by Deacon Theodore Otto F. Clements

Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) began in 1999 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a transgender activist, to remember transgender woman Rita Hester who was murdered via hate crime in 1998 (source). 

When we gather together as a faith community to remember this day, and allow transgender individuals in our congregations and our rosters take the lead, we are doing the work of our Creator by reminding each transgender individual that they are made in the image of God, no exceptions, and that their life matters because of their they are creative beings of a Creative God. 

To remember those who we lost to hate crimes in the past year shows that these people mattered, that their life mattered. Just as every Spring we enter a liturgical season to remember the death of our Savior through a hate crime under an oppressive regime, TDoR is a way that we can remind ourselves as Christian's that hate has no place in our churches, in our world, and that part of our calling by the One Who Called Us is to speak up against injustice and see the value of every human being.  Part of the liturgy that we, Affirming 365, employed was the reading of the names that's provided for us. 

By employing this spiritual practice, the reading of the names, the chime, and having candles lit while we read names, we are remembering those who's family of origin may not have said their name during All Saint's Day because transgender individuals are more likely to be estranged from their family, but being a part of community means that we have the privilege to remember. 

As a candidate for Word & Service, watching/hearing the names, seeing their faces and cause of death through a provided powerpoint (many of them from gun violence, or completing suicide), breaks my heart. It was seeing the Image of God, over and over, taken from us too soon. In a time where anti-transgender sentiment is on the rise (which you can keep track of via news source Erin in the Morning), it is clearer than ever that the role of the church is to stand beside the oppressed, the disinherited, and the despised, as Christ called us to do. 

The first person to name God is an escaped slave, a single mother who is a survivor of sexual violence, and she gives God the chosen name of The God Who Sees Me. May all my transgender, and gender nonconforming, siblings know this God - the God who Sees Us, and rejoices in us, and made us. And may the church see that the God Who Sees made all transgender people in the Image of God, not in spite of being transgender, but because they are transgender.