Transgender Day of Remembrance Service Planned at Purdue

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Purdue University chapter of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP) and Purdue Queer Student Union will conduct a Service on the Purdue Engineering Mall (near the Hovde Administration Building) at 5:00pm on Thursday, 20 November 2008, to memorialize those murdered as a result of their gender expression.

The service will include a large lawn display reporting the names and details of death of the 238 gender-based murder victims from the last decade known to the organizers. Recent events on the Purdue campus and/or involving Purdue students has motivated the organizers to draw the attention of Purdue Administrators to the social environment that transgender people face every day — an environment of oppression similar to that faced by African-Americans in the Jim Crow era — including lynching.

As of the writing of this release, 23 people have been murdered as a result of their gender expression in the last year, according to the Transgender Day or Remembrance Web site.

“November 20, 2008, is the tenth annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. This is a day that is set aside to honor and remember those people who have died due to violence and hate crimes inflicted upon them by others who took exception to their gender expression. I know of no minority group that has a higher per capita murder rate than transgenders. They are routinely threatened, harassed and even murdered. It is open season on transgenders. Murders of transgenders often go unsolved. The police seem to have more important victims. Murderers who are caught often use justification as a defense claiming that a reasonable person would do the same. Those people who do accept transgenders often marginalize them and treat them as some sort of novelty. The humanity of transgenders is denied,” said Kay Johnson, chief organizer and President of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientist and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP) at Purdue University.

“Transgender Day of Remembrance is an opportunity for transgenders and their allies to stand up and be counted, to affirm the inherent value of all human life, and to denounce hate crimes and murder — something one would think would be a mainstream position. It is also an opportunity to educate others about a state of terror that many do not know exists. We read the names of our brothers and sisters and sons and daughters who died for having the courage to be themselves in a world that told them not to,” Johnson said. “We remember our dead.”

For more information about Transgender Day of Remembrance visit: http://www.transgenderdor.org/
NOGLSTP at Purdue: http://www.noglstp.net/purdue
Purdue Queer Student Union: http://www.pqsu.org/
National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientist and Technical Professionals: http://www.noglstp.org/

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