Read the full issue of this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal Nov. 21

In this week’s issue, Rev. Jen Crow writes:

Yesterday, November 20th, marked the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside to memorialize those who have been killed in the past year because they don’t fit squarely into the categories of male or female, or more precisely, because they don’t fit into somebody else’s idea of what an either/or gender should look like. Transgender Day of Remembrance began in November of 1999 as part of an effort called, “Remembering Our Dead,” created by Gwendolyn Ann Smith. “I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost,” Smith said. “With so many seeking to erase transgender people – sometimes in the most brutal ways possible – it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice.”

This year, 331 lives were lost in documentable ways because of someone else’s brutality and intolerance of transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people. The majority of those killed were transgender women of color – people who experience the impact of multiple oppressions and land squarely at the bottom of our soul-crushing systems of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and transphobia. 

All over the world yesterday, people spoke the names of those who have been killed this year, and so many more names went unspoken. We know that people who experience oppression, let alone multiple oppressions, experience higher rates of addiction, depression, health issues, and trauma. We know that many of our trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming siblings have died because they feared seeking medical treatment, could not find care, or completed suicide. We remember them all. 

And we remember this truth: all of us are whole and holy and worthy. We don’t have to earn it. We are born this way. Worthy of love and affection, worthy of safety and basic human rights, worthy of a place in this world to grow and shine with all of our uniquenesses and particularities. We arrive here worthy of unconditional love and we remain worthy of that love our whole lives long, even and especially when we live into the beautiful, multiple expressions of our own particular lives.

In faith,
Rev. Jen