Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20, 2025) is more important than ever.
To be witness during this time in history is sometimes as much as we can do. Please
consider attending a local vigil or learning more about TDOR. We stand in witness.
Thank you to Rev. Sunny for her moment from the pulpit.
But what is the history of it and why did it start?
It started in the wake of the November 28,1998 murder of Rita Hester and the
transphobic media coverage of it in gay and mainstream media outlets that incensed
the Boston area and national trans community. Hester’s killer as of this date has not
been brought to justice.
On the one year anniversary of Hester’s death, because we were starting to forget the
names of the people who had been murdered at that time because it was happening
so frequently and we had better information about it thanks to the Internet, San
Francisco based trans advocate Gwen Smith founded the Remembering Our Dead web
project to track and memorialize those folks we have lost to anti- trans violence.
Smith also organized a vigil in San Francisco on the one year anniversary of Hester’s
death that grew into the Transgender Day of Remembrance event we are familiar with
almost two decades later. The TDOR was rapidly adopted elsewhere in the United
States and the rest of the world.