Jacob Anderson-Minshall

With all the protests this past weekend, one could easily conclude that the ban on same-sex marriages is the single greatest affront to LGBT civil liberties today.

And yet, many of us are still being violently attacked and sometimes killed simply for being queer or transgender.  Last month, in little over one week, three Washington State University students were assaulted on campus. Two were trans masculine identified while the third was an openly gay student so brutally assaulted that he suffered a collapsed lung.

These attacks are not isolated incidents.  According to the FBI, which released its annual Hate Crime statistics a few weeks ago, while racial and religious-based attacks were down between 2006 and 2007, crimes against gays and lesbians increased by six percent.  And that might only be the tip of the iceberg.

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP)—which collects its own statistics—argues that the FBI consistently underestimates the number of attacks on queer and trans individuals.  First, the FBI relies solely on law enforcement data, rather than including reports to victim service organizations. Second, the FBI doesn’t include statistics about violence against trans or gender variant individuals.

In contrast with the six percent increase the FBI describes, NCAVP reported an alarming 24 percent escalation in victims reporting incidents of anti-LGBT violence last year. With some indication that violence against the LGBT community erupts during anti-gay campaigns, those numbers may be set to rise even higher in 2008, a year that saw multiple anti-marriage ballot measures including California’s Prop 8.

Richard Juang, a genderqueer, Taiwanese-American, male-born femme who contributed to National Center for Transgender Equality’s Responding to Hate Crimes argues that these violent acts are meant to relay a message to the entire community that “our existence is deviant and of no value.”

Thursday, November 20 is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance honoring those who’ve been killed by anti-trans violence.  International vigils will pay tribute to this year’s dead, including 15-year-old Lawrence King from Oxnard, California who was shot to death by a classmate allegedly in part because he liked to wear girl’s clothing.

In addition to King, at least fifteen other Americans were killed in the past year (and 400 since 1970) for their non-conforming gender expression or identity.  As violence against the trans population goes woefully under-investigated, many of their murders will never be solved.

The Day of Remembrance was started by columnist Gwen Smith to remember the murder of Rita Hester, a highly visible transgender activist in Boston, who was stabbed to death Saturday, November 28, 1998.  A decade later her murder remains unsolved.

Smith founded Remember Our Dead to memorialize those killed by anti-trans violence.  Last year, TransFM’s Ethan St. Pierre co-founded The International Transgender Day of Remembrance (transgenerdor.org) to further Smith’s work.

“I can’t tell you enough about the work that [Gwen]’s done on our behalf;” contends St. Pierre, who says it’s a difficult job.  “I work on that website for half a day and I’m bawling my eyes out.  Lives…snuffed out for no other reason than they’re trans or different.”

While some communities, like Chicago, Ill. and Oakland, Calif. hosted Trans Remembrance events this past weekend, Columbus, Ohio honored the dead Wednesday and still others will do so this Thursday and Friday including:

San Francisco’s observance begins Thursday at 6 pm at 815 Hyde Street offices of Trans: Thrive (transthrive.org) and will feature community speakers, a reading of names of known 2008 victims and concludes with a march to City Hall.  Special tribute will be paid to King and Sacramento area trans woman, Ruby Molina, whose body was found floating in the American River this September.

Friday, November 21 at 7:30 PM San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (shaarzahav.org) will hold a Transgender Day of Remembrance Shabbat with special liturgy, music, sermon and reading of names.

In Denver the Gender Identity Center of Colorado (303-202-6460) will be holding a service Thursday at the Washington Park United Church of Christ from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
In Portland, Oregon a candlelight vigil will be held Thursday 6:30pm-7:30 pm in the Park Blocks and will feature speeches by trans author Reid Vanderburg, Spirit of Pride award winner Laura Calvo and Executive Director of TransActive, Jenn Burleton.
A show by award winning trans performing artist Scott Turner Schofield  (Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps) follows the vigil from 8-9:00 pm in the Portland State University Smith Memorial Center Ballroom.
New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (gaycenter.org) hosts the 7:00-8:30 pm Thursday event , featuring a candlelight vigil, speeches from community leaders; and a display of quilts, collages and other meaningful items honoring the dead.

In tribute of the tenth anniversary of Rita Hester’s death, Boston will hold a candlelight vigil Thursday night, retracing the original route past Hester’s home.  Community members are invited to share their feelings at a 7 pm reception at Saint Luke’s and Saint Margaret’s Church (masstpc.org/dor).

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Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-hosts the radio show Gender Blender on Portland’s KBOO.  Download the November 18th episode on gender-based violence at kboo.fm.

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Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-hosts Gender Blender on Portland, Oregon’s KBOO 90.7 (streaming live at kbooo.fm). The next episode is November 18th. Jacob also writes the syndicated column TransNation, co-hosts Portland’s QLiterati!, freelances with Just Out & KBOO radio news and co-authors the Blind Eye Mystery series. Blind Curves and Blind Leap are available through boldstrokesbooks.com and bookstores nationwide. Discover more at anderson-minshall.com or myspace.com/blindeyemysteries.

“I have the word ‘Paradox’ tattooed onto my chest,” reveals author, artist, performer, and activist Sassafras Lowrey, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns ze and hir.  The tattoo hints at Lowrey’s complicated gender identity.  “I came out as trans when I was 18 and lived as an FTM—including several years of being on testosterone.”

