Trans Day of Remembrance: its history and how to take part

Content warning: this article discusses violence and death, including murder and suicide. Trans Day of Remembrance, also called Transgender Day of Remembrance or TDoR, is held every year on 20 November to remember trans people killed in anti-trans violence. It began in 1999, a year after the murder of Rita Hester, a Black trans woman, in Boston, and it is usually marked with candlelit vigils where the names of the dead are read aloud.

Why 20 November: Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett

Rita Hester was killed in her apartment in Allston, a neighbourhood of Boston, on 28 November 1998, two days before her 35th birthday. Friends remember her as a well-known figure in the city's bars and rock scene. Her murder has never been solved; Boston police assigned a new detective to the case in 2023 and renewed their appeal for information on the 25th anniversary.

What followed her death made it a turning point. Local newspapers, including Boston's LGBTQ paper Bay Windows, misgendered her and printed her deadname. According to NBC News, about 50 trans people and allies marched from the offices of the Boston Herald to Bay Windows in protest. A candlelight vigil for her on 4 December drew about 250 people.

She was not the first. In November 1995, Chanelle Pickett, another Black trans woman, was killed in Watertown, just outside Boston. The man accused of her murder was convicted only of assault and battery and sentenced to two years. Monique Thomas, also a Black trans woman, was killed in Dorchester in September 1998. Hester herself had told a local paper she feared a light sentence in the Pickett case would send the message that such killings were acceptable.

That link explains the date, although accounts put it differently. Wikipedia, Pride Source and the City of Boston say 20 November is the anniversary of Chanelle Pickett's death. Some short histories, including GLAAD's, describe the first vigil as marking a year since Hester's death, which fell on 28 November. Both women are remembered on the day.

How Gwendolyn Ann Smith started it

Gwendolyn Ann Smith is a trans advocate and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She told NBC News in 2017 that, after Hester's death, she talked about it online with friends in Boston and found that none of them remembered Chanelle Pickett. "It really surprised me that it had already, in a short period of time, been forgotten, and here we were with another murder at the same site," she said.

She started keeping a list of trans people who had been killed, which became the Remembering Our Dead project. Her own website dates it to 1998; the City of Boston says 1999. In the spring of 1999, by her account, she led about 100 people holding candles to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, where a documentary about the murder of Brandon Teena was showing. That convinced her a day of remembrance was needed, and the first one was held that November.

Accounts differ on details. NBC News, the Boston Globe and the City of Boston say the first day was held in both San Francisco and Boston; Smith has also described it as an event in San Francisco's Castro district. GLAAD credits Smith as the founder, Wikipedia names a small group including her, Nancy Nangeroni and Jahaira DeAlto, and Smith's own site says she co-founded it.

The organisers' guiding principles sum up the purpose: remember everyone who dies because of anti-trans violence, because their killers, the police and the media often erase them.

How the day spread

By 2010, the organisers' own list counted events in over 185 cities in more than 20 countries. Vigils have been held from Dublin, where Transgender Equality Network Ireland held a ceremony with candles, reflections and songs in 2018, to Jakarta, where Indonesian trans activists held one in 2015. In 2024, UK groups organised vigils from Soho, in London, to online gatherings for people who could not attend.

In 2012, Barack Obama became the first US president to honour the day, with a White House meeting of trans advocates that opened with a moment of silence. The Canadian province of Ontario passed a law in 2017 that requires its legislature to hold a minute of silence every 20 November.

The day also shaped the calendar around it. The week before it became Trans Awareness Week, and Trans Day of Visibility on 31 March was created in 2009 by Rachel Crandall-Crocker, who wanted a day to celebrate trans people who are alive. Our guide to trans awareness days and the LGBTQ+ awareness calendar set out how these dates fit together.

For the 25th anniversary in 2024, Boston's organisers spread events over three days and added a house ball, to make room for trans joy as well as loss.

How the names are gathered, and what the numbers miss

The names read at vigils come from lists kept by advocacy groups and volunteers, and each list counts something slightly different.

• Worldwide: TGEU's Trans Murder Monitoring. TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) has tracked reported murders of trans and gender diverse people since 2009, working from partner organisations, activist-researchers and media reports, and updates its figures just before each Trans Day of Remembrance. Its 2025 update counted 281 people reported murdered between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. Ninety per cent were trans women or transfeminine people, 88% were Black or Brown, and 68% of the murders were recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region TGEU says has better and longer-established monitoring than others.
• United States: the Human Rights Campaign. HRC typically finds cases by monitoring local news and social media, and counts only deaths in the US caused by another person; suicides are not included. It recorded 27 cases in the year to 20 November 2025, and at least 399 since it started counting in 2013.
• United States: Advocates for Trans Equality. A4TE's 2025 Remembrance Report takes a wider view. Among the people it lists, 27 were lost to violence and 21 to suicide.

So the number you hear at a vigil depends on whose list is being read. In 2024, Boston's ceremony remembered 319 people worldwide who had died by homicide or suicide.

Every one of these groups says its count is too low. TGEU writes that many murders are misreported or left out, often because of misgendering or stigma, and that the real number is likely far higher. It also warns that its 2025 figure, down from 350 the year before, does not necessarily mean trans people are safer: it may reflect murders becoming less visible in the media.

