tabithaTDOR 2025 – Sponsored by Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”
So last week was the recurrence of Trans Day of Remembrance. This year I was involved in planning the local event and essentially while we were running something that anyone could stand up and speak at we made sure to put a few ringers in the crowd in case things got quiet and needed a nudge, one of which was me.
This year my theme was the mix of sadness and rage, so I wrote the following.
Below I’ve reproduced the framework notes I was working off, but on the day I was spurred on by something someone said earlier to talk about my feelings for Lucy Meadows who was hounded to suicide by the UK media back in 2013 when I was still relatively early into transition. It’s an event that left its mark on my mind, showing me what society can and will do to us in the name of entertainment and a moral crusade.
So while the below segment is the bare bones it wasn’t everything that was said on the day. I also gave the people I was working to organise the event with the chance to ask me to modify what I was saying to remove the overtly religious work.
I’ve scattered links throughout to the ideas I was referencing and name checking.
Trans day of remembrance is a relatively young event, beginning in 1999 in America to commemorate the murders of Rita Hester, Chanelle Pickett and other trans women, caught at the intersection of American gender, queerness, and race bigotries. The event spreading from there and becoming a regular feature of our calendars to recognise and remember those we have lost due to transphobic violence. It’s fitting to me in this dark time of the year that we look to remember and grieve for our dead. And every year I face this time with a mix of sadness, and also rage.
I have a great sadness in my heart for all those of us we lose to murder, to violence, but also I have rage at the way that the power of society excuses those murders and that violence. I have great rage at the pressures of society causing even more of us to socially murdered – to have our lives shortened – by the effects of medical neglect, drug addiction, minority stress, intimate partner violence, class, poverty, homelessness, sexual assault, and a thousand other cuts both small and large, and all too frequently we are driven to suicide by all this.
As we say to each other – “look if you’re trans, you have to live. Do whatever you need to do to make it, but you have to live”.
The flip side of that is of course that if you see the trans people you know struggling I implore you to do what you can to check in on them, to do what you can to support them, to make sure that the hot allostatic load of being hyper visible in a society tacitly condoning our demonisation doesn’t overwhelm them and add to the list of those we must mourn in the dark of next year.
Historically the lives we have been allowed to live have been driven by apotheosis, we are linked to various gods to explain our existence and our transitions are to become like them, the cost of which is to be seen as “other” from the rest of humanity. This is a powerful framing from which we can draw trans power and joy, however it cannot be the only framing we have access to. Our lives are just our lives, lived imperfectly, but as ourselves. We have to live and we have to help each other live as best we can however that is, and we have to pick each other up as best we can when things go wrong even if people fuck up.
Still I reference the words of Emperor Julian and call for the Magna Mater, Cybele, to perfect our theurgy, to grant us true knowledge of what is good and virtuous in the world. To grant us long, glorious, joyful, and pain-free lives – that we may live and thrive as a part of the world, instead of this callous murder by those who cannot see our inner light. We are trans and we must live, and do what we can to help each other live instead of being ground down and socially murdered by a society in the thrall of a moral panic driven by a handful of hateful bigots.
[[ Improvised segment about the death of Lucy Meadows in which I politely request that those involved still working in the media step on Lego for the rest of their lives ]]
This will not be the last event like this I attend, and my love for my people and my sadness and rage at this is unutterable.
When writing this I was looking for something that I could listen to on a loop to help drive my feelings on framing everything, so I googled up trans anthems and found a Reddit thread where someone mentioned the idea that Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” was a trans woman anthem so yeah, I wrote the above with that on loop and over the weekend its been popping back into my head and bringing a mass of feelings with it.
I was so fucking angry on the day and I funneled that into being able to stand up and deliver my rhetoric to some trans folks and a large number of supportive allies, then once I had done that I was able to let it pass through me and feel all the other feelings I had been concealing behind it. The catharsis of anger is useful, but also the motivation of anger to continue to effect change in the world is a powerful motivator.
After talking I lit a candle for those who have gone before and wrote a note to a specific friend I miss who was gone too soon and hung it with the other messages on a little tree and had a bit of a cry about things.
Apparently my speaking was good enough that I got compliments about it later by a passing vicar so hopefully it reached the right people and nudged them to check in on each other.
