Every year, the trans community and our allies meet to grieve those who have been taken from us by transphobia – usually in a crowded rental venue.  We light candles, hold roses, and pass around a stack of paper the size of a novel, taking turns reading aloud the names of those who have died. They’re almost entirely trans women of colour, murdered in horrible ways just for existing. It takes three or four hours, and by the end, everyone is a mixture of exhausted, numb, and furious. The process is gruelling, but it feels important and urgent that we read every single name, because we would want the same done for us.

‘Give us our roses while we’re still here’ has become the rallying cry of TDOR, in the hopes that the list of names will start getting shorter if trans women of colour are celebrated in their lives, rather than mourned when they’re killed. The phrase was popularized by B Parker and Micah Bazant’s artistic work with “Forward Together.” B Parker had to say about it, “Roses can be a symbol of friendship, love, and acknowledgement of achievement, but are often associated with mourning the loss of someone close to us. Reframing the giving of roses in relation to trans lives immediately lets people know that we want to be cherished and honoured while we walk the earth.“ Whereas other queer identities are organized around Pride, the trans community has historically been organized around grief and only recently been invited to celebrate ourselves, partially in hope that the numbers will get smaller.

I mention our allies at TDOR with a bit of hesitation, because the thing is, they’re usually isn’t a lot there. The same people who are quick to change their Facebook profile to a rainbow don’t come to this sad, long night.  That’s because TDOR is a night when the performance of being trans for cis people stops, where we say less of ‘we can be just like you’ and more of ‘we don’t know if you’ll ever stop killing us’. 

You can come to TDOR if you want, but it’s no use to us to have cis people consume our grief as tourists. You won’t find friendly trans people just looking to be accepted; you will find us angry, impatient, demanding to know why our trans sisters were killed. 

I get asked a lot about what cis people can do to show solidarity with trans people. TDOR reminds me to give out fewer pronoun pins and to demand more real change from cis people. It reminds me to ask for nothing less than changing the world, especially when it makes cis people uncomfortable. After all, it’s easy to give roses to people who have already died; they’re quieter.

What I really want is for cis women to think about how their comfort has been prioritized over trans women’s lives, and to get better at feeling uncomfortable. I especially want for white cis women to think about how their perceived helplessness encourages cis men to protect them by attacking trans women in bathrooms, without ever having to think of themselves as part of the problem.

I want cis queers to think less about whether or not they could ever be attracted to a trans person and more about why attractiveness is a prerequisite for safety and belonging. 

I want feminist organizations to think less about updating their intake forms and more about how their transmisogynistic partner organization causes as much harm to trans women as rape does. 

I want housing organizations to think less about putting up posters and more about how their gendered mandate forces trans women in poverty to buy razors so they can ‘pass’ enough to be there.

I want doctors to think less about who is mentally well enough to consent to treatment, and more about the way trans people’s consent is violated every time we need to convince them to give us hormones.

This is what it means to give us our roses: to think of the rubber stamps of inclusion as less than minimum, and then to get to work. We need to create safety for all trans people, not just the most privileged within the trans umbrella, and that means re-thinking a lot of how our communities, non-profits, and organizations are structured. We need allies to pay attention to TDOR, and to recognize the way it’s different than other queer events; TDOR isn’t willing to cover up its tragic urgency with a positive spin, and it’s not here to be consumed by cis people. TDOR asks us to stop thinking about letting trans people fit into the world and to start thinking about how to change it. 

In Solidarity,

Felix Gilliland
Pronouns: They/them
Meaningful Inclusion Project Lead