Day of Remembrance

...was yesterday. I spent most of the day volunteering at Genderblast V. I met a lot of the younger crowd, which was mainly either FTM or others who did not appear to be blatantly gender variant. I even ended up chatting with an AP reporter who was doing a story on TS youth. She wondered where all of the younger MTF’s were. Good question. Well, many of the ones I know online are either more worried about living stealth, are too busy with college, or are playing DDR and video games. The others could be sleeping after spending a night working the streets. OK, I’m stereotyping - but, unfortunately, that’s what some of the TS youth are doing - not all by choice, to a degree.

As that started to wrap up, I was off to the SF LGBT Center to work as the site coordinator for the 6th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. Susan and I met up, grabbed a light bite to eat, and then received last minute instructions from Gwen before she headed out to the march site. She also dropped off a lot of the setup supplies. Susan got the sound going while I organized most of the rest.

The marchers were actually early, and about half of the 500-600 people filed into the room. Gwen started off with some symbolic words before a few more speakers spoke.

I simply cannot put most of the evening into words, but the most somber part of the event was the reading of the names of people who died in the past year due to anti-transgender violence. There were 21. Several were nameless. One died less than 10 miles from where we stood. One non-T died protecting several transpeople. We can’t bring any of them back, but we can remember them, honor them, and let others know who they were - that they didn’t deserve to be killed simply for being themselves.

By the end of the night, my feet were hurting pretty bad. I did a lot of rushing around being basically the stage manager. I had a good time doing it, especially since it was my first time to do such a job...which leads into another subject.

After Susan and I finished putting everything away, we grabbed a bite to eat at the diner across the street. We talked about the event and how I enjoyed being stage coordinator. We talked about careers. She mentioned that she could see me as a publicist of some sort. I told her that I’d recently taken an abbreviated online vocational aptitude test. The result: Engineer. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either, but it still popped up my current occupation. I’ll probably look at more in-depth tests, but they cost money.