Mason's Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR)

Mason's 2023 observance of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) will be on Thursday November 16th, and Transgender Awareness Week will be the days leading up to it: Monday 11/13-Thursday 11/16. If you haven't heard too much about TDOR, it happens every year on November 20th, and is an event held internationally to recognize and remember trans (and non-binary) folks who have died due to anti-trans violence in the past year. Here's the website where we usually get the information for recognizing the lost lives, which also includes more information about the origin of the event and why it is held in November. https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/ (When you first click this website, it has a content warning about reports of violence against transgender people, and links to detailed reports which contain graphic imagery, but we wanted to include it here as well).

In terms of what we have done to observe TDOR in the past at Mason, it has varied over the years from smaller student-led gatherings where only folks in LGBTQ+ communities knew and were invited, to larger events like last year where speakers from outside campus were invited, people marched, and the larger Mason community was able to support and grieve with us. We have also used the "R" to stand for not only "Remembrance", but also perhaps "Resilience" and "Resistance," but we aren't tied to that language in any way for this year's event. There is always a somber reading of the names of the trans people we have lost in the past year, a moment of silence to recognize that these are only the people who have been confirmed, and that finally, we continue to have to observe TDOR because violence against trans people isn't going away, the list of names seems to grow every year, especially in numbers of trans women and non-binary people of color.

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Co-hosted with: LGBTQ+ Resources Center, LGBTQ+ Faculty/Staff Alliance