At 7 p.m., Monday, Nov. 15, students gathered in the Stetson Room to recognize Transgender Day of Remembrance, an international commemoration of transgender lives lost during the year. While the official date of the occasion is Nov. 20, the Cross-Cultural Center and Kaleidoscope, the on-campus Gay-Straight Alliance, organized Stetson’s event to fall during the workweek, presumably so that more students could participate. Sobering piano music filled the room as over 70 students gathered together.

The event began with Karen Kendra Holmes, a male-to-female transgender military woman, sharing both her transition story and information about the transgender community at large. While in the service, Holmes hid her transgender identity.

Although the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, a discriminatory ban against gay and lesbian service people, was repealed in 2010, transgender soldiers were still “not accepted.” Despite this potentially toxic environment, Holmes, then called by her birth name of “Tony,” embraced her true gender identity and scheduled her transition surgery in October 2010.

“I thought Tony was happy, but to see myself now…there was something locked inside of me that had to come out.”

By the end of that year, Holmes had completed her transition and was surprised that her workplace was, for the most part, supportive.

However, Holmes shared various struggles she had to face after her transition. She explained that “people always assume transgender means gay, lesbian, or bisexual.” To clarify the various definitions for the audience, Holmes said with a laugh:

“Being gay or lesbian is who you go to bed with; being transgender is who you go to bed as.”

Holmes has also faced misgendering—the incorrect usage of pronouns such as “he,” “she,” “him,” or “her”—which is a common problem faced by the transgender community. Painfully, she shared how one of her close friends, when drunk, called Holmes an “it” and belittled her gender identity as illegitimate because she was not a biological female. This dehumanizing misgendering is all too common for the trans community, Holmes told the audience.

And these represent merely a fraction of the many injustices transgender people face. Holmes shared the tragic statistic that 45 percent of transgender people commit suicide. “We transition to be happy,” Holmes said, “but the way society is set up…we lose family, friends, our homes—[you] feel hopeless and are driven to suicide.”

Additionally, many trans community members—predominantly transgender women—become forced into prostitution because “they need to make money for food, bills and hormone medicine.”

On this solemn note, the event shifted toward its reflective service. Seven Stetson students gathered onstage and read off a list of recorded transgender deaths during 2016. The victims’ names, ages, causes of death, locations and dates of death were powerfully delivered, and a bell tolled after each acknowledgment. Several deaths occurred in the United States; the recitation of Florida deaths brought the reality of tragedy closer to DeLand.

The moving evening concluded with one of Holmes’ quotes serving as a call to action:
“The battle for transgender equality won’t come unless cisgender people are holding hands with us.”

Each person in the audience, whether transgender or cisgender, a member of the LGBTQ+ community or an ally, was asked to help foster a more accepting world for transgender people. The evening’s conclusion, encouraging the creation of a safer world, kindles hope that many needless deaths will not be added to a heartbreaking and already staggering toll.