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Today is the National Transgender Day of Remembrance. I am a cis-hetero-male of the white middle class and from the middle of the US; I am the unmarked. But I recognize that it is wrong, flatly wrong, to persecute those who do not conform to "traditional" gender binaries because they do not conform to them. I admit that I have little if any understanding of the circumstances and situations of those who are transgendered; even with the ways in which I have been made to feel less, I have never not felt male. When I have spoken with or worshipped with members of trans communities, the fact of trans-ness has not much been the topic treated; we were doing other things entirely. So I do not claim expertise in the matter. But that does not mean I cannot recognize the systemic wrongs that enable discrimination against trans persons because they are trans. It does not mean that I cannot pause for a moment to condemn those wrongs or to think on those who have suffered them. It does not mean that I cannot consider what little I can do to right the wrongs as they occur within me and around me, whether through working to redress ignorance or to deter willful bad behavior.

Violence and other discrimination against trans persons comprise one of the many ways in which the dominant culture of the United States is in need of correction; that culture, from which I am ostensibly positioned to benefit through standing at the focus of many of its normalizing assumptions (I am the target audience of the performance and easily swap in for the presumed originator/s of many of its tenets), does much to normalize through rejection of what is different, and there are many differences to be found. At its most forgivable, the rejection proceeds from a lack of understanding, and I admit to my own culpability in that regard; I do not know, and so I likely end up offending through that ignorance. And there are limits to what any one person can know; we all of us have work to do (paid and validated by the dominant culture or otherwise), and the attention demanded by that work and given to it cannot be otherwise spent. But much of the rejection is based not on ignorance but unwillingness to learn, and that is not forgivable. One may be pardoned for not knowing if not exposed to knowledge, and one may be forgiven (if to a lesser extent) fro trying to learn and not having mastered material, but forgiving those who refuse to make the attempt...I am not so good a person as to do so. When that refusal erupts as violence against persons, it is clearly wrong. When it manifests as differentiation of legal protection, it is also clearly wrong. Both happen, and entirely too much. Hence the Day of Remembrance. Hence the activities that surround it. And hence my own small contribution, for whatever good it may actually do in the world.