Today, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This day was set aside to honor and memorialize victims of transphobic violence in 1998.

Just last week saw the murders of two black transwomen, Duana Johnson and Lateisha Green. There has been little media coverage of these killings, and what coverage there is frequently fails to respect the victims’ identity.

Read a memorial poem dedicated to Duanna here.

Read the names of this year’s dead here.

Queen Emily says:

Few will respect our lives as they were, and few will mourn them, and they must be mourned. Their lives were meaningful, their names and genders were real and important, and they lost their lives from hate…

And yes, today we remember those of us still living–our fear, the fear that lives at the heart of every trans person, that someone will know that we are trans, and will kill us for it. Today we remember all the other times we murmured “oh fuck” as we read the news. Today we discover the deaths we missed, because we couldn’t bear hearing about them anymore for awhile, even though we must. We must.

I’ve been thinking a lot about coalitions lately. Coalitions and communities, about how those two concepts overlap and how they are very different creatures with very different functions, and different needs.

Some of these musings were sparked by a conversation with a friend of mine, who mentioned how he had spoken up in an LGBTQIQ support group about his experience as a transgender person and gotten nothing but an an awkward silence back from the other members. This led to a discussion of the limitations of the LGBTQIQ (etc) umbrella, and how the word “community,” so commonly applied to the LGBTQIQ movement, is often a misnomer. The issues faced by lesbian and gay people are not the same as issues faced by bisexual people are very much not the same as issues faced by transpeople are not identical to issues faced by intersex people. The issues faced by queer people of color are not the same as those faced by queer White people. The issues preoccupying affluent and middle class queer folks may be completely irrelevant to queer people living in poverty. And all too often the umbrella doesn’t cover everyone the way it’s supposed to or assumed to.

It seems to me that this problem arises when people within the so-called community assume that because it is a “community,” everyone encompassed by it does have the same needs, the same interests, and the same or similar experiences. It’s that mindset–an expectation of automatic clarity and easy understanding, an inability to engage with difference–that my friend met in what was supposed to be a safe space. In fact, the LGBTQIQ movement is much more like a coalition than a community, an alliance of groups with vastly different–and sometimes conflicting–interests, concerns, and unifying experiences. And coalitions are not–cannot be, should not be–safe spaces. Effective coalitions require us to step outside our comfort zones, to work through and with differences of opinion, to expect that understanding won’t always or often be intuitive or simple.

The other thing which has me thinking about coalitions is the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which–as Amanda pointed out in her last post–is most certainly a reproductive justice issue. I believed, and still believe, that it was time for marriage discrimination to be ended in my state. The initiative passed by only a few percentage points–and is a hallmark of coalition failure, a failure of coalition-building.

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