Trans Day of Remembrance is a day to mourn those we have lost.  Our website is a celebration of life – a place to focus on the names, memories, and joy of the people we loved.  Not everyone who visits our site is part of the LGBTQ+ community or has had a chance to learn the history of the trans rights movement.  The purpose of this TDOR list and report and publishing our numbers is to recognize the lives lost and make the scope of this crisis impossible to ignore.

When names are submitted for people who publicly identified as part of the trans+ community, inclusion in our list is straightforward. Other names and stories on our list come from the year-round work of many organizations, reporters, unpaid volunteers, and dedicated individuals working in community. We also investigate police notices, missing persons databases, news reports, obituaries, and memorial notices.

When we look at the numbers collected for TDOR, we must be careful about the conclusions we draw from them.

Vital records and data collection in life and in death does not always include accurate acknowledgement of transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, intersex individuals and other identities outside of the cisgender binary. There have been pushes for greater inclusion of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people in public records, but a patchwork of state laws often make ‘official’ documentation inaccurate. Until every government agency collects accurate and complete information on gender identity and issues official documents recognizing all people, our community's losses will remain undercounted. 

In addition, racism, stigma, the digital knowledge divide, and other forms of erasure of strategically underrecognized populations means that the data available isn’t large or complete enough to tell the full story.  While it is useful to understand the necessity and purpose of a Trans Day of Remembrance, this work exists because trans identities are poorly acknowledged in life and erased in death. We have a long way to go before data on trans deaths can be accurately analyzed.

In order to fully recognize every person’s identity, where someone identified as more than one race or ethnicity, they are counted in both categories separately.  The categories we use for cause of death is also not exclusive.  If a victim was both shot and stabbed, they would be counted in both categories.

A4TE recognizes that too often a white, western, colonizing perspective on gender identity and expression has controlled the narrative of belonging. As the wave of “drag bans” sweeping the country have displayed, hatred does not concern itself with nuance in its oppression; any act subverting established cisgender norms is a target. It is long past time for that narrative to change. We believe all members of our community deserve to be memorialized in their authentic identity as they experience it. We also recognize that while some people experience a fixed gender identity, it can also be a journey that many on our list were only beginning to explore or express to the world. In addition to transgender and nonbinary victims, we also recognize two-spirit, māhū, khwaja sira, agender, and other identities outside of or expanding on gender binaries, as well as those who are gender nonconforming, gender fluid, intersex, or drag royalty.

Translating gender identity across cultural understanding can be difficult, and complex identities are often oversimplified when represented in numbers.  To promote understanding, we collect all of these identities into very broad categories representing transmasculine, transfeminine, nonbinary, and nonconforming identities.  We use care to interpret these many identities as respectfully and accurately as possible, and continue to update our practices as both our information and our understanding improves.

Violent deaths include deaths that occurred as a result of physical violence or an attack against a person.  Often these attacks are criminal attacks, like assault, homicide, or manslaughter.  Apathy, discrimination, and unconscious bias from investigative agencies means that some deaths get investigated more vigorously than others, and some disappearances are taken more seriously than others. Assumptions about a person’s life, perceived value, or the elements of a crime mean that for purposes of the law, some victims’ deaths get misclassified or overlooked. Deaths that are still under investigation, are under suspicious circumstances, or where a crime has been committed are considered violent. Because of the deeply ingrained structural and institutional racism and transphobia that informs the criminal justice system in the US and many countries, deaths in custody, executions by the state, and deaths resulting directly from law enforcement involvement are categorized as acts of violence.

Many voices and discussions contributed to defining this list and the parameters for inclusion. The very first lists in 1999 included only those in the transgender community who were lost to violence, which is to say physically violent crimes. Stochastic terrorism against the trans community has increased and become a regular tool in politicians’ campaigns. The effects of bullying and harassment on mental and emotional health are less stigmatized and more fully understood. Lack of access to affirming or even competent healthcare, employment discrimination, housing and food insecurity, disparate policing, and isolation from community all create measurable impacts on the health and mortality of trans, nonbinary, and nonconforming people. We recognize all of these as forms of violence. 

The primary purpose of this website is to memorialize all those who have died, but we recognize that numbers and data can help people better understand the scope of the problem and the impact of anti-trans attacks. To make that information easier to understand, we separate the data into ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’ categories.