Remember Us

A meditation for Trans Day of Remembrance 2025

The urge to be cliche, to be maudlin, to be over-dramatic is very strong this year, and I feel that this is a common sentiment. It has been a very long year, and an exceptionally difficult one for trans people. But where there is strident and powerful opposition to the forces that are pushing us into the darkness, I cannot help but release more than a small sigh of exhaustion.

Transfeminist critic Talia Bhatt calls what we are facing an epistemicide. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, focused on methodology and validity. It is “how we are able to know what we know.” In effect, when we are talking about the epistemological injustice faced by the trans community, we are talking about the fact that trans people are often not believed by cis¹ people.

Epistemic injustice is a rampant harm that impacts most marginalized peoples, but in my own life, there is nowhere I see epistemic injustice outright define the reality of a group so much as with transfeminine people. To be a transfem is to never be viewed as a credible source again; indeed, if I may be allowed a small measure of bitter realism, to be a transfem is to surrender one’s own authority over one’s own experience for the paltry compensation of some medication (maybe) and an unlimited supply of emotional labor to-do lists (certainly). Of course, in actuality, there are definitionally no better sources on the experience of being transfeminine than transfems themselves, because transfemininity must be experienced to be truly understood.²

Perhaps that may seem self-evident, that we are our own best source on what it means to be transgender, and indeed trans women, but I promise you that we can see when we are not being understood or believed about our experiences³. But there is a more insidious aspect to this injustice, as well.

Transness and trans people are slowly being silenced, and in fact, erased. Earlier this year, the Trump regime began erasing all mention of trans people from government documents, and redacting papers about the science behind transness. They have also begun to invalidate the passports of nonbinary people, requiring either an M or an F on the gender markers. They are trying to cut sex education funding for any school that dares even to mention us. And of course, in my home state, they finally managed to pass a bathroom bill forcing people to use the restroom of their assigned sex at birth. But one threat that looms over us that dares not be spoken of, much less codified, is our censorship.

The censorship is not from the government, although they are trying to make that happen. No, the censorship is from corporations, the digital landlords we all owe rent to for this, our existence on the internet. Social media, once a warmer place where we could connect, make friends, and forge identities, now chills, isolates, and disinforms us. We now dance around our language, inventing neologisms like “unalive,” “sewerslide,” and “Yahtzees,” just to dance around real problems we are facing. Death. Suicide. Nazis. None of these things should be controversial, and we should be able to speak freely about them. But our spaces on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and other spaces like them are slowly de-platforming people who even dare to say such words aloud.

Which leads me back to trans people. I see creator after creator, artist after artist, writer after writer being muffled for speaking out about trans issues, trans rights, and trans oppression. We blame this on “the algorithm,” a black box which none of us truly understands, but we owe our reach and our voices to this thing that decides what gets shown to people and what gets de-boosted, isolated, and silenced. This means that our ability to speak out on our stories, to share our experiences, may not reach people who may need to hear them. This includes trans people who are closeted, and trans kids who need the language we can offer to help them speak on their own experiences.

Part of the explosion of trans people in the past 15 years is owed to the ability trans people have had to share our ideas and our stories with wider audiences. Social media has given a sliver of an oasis to us, affording us space to be ourselves for the first time and speak about the things that matter to us. That space, that platform, tiny and shaking as it is, is under threat. This is what I mean by epistemicide.

If it weren’t for the internet, if it weren’t for the much larger reach of trans voices in the recent past, I might not have ever figured out that I was transgender. I might not have connected the dots. I would not have the language to speak to my own trans identity. I would not have the narratives that gave meaning to my own experience. I would not have a small but strong community of trans people that I have forged, friends who have helped me in my journey. And that is what is at risk.

The world is against us right now. The internet, once a place of community and hope, is being turned against us. And soon, the legal and corporate forces that want to turn the wheel of civilization would rather us be silenced, alone, isolated, and often, dead.

Because epistemicide is all part of a grander genocidal process.

Wednesday, Nov 19, is the Trans Day of Remembrance, a day when we look back and remember those who we lost along the way this year. It is grimly important because death is a regular occurrence for trans people. Our existence is under threat like never before. They want to silence us because they would like us to go back into the closet, and out of public life altogether. Failing that, they’ll just exterminate us. They think there is a social contagion, that exposure to a trans person will “turn” a person transgender. They are only half-right. No, nobody “turns” transgender; they just are that way, often from birth. Yet there is a social aspect to us, which is why getting our language, our experience, our system of knowing ourselves—our epistemology— out to the world. Being able to express ourselves and share our experiences helps other trans people put together the puzzle pieces within them. They can’t have that. So they will try to silence us, one way or another.

We need help. We are a very small population. One of the best ways you can help is to simply get to know us. If you know one trans person, odds are you will become an ally to us. We aren’t scary. We aren’t a threat. But we are under threat, and we need people to link arms with us and argue for us, because they are trying to end us.

So, please. Remember us. Remember our dead, and remember that we are the edge of the spear that the fascists will use to wedge us apart. Remember that we are your friends, colleagues, classmates, family, partners. Remember that we are also made in the image of God.

Remember us.

1. People who are not transgender.

2. Talia Bhatt, On the Need for a Transfeminist Empiricism to Combat Epistemic Injustice.

3. While Bhatt was making a case for transfeminist analysis, there is a case to be made for transmasculine and nonbinary narratives as well, alongside it. The truth of it all is that trans people are our own best resources, and that is what I am trying to argue here.