“I knew that I wasn’t a girl,” Lowrey explains now.  “And that I wanted to play with gender.  [But], I honestly thought the only option available for me involved adopting masculinity.  I came out into a community that was incredibly femme-phobic.  Femmes …were considered to be less queer than the rest of the community.  I’d lost everything—family, home, friends, community—to live an authentic life.  Being culturally recognizable was very important to me.”

Because of that, Lowrey says, “It took me many years to feel comfortable…playing with my own femininity, and to come out as femme.  As a genderqueer femme I see my femininity as being incredibly performative. It’s over the top, complicated, inherently queer, and outside of the gender binary. It’s also very invisible.  Folks don’t always know how to see me, and [they] frequently miss the ways in which I’m subverting gender.”

Lowrey recalls hir time with The Language of Paradox—a performance group founded and directed by trans playwright Kate Bornstein—as a “fundamental turning point in my life, both personally and artistically.  Working with Kate and becoming friends with hir truly changed my life.”

With hir partner Kestryl Cael, in 2007 Lowrey established PoMo Freakshow (pomofreakshow.com), a queer production company that, by “invoking the spirit of the sideshow,” hopes to challenge norms and subvert assumptions, while producing collaborative and solo works that mix elements of theater, performance art, visual art, spoken word, slam poetry, storytelling and/or filmmaking.

“Much of what we do riffs on the performance of otherness [and] the vivid imagery of the freak,” Lowrey explains.  Still, ze admits pondering, the history of sideshows as “paradoxically exploitive and a lucrative sanctuary. There’s no denying the fact that many sideshow ‘freaks’…were abused, used against their will and otherwise exploited. [But some] consensually chose to participate, and found sanctuary within a community of those who’d been continually othered.”

Personally, Lowrey recalls, growing up, “dreaming that I’d be brave enough to run away and join the circus.  I had this innate feeling that it…would offer home to someone so—queer.  For me, there’s a sense of conjuring that childhood dream, now, as an adult living and working in a community of the freaks I [always] knew were waiting for me.”

PoMo Freakshow’s first piece, Traitors without (T)reason premiered this summer  and, Lowrey says, grapples with “the complexities of passing,”  and “centers around the idea that we’re a queer couple that—despite our best efforts—pass as straight. Traitors explores the betrayal, invisibility, sacrifice, subversion, and loss that are inextricably tied into public passing.”

A freelance journalist, Lowrey was honored as one of Portland, Oregon’s top emerging authors in 2004.   Hir first book GSA to Marriage: Stories of a Life Lived Queerly is an autobiographical exploration of hir multiple gender changes from butch to FTM to high femme.

Lowrey also edited 2009’s Kicked Out, an anthology by current and former homeless LGBTQ youth from around the world who were forced out because of their sexuality or gender identity.

“Kicked Out is realy a dream for me,” ze notes.  “I was kicked out when I was seventeen after coming out as a lesbian in semi-rural Oregon. One of the first things I remember doing in the face of all that upheval was go to the library and look at every book I could find on teenage queerness.”  But ze was disappointed to find that none reflected hir reality.  Now ze’s thrilled to have organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and PFLAG backing the anthology.  Matthew Shepard’s mother wrote the foreword.

But Lowrey hasn’t limited hir efforts to combat the “epidemic” of queer youth homelessness, to the anthology.  Instead, ze also established the Come Out, Kicked Out campaign (kickedoutanthology.com) to “break down the cultural shame and silencing faced by those of us who were kicked out or left home as teens.  Until it’s safe for current and former homeless LGBTQ youth to talk about our experiences we won’t be able to effectivly fight the epidemic.  As a community we need to make this a top priority.  There’s no reason that some of the youngest and most vulnerable members of our community should be so disenfranchised and alienated.”

Interested in how marginalized people alter society by telling personal stories, Lowrey begins a graduate program in Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where ze plans to focus on queer storytelling and the role it plays in “the construction of community.”

The creative femme is also an activist who leads workshops at schools, conferences, and for community groups across the country, and an artist whose work has been showcased at conferences and in galleries nation-wide.

“Visual art is very much activism for me,” contends Lowrey about the connection. “The vast majority of my visual art centers around pushing boundaries, and crossing borders related to themes of gender and sexuality.  It’s my goal to make people think, and to leave them with more questions than answers.”

Now a new assistant producer of Woman-Stirred radio—a queer cultural journal aimed at celebrating and preserving the work of LGBTQ artists, musicians and writers—Lowrey is primarily responsible for increasing its social networking presence.

“Social networking…is a really important tool for building community,” ze contends. “The Internet was something that really shaped my experience of queerness. Coming out in a very conservative area and ultimately losing my home and family; though I felt profoundly alone, I knew—from my brief Internet access—that there were others like me.”

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Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall (jake@trans-nation.org) co-hosts Gender Blender, a new show on Portland, Oregon’s 90.7 fm KBOO radio and streaming live at KBOO.fm.  Download  Tuesday, October 21st’s show on trans youth, free at kboo.fm.

© 2008 Jacob Anderson-Minshall

Visit Sassafras Lowreys’ profile on Trans-Genre to find more info, videos, and links to hir sites!