to, the past week (12-19 November) has been Trans Awareness Week which closes with Trans Day of Remembrance (20 November), representing the formalised framework through which trans existence becomes temporarily legible and a cause for concern. This week I have given a couple of talks, one was a paper at the Henry Moore Institute’s ‘Power to the People' symposium and one an evening talk at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester both of which considered how anti-trans mobilisations operationalise institutional amnesia to legitimise harm.
I asked questions about how the deliberate fracturing of LGBTQIA+ coalition histories through separate legislative treatment complicate community memory formation and intergenerational knowledge sharing. The ways that manufactured narratives about trans people (e.g. deliberately inflated detransition statistics, fabricated claims about medical interventions or anything that includes the word ‘contagious’) function to position trans experiences as inherently fictitious, historically unprecedented and fundamentally unintelligible, whereby undermining the credibility of our own experiences but also creating conditions where trans people speaking at all face presumptive delegitimisation regardless of content or context. Such disenfranchisement goes beyond trans people talking on trans things, to trans people speaking on anything. While the systemic erasure of transgender presence from institutional commemorative space, exemplified by the Trump administration’s removal of references to trans people from New York’s Stonewall National Monument website , is a calculated intervention in how public memory is constructed and maintained. The National Park Service’s public affairs department said that the steps had been taken to comply with the ‘Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ part of Executive Order 14168 (I have previously written about this in relation to sports being a gateway to wider border control restrictions here).
Adjacent rewritings are also happening in real time, for example in what Finn Mackay (2025) notes as the misdirection inherent in the so-called ‘gender culture war’ which functions not as critiques of gendering systems but as a mechanism for hyper scrutinising the gender of ‘others’. As they note ‘concerns about gender are, in fact, concerns about trans people, concerns about ’gender ideology’ are concerns about trans people’. When ‘gender’ becomes code for ‘transgender’ for example within gender-critical feminist organising, alongside so much other violence, is also rewrites our understanding of what constitutes ‘gender’, a distortion that obscures how gender is comprehensive colonial classification system that constraints everyones possibilities for self expression.
The erasing of trans lives from the Stonewall website is really the tip of the iceberg for digital trans archives which face systemic vulnerability to the supposedly ‘neutral’ algorithmic governance that seek to disrupt, delete and effectively dismantle trans visual heritage projects that fail to conform to the binary computational logics upon which algorithmic systems are predicated. Pincered between bureaucratic and algorithmic erasure, both increasingly funded by the same handful of super-rich individuals see Watkins (2025) on AI as the ‘new aesthetics of fascism’ and Joanna Wuest (2025) examination of ‘Big Capital and the Anti-Trans Agenda’ it becomes clearer perhaps why TDoR retains such significance as a grassroots commemorative practice.
TDoR has increasingly become contested terrain, what originated as community based memorialisation has increasingly been absorbed into institutional calendars, corporate diversity initiatives and institutionally supported events. Such adoption severs current commemorative practices from their radical activist foundations, transforming acts of political resistance into palatable performances of inclusion that note but rarely challenge the structural conditions producing disproportionately experienced transgender vulnerability. Do we want organised TDoR events or memorial statements by universities quietly dismantling transgender-inclusive policies, by hospitals actively restricting transgender healthcare or corporations that maintain hiring practice that contribute to a 2021 UK census finding that trans people are around 81% more likely than cis people to be unemployed? The contradiction between institutional gestures and material policy or what Ahmed (2006) refers to as ‘non performative institutional speech’ - statements that appear to enact commitments while failing to generate the institutional changes they promise - demand our sustained attention.
The above cannot be separated from the call also coming from inside the house as Morgan Page reminds us in her sharing of an extract of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ interview with Viviane Namaste in 2005 on the origins of Trans Day of Remembrance. The conversation highlights how such commemorative practices reproduce hierarchies of recognition and respectability, privileging trans identity as a singular axis while systematically ignoring intersecting dimensions of structural vulnerability - particularly sex work - despite the statistical overrepresentation of trans sex workers among those memorialised. In the words of Ross, such days then ‘function, both theatrically and politically, to benefit a privileged subsection of the trans community’ while rendering invisible even within the trans community those most acutely impacted.
This is similar to Toby Beaucamp’s (2007) notes on how such public demonstrations of grief function as citizen-making projects, which despite ‘to talk about violence against trans people, in a broad sense, is really to talk about violence against trans women, trans people of colour and trans sex workers’ turns to legal systems as solutions for violence injustices. Beaucamp (2007), much like Ross’s comments that Page shared, reminds us that Gwendolyn Smith, a white transsexual woman who was the board member and ‘webmistress’ of Gender Education and Advocacy (GEA) the US-based internet non-profit org that set up on their site ‘Remembering Our Dead’ in 1999 which grew into the annual TDoR, on the original site wrote ‘over the last decade, one person per month has died due to the transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives’ . UK trans scholar Lamble (2008) also highlighted divisions in how individuating violences into enclosed acts enables white complicity ‘the narrative allows Whites to deny the ways in which we/they enable and benefit from the ongoing legacy of colonial and racialised violence’. C Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn in an account of the 1995 death of Tyra Hunter, an African-American trans women from Washington D.C. and the many uses to which her death subsequently has been put, offer an important to critique to how ‘immobilised in life, and barred from spaces designated as White (the good life, the Global North, the gentrifying inner city, the university, the trans community) it is in their death that poor and sex working trans people of colour are invited back in, it is in death that they suddenly come to matter’.
The effacement of that which is actually systematically harming trans people and the implicit mobilisation of human rights discourse that presupposes liberal state recognition as the primary means of justice reproduce the very structures of belonging that render certain bodies differentially vulnerable.