Misgendering is part of the problem, not just an insult. HRC's 2024 report found that 64.3% of the victims it had recorded since 2013 were first misgendered by the media, the police or the criminal justice system, and even in 2024, the year with the lowest rate it had recorded, 40% were. HRC says "at least" because deaths go unreported or misreported, and misgendering delays identification. Research by the criminologist Brendan Lantz, reported by The 19th, found that murders of trans people in the US between 2010 and 2020 were solved about 48% of the time, against roughly 62% for all murders, and less often when police used the wrong name.

Lists can also include people who did not call themselves trans but were victims of anti-trans violence, as the organisers' own materials note.

The debates around the day

Much of the debate about the day comes from inside trans communities.

Who belongs on the list

In 2023, the National Center for Transgender Equality, which merged with another group into A4TE in 2024, widened its remembrance report to include people who died by suicide or of illness, arguing that discrimination shortens trans lives in more ways than murder. Elle Moxley, founder of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, supported that, saying Black trans communities had always seen the violence as bigger than killings. Smith told The 19th she was apprehensive: the day began because of two murders, and widening it dilutes that message, though past observances have included some suicides caused by anti-trans harassment.

Whose day it is

Most of the people named are trans women, and most are Black or Brown, so critics have asked who gets to run the vigils. In a 2016 essay for the blog BGD, Princess Harmony, a trans woman of colour, wrote that she could not stand the whiteness of the events in her area, where, in her account, white trans women organised the mourning of women whose lives they ignored, and she asked readers to remember the circumstances of those lives, not only their deaths. The scholar Sarah Lamble argued in 2008 that collective mourning can let white participants feel innocent of the violence, and called for a move from witnessing to action. The activist Mirha-Soleil Ross has criticised organisers for presenting trans sex workers murdered in Toronto for their work as martyrs of the trans community.

Mourning or living

Some have built other days alongside it. The group BreakOUT coined Transgender Day of Resilience in 2015, to shift the focus from trans deaths to survival. And for families, the day does not end: Rita Hester's sister Diana told The 19th that reporters and advocates called every November, and the family eventually stopped going to vigils.

How to attend or hold a vigil

Vigils are usually organised by local trans advocates or LGBTQ+ groups, in community centres, parks and places of worship. A local trans group or LGBTQ+ centre will know what is happening near you; how to find a trans support group has some starting points.

If you go

• Keep the reading of the names quiet. It is the centre of the evening.
• Use names as the organisers give them. Never go looking for anyone's deadname, and never repeat it.
• Ask before taking photos. Some people there cannot be seen at a trans event. Keep faces out of anything you post unless people agree.
• Plan how you get home. The organisers of a 2024 vigil in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, advised people to travel in pairs, had community wardens deal with passers-by, and paid for taxis for anyone who felt safest leaving that way.
• Stay home if you need to. Some vigils are online; in 2024, one UK online vigil chose not to show a video of the names, because some find it distressing.

If you organise one

GSA Network publishes a checklist adapted from the organisers' own materials. The essentials, with examples from recent vigils:

• Build a team and a plan. Work with other local groups, and make sure Black and Brown trans people shape the evening, not only appear in the list of names.
• Say whose list you are reading, and whether it includes suicides, so nobody is caught off guard.
• Plan for hostility. Meet beforehand to agree how to handle harassment, and have enough volunteers to set up, keep watch and clear up. A 2023 vigil in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hired a local queer-owned security company; the Newcastle vigil closed a gate once everyone had arrived.
• Make it accessible. The Grand Rapids listing promised step-free access, asked guests not to wear scents and was arranging sign language interpretation.
• Make room for grief. GSA Network suggests a quiet room where people can go to talk or be alone, and a table with information about local support.
• End with the living. Thank people, and point them to ways of supporting trans people during the rest of the year.

Looking after yourself

The day is hard even for the people who built it. Smith told NBC News that reading how people were killed, and seeing parts of yourself in those stories, can be very difficult to sit with. Rachel Crandall-Crocker, who went on to found Trans Day of Visibility, has said the remembrance events she attended could leave her depressed for up to a week.

You do not have to go, and you do not have to read the details of every death to honour anyone. Plan something gentle for afterwards, and someone to message. It can help to hold on to history that is not only about loss: trans women and drag queens fighting back against police at the Compton's Cafeteria riot in 1966, or Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson opening STAR House to people who needed somewhere to stay in the early 1970s.

If you need to talk to someone:

• Trans Lifeline (US and Canada) is a peer support line run by trans people: (877) 565-8860 in the US, (877) 330-6366 in Canada, Monday to Friday, 1 pm to 9 pm Eastern time. It says it does not call emergency services without your consent.
• Switchboard (UK) is a free LGBTQIA+ support line, answered by volunteers, on 0800 0119 100, from 10 am to 10 pm every day.
• Elsewhere, a local trans group or LGBTQ+ centre can point you to support near you. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services.

Trans Lifeline's hotline was on its list of scheduled closures for Trans Day of Remembrance in 2025, so it may be closed on the day itself. Check its hours on its website before 20 November.