By Jessica A. York
SANTA CRUZ >>
Months ago, when Maddox Flagg started planning Monday night’s solemn vigil, he knew that he was organizing an event honoring people who were yet to die.
“That’s a hard realization to have,” Flagg told an audience of more than 60 attendees with battery-powered candles and small rainbow flags in hand at the Resource Center for Nonviolence.
Flagg, a UC Santa Cruz intern working with the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz, was among those who helped organize the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, providing a safe place to gather and honor dead transgender and nonbinary people. In 2023 alone, there were 26 known trans people killed in the United States through violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s “An Epidemic of Violence 2023” publication. An additional seven people died between last year’s day of remembrance and the end of 2022. The agency estimates those numbers as just a starting tally, as they said such deaths go unreported — or are misreported.
In their opening remarks, Flagg described the widely publicized and nationally discussed homicide of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1999. Just two months later, when Boston resident Rita Hester was killed, stabbed 20 times in the chest, her murder went mostly unnoticed and ultimately unsolved, Flagg said. Friends gathering a year later to honor her memory created the first Transgender Day of Remembrance.
“At some point in the next two and a half hours, you will feel grief and pain and sadness and anger and I urge you to embrace those feelings. Feel them, sit with them, welcome them. This is a safe place for those emotions,” Flagg said.
Later, event speaker Sean Rodriguez, his voice cracking with emotion, urged the audience to speak up on transgender issues, “so our children’s children can have an easier go at it.”
“Be a voice for somebody. Be a shoulder for somebody. Hold somebody, lift them up,” Rodriguez said. “Keep showing up, because sometimes that is the hardest thing to do.”
Paraphrasing a quote borrowed from the film “Independence Day,” speaker Selina De Vestige told the audience, “We’re fighting for our right to live. To exist.”
“Life is precious and it has been taken by so many that want us eradicated from their distorted view of the world,” De Vestige said. “My heart breaks for the beautiful souls that have departed from our lives. The injustice that has been done will never fade from our memory. It is our honor and duty to make sure that they are remembered and to make sure we also look after each other.”
The evening’s ceremony also was attended by state Sen. John Laird and Santa Cruz City Councilmember Sonja Brunner. Laird shared some information on his work in the state Legislature, particularly as a member of its LGBT caucus whose members were working “day-in and day-out to make sure you are not standing alone.” Laird also told of work to ensure the failure of three separate bills attempting to codify a requirement that parental consent was needed prior to their children obtaining reproductive services.
“We, as an LGBT caucus, are doing polling to try to figure out what the right messaging is for us to successfully stand with trans people across the state in this onslaught,” Laird said.
Speaker Zak Keith, a Diversity Center program coordinator, said it meant a lot, as a trans person, to live in a state where “we can really celebrate and be our authentic self.”
“And to feel, where it’s not just a hardship or a barrier, it’s not just a box that I have to check off on a form,” Keith said. “This is our lives and experiences and we get to honor not only our current selves, but we get to honor those that have paved the way, and walked with us, hand-in-hand, though we may not have been able to see them, we can feel them tonight.”
For more information on the Diversity Center, visit diversitycenter.org, or partner Resource Center for Nonviolence at rcnv.org.