According to research by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, transgender people in the United States were over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime based on statistics from 2017-2018. A study by the non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety found the number of trans people murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017and 2021.
In the last 5–9 years, those figures have only increased as the Republican Party has made trans people the target of many of their political campaigns and legislative actions.
Because of the violence trans people face globally, the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is observed annually on November 20 to honor transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered for simply existing. Founded in 1999 by activist Gwendolyn Ann Smith, it began as a vigil for Rita Hester, a Black transgender woman murdered in 1998 in Allston, Massachusetts.
The first local vigil turned into an international day of action observed in dozens of countries and hundreds of cities worldwide.
Realizing a contributing factor to violence is ignorance, the International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) was begun in 2009 by Michigan-based transgender activist Rachel Crandall-Crocker. The March 31 event is to celebrate living transgender people, providing a positive alternative to TDOR, and to combat stereotypes and increase global visibility.
In recognition of the day, the Democratic Party's official social media accounts shared a message.
The DNC wrote:
"Trans rights are human rights."
"This Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the resilience of transgender and nonbinary Americans and celebrate their incredible courage."
On vocal transphobe Elon Musk’s social media platform X, the National Republican Senatorial Committee decided to repost the DNC's TDOV message.
They very cleverly captioned their X repost:
"No"
The post was heavily ratioed, with people calling out the GOP and their priorities in the comments.
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While the GOP organization kept their transphobic message to X where they mistakenly believed their bigotry would be supported, screenshots of their ignorance were shared on other platforms.
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Why is Transgender Day of Visibility important?
Transgender people are a very small portion of the population, but they receive outsized government scrutiny, demonization, hatred, and violence.
Some of that could be countered with education and visibility as many people have never had a personal interaction with a trans person.
Despite no record of attacks on women and girls by trans people in bathrooms, the GOP still focuses on bathroom bans that target trans women and ignore trans men.
Despite only a handful of trans people participating in organized sports, the GOP has spent years and millions of dollars pushing bans on trans women and girls participating in sports from the peewee level to the Olympics.
The NCAA was pushed in 2024 to reverse their policy on trans athletes even though there were less than 10 trans student athletes out of 510,000—which included those who identified as nonbinary and as men—participating in college sports.
And none of the trans women were "dominating" or winning all their competitions like Republican rhetoric claims they would.
Congressional hearings, which range from $20,000 to over $50,000 per day in operational costs, were held in 2024 to address what to do about less than 0.002% of NCAA athletes. Despite years of transphobes trying to find proof for their cause, a trans athlete's only harm they could find was causing a fifth place swimmer to get her trophy in the mail.
If more people were aware that Republican bathroom bans and sports bans are wasteful spending of money and effort to address issues that never existed, maybe they could vote for productive representation.
Or at least pressure their GOP government officials to focus on something that does more than target and victimize an already vulnerable population.
Imagine what could be accomplished.
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