We Must Love One Another or Die: Reflections on Transgender Day of Remembrance

By Bruce Parker, OBC Deputy Director
11/20/22

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. Out Boulder County will have a ceremony featuring an LGBTQ+ choir, community leaders, a poet, and elected officials. We will grieve together and shed tears for the 381 trans people that we know about who were murdered in the past year because of who they are. 

This never gets easier.

Five people were murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado last night. A man with a gun entered the club and opened fire on a crowd of people who thought they were somewhere safe with their friends and members of their community. Now five of them are gone, and I can’t fix that. None of us can.  

So today, I am grieving for 381 people I have never met who died due to transphobia and five people I have never met who died due to homophobia and transphobia. This is not the first time I have had to grieve for people I have never met. Being an LGBTQ+ person in a world that continues to punish us for being different, sometimes with death, leads to a lot of difficult days and long nights. 

Just because I have done this before doesn’t make it any easier.

As a young queer man in Eastern Kentucky the murder of Matthew Shepherd made me want to be an activist. In my mid-twenties in Indianapolis, Indiana attending my first Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) ceremony made me understand just how dangerous the world could be for my transgender friends, partners, and chosen family members leaving me with no choice except to be an advocate. The first few years after attending my first TDOR, I would have nightmares that my partner or close friends were killed in anti-transgender violence. Twenty years later, I no longer have those nightmares, but the fear of losing those I care about continues to be with me each and every day. 

No matter how many murders of trans or queer people I read about in the news, it never gets easier. 

Twenty years later, I am spending my day doing communications work for Out Boulder County and supporting the efforts of Mardi Moore, Executive Director, and other members of our team doing what we can to comfort members of our community. Charlie Prohaska, Communications and Trans Programming Coordinator, is working to make the needed updates to today’s plan for Transgender Day of Remembrance and to be able to accommodate a larger attendance than initially anticipated. I am not interested in putting on a brave face today. I am tired, sad, and angry. I see tears welling up in my colleagues eyes as we move about the building doing our jobs and showing up for each other and the community as best we can.  

I hope this never gets easier.

I have no interest in making peace with the reality of hate-motivated violence against trans and queer people. I don’t want to stop feeling each loss of life for what it is - an unspeakable tragedy. Tonight, I will hold my loved ones close and be grateful for another day with them. Tomorrow, I will keep doing what LGBTQ+ people do everyday. I will keep trying to stay alive and keep other members of my community alive.

While I know there is not one solution to the deadly realities that living in a world that hates trans and queer people present, I suspect that any answer requires us to love one another. W.H. Auden wrote that, “We must love one another or die.” Thankfully, loving each other is easy. And while it may not be enough, it feels like a solid start.