To my sisters on the day of remembrance
My sisters, I love you. I fight for you. On this day, we mourn our fallen sisters and siblings, because others have not. We cherish and remember their memories until the day that none of us are killed. We say their names because the silence in our deaths is part of how we are made inhuman in the cis gaze. We remember their humanity in the face of cops and reporters who use their silence in death to erase their lives, who use their power to finish what the murderer started. We remember their humanity and worth in resistance to the racist, transphobic, and misogynistic state/culture that denies us humanity, worth, and life. We remember until the day that no one can forget it.
The day of remembrance is a funeral, but it is also a political one. We do not hold it just to be sad, we do not hold it for cis pity. We hold it to hold on to our worth and our humanity. We hold it to fight. There is not some dichotomy between mourning for the dead and fighting for the living. It is not a holiday that can be observed by just crying in your room, as some white women have said to me, and it is not a holiday that’s just too sad and should be replaced with something more upbeat, as many white men have said to me. We are just as in danger of forgetting the humanity of our black and brown sisters as white cis people are, and we cannot remember it silently and alone, but in community, out loud, where everyone can hear us.