International Trans Day of Remembrance 2009
There have been 162 murders of trans people reported from November 20th 2008 to November 12th 2009. In the first 11 1/2 months of 2009 already 150 murders of trans people have been reported.
Please note that these numbers do not portray the reality. The reality is much worse. These are only the reported cases which could be found with some research in the internet.
Since 1999 the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), in which trans people remember those trans people who have been murdered, has been held annually in November.
The event is held in November to honour Rita Hester, who was murdered on November 28th 1998. The Transgender Day of Remembrance is held to raise public awareness of hate crimes against trans people, to provide a space for publicly mourning, and honouring the lives of those trans people who might otherwise be forgotten.
Started in the US, the TDOR is now held in many parts of the world. This year TDOR events are known to be taking place on November 20th in more than 140 cities in 21 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania.
Sadly, this year there are more than 160 trans persons to be remembered, mourned and honoured. The reported names listed below were collected by the research team of Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring Project.
If you use or reference this material, the source should be acknowledged as the ‘TGEU Trans Murder Monitoring project TDOR 2009 update’.
When using the data presented by the Trans Murder Monitoring project, please note that for the following four reasons the data presented does not reflect the true situation. It shows only a glimpse of reality, the tip of the iceberg of worldwide murders of trans people. The reality is much worse:
- The collected data shows only those cases which have been reported. There is no data and no estimates available for the unreported cases.
- The data presented here does not show all reported cases worldwide, but only most of those, which can only be found on the Internet with some effort. Reports from local newspapers which have no web page are also missing.
- Because of the dozens of languages used in the Internet, the diversity of terms denominating trans people, and the myriad of web pages in the World Wide Web to date it is simply not possible to find all reports shown on the Internet.
- There is a specific problem regarding the reporting of murdered trans persons. Not all trans people that are murdered are reported as trans.
Please note also, that the Trans Murder Monitoring project is reporting all kinds of murders of trans people. There is often a difficulty in classifying the murder of trans persons as hate crimes. This is due to a lack of information in the reports as well as the lack of national monitoring systems. Although the brutal violence and the reported circumstances in the reported cases are indicating that quite a lot of them and maybe most or almost all cases are transphobic hate crimes or crimes that occur related to a specific situation trans people have to face in some countries (being forced to do sex work to earn one’s living due to refusal of employment) in this first stage of presenting the results, they are classified as reports of murdered trans persons.
If you use or reference this material, the source should be acknowledged as the ‘TGEU Trans Murder Monitoring project TDOR 2009 update’.