By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The photos were projected overhead in the First Presbyterian sanctuary.
Dozens of names. Some were murdered – stabbed or shot. Two died in police custody. Others committed suicide.
Deaths recorded in Morristown, Vermont, and Salem Oregon, from Jackson, Michigan to Jacksonville, Florida. Deaths in every region of the country.
BGO Pride marked Trans Day of Remembrance Sunday night with a vigil for those trans individuals who have died in the past year.
This year’s vigil was additionally clouded by the attack on a gay bar, Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, late Saturday night, in which five died and 25 were wounded.
“What happened last night is why have this,” said Kenny Sheets, of BGO Pride. “We need to grieve. We need to mourn.”
Miranda Allysen, who organized the event with Sheets, said in her remarks that “seeing the names and the faces just brought me to tears.”
She said she wishes that next year there would be no names to remember.
But news reports Monday identified bartender Daniel Ashton, a transgender man, as one of those killed in Colorado Springs.
Still an incident like the murders in Colorado Springs “makes it harder to be ourselves. It takes courage just to be ourselves,” Sheets said.
The Rev. Jeff Schooley, First Presbyterian pastor, said his church was proud to host the event as part of the church’s continuing work with BGO Pride. The vigil had been scheduled to be held outdoors at Wooster Green but was moved inside because of the sub-freezing temperatures.
Schooley said he was not planning to speak because he wanted trans and non-binary voices to predominate. But what he heard at the vigil moved him to speak.
Courage, he said, was too often defined in our society in terms of war, or the proxy-war of sports. “We only understand courage in the context of conquest,” he said. “We only understand courage in the context of winning.”
But trans and non-binary individuals “have the courage to be precisely who God created you to be even in the face of cultural resistance and violence. That’s courage.”
Another speaker at the vigil quoted author Daniel Mallory Ortberg wrote said that being trans was to be part of creation. a“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
Allyson said in the face of societal resistance, including proposed anti-trans legislation, they need to come together. “We need to look out for each other and take care of each other. It’s really important. If anyone needs me, I’ll be your friend.”
(This story was updated as further information about the Colorado shooting became available.)
