Transgender Awareness Week Is EVERY Week On TransGriot

Because there are folks in the trans community who believe the Transgender Dy of Remembrance memorial ceremonies are in their words 'too somber', there has been movement over the last few years in several cities that host these TDOR events to host a week of events in the run up to November 20 to educate the cisgender community about our issues, concerns and expose them to our trans world.

Those efforts have led to Transgender Awareness Week. 

The Transgender Awareness Week events can range from trans themed movie nights, lectures, panel discussions, speeches by trans community leaders and elders and debates. 

But why just limit those education and enlightenment efforts to just the week before a TDOR or college campuses?   They can be held at community centers, friendly churches and any venue or room big enough to host them.  

The media that covers us definitely needs that trans 'ejumacation'.  So does law enforcement, the clergy, the legal profession and even our SGL and bi allies.

I submit those trans education efforts are becoming more important because the right wingers are shifting tactics and coming after the trans community with their patented fear, smear and lie tactics.

Yes, those futile efforts to halt the momentum of trans human rights here and around the world will fail, but we will need to do our part to ensure that happens.   One part of that education battle is to do these Transgender Awareness Weeks not only during TDOR, but ensure they happen everyday and everywhere.

Far too many of our own trans people and our allies allies are unaware of our proud history, the trans community's iconic leaders, our trailblazers like Sylvia Rivera and countless others, and the role we transpeople have played in advancing human rights for all people including our own community while fighting a pitched battle to have our own humanity respected and protected.  

Some of those people we know their names, while there are others who fought battles and then faded from the pages of history and we will never know their names, but their contributions were just as valid to enable us to move the trans human rights drive forward to that inevitable civil rights touchdown we will score.  

And yes, I'm proud to have played a role in getting that information and history out there, especially about my own trams community of color.  

I'm also not forgetting about our international trans peeps like Audrey Mbugua, Naomi Fontanos and Victor Mukasa just to name a few who are doing their part to advance the knowledge of trans people and their human rights in their own locales.

Sometimes those trans folks stepping up to lead in other nations are doing so at great risk to their own lives or have sacrificed them to do so like Cynthia Nicole Moreno in Honduras and Agnes Torres Hernandez in Mexico.

I have every intention of continuing to drive home the point that trans rights are an international human rights issue, and will continue to say it as loudly as I can as long as TransGriot exists.  

Transgender Awareness Week is EVERY week on this blog and always will be.