The Transgender Day of Remembrance was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder in 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Since then, the event has grown to encompass memorials in dozens of cities across the world.
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”Candy” is the first fashion magazine ever completely dedicated to celebrating transvestism, transexuality, cross dressing and androgyny, and it was launched last night in London. A limited edition of 1000 copies, the publication is promising to shake the fashion world, and pushes people to take on the persona of what they always wanted to be.
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Courage comes in many different forms. For Esmeralda a transgender asylum seeker from Mexico who faced horrific circumstances in immigration detention, it came in the form of seeking justice. Kept in a segregated cell with other transgender detainees, Esmeralda never realized that her experience in detention would match the trauma of discrimination she had faced back home. But her story is also one of hope for change.
An immigration official forced Esmeralda (formerly Mayra), a transgender woman, to perform oral sex on him while she was in the custody of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility. The official later resigned and was sentenced to four months in jail. After reporting the abuse, Ms. Soto suffered various forms of retaliation and often feared for her life. Ms. Soto, who came to the U.S. seeking asylum, had also been raped by a male inmate while detained at a jail in her native Mexico. She currently resides in Southern California.
sources:
Breakthrough.tv | Portraits Of Courage
Antony Hegarty:
“They’re actually entwined, those two ideas – being born into the transgender community, my experience of being in my body has been quite alienated. I felt I was stuck inside this thing. I have been searching my whole life for a place where I belonged, and ‘Everglade’ is about my realisation that I do belong. I am at home. I am a part of the sunlight and the water and the trees. My body stopped crying for home, I stopped feeling alienated. I stopped having such cruel thoughts in my head, that I was alone and would always be alone. [from an interview in Plan B Mag. Dec. 2008]
“A few years ago I was lying in a canoe at a friend’s house in upstate New York, flat out on the water, and looking up at the trees above me, and suddenly was struck by imagining that each of the leaves was an eye. ‘Everglade’ is addressing that alienation, seeking to re-connect with that perpetually watching world.”
[from an interview in Plan B Mag. Dec. 2008]
Everglade – Studio version:
Lyrics:
When I’m floating in the water
And your eyes are lilies all around
When I’m lying sweetly in my bed
The sun plays crystal with my eyes
Then I stop
My body stops crying for home
My limbs stop weeping for home
When I’m peeping in a parlour of trees
And the leaves are winking all around
I’m home, my heart sobs in my veins
But brains they play the softest games
Fingers kiss the string
Mouth taste the blade
Of everglade (x3)
Antony and the Johnsons – Everglade – [Live] Laiterie Strasbourg – April 2009
“I wanted to make a marker in time, marking the incredible loss we’re all feeling as we deplete the world, the only world we know, the only world we will ever know. Heaven is not elsewhere; this is all we have. We’re at such a critical point with it, not only in the physical sense but also on a threshold of feeling. This has preoccupied me throughout my adult life, and it has reached critical mass in terms of my wanting to take it as a clear theme for this group of work, at this particular point in time. I set myself a task to be really clear about it, to write and talk unmediatedly, to set down a marker in time to show directly how I’m feeling, and that’s what Another World is.”
“My favorite song is “Everglade”, just because it feels like the most recent song I wrote, and it really describes how I feel today. It’s a song about me peering out and looking at the leaves, and the leaves have eyes in them, and they are looking back at me. Everything is more alive than ever and yet, I’m sitting with a very beautiful world, but I’m still aware of a brokenness in me. And it’s about sitting with these two things at the same time — brokenness and a beautiful world.” [from an interview in The Tripwire Feb. 2009]
**full interview from Tripwire: here
** full interview from Plan B mag over at bunnyrabble
I spent some time researching Christian and other religious group affiliated blogs, and found lots which show compassion toward transfolk and lgbt in general. The focus in media and the lgbt movement is from a negative religious right stance. What is the percentage of Christians in North America who are on the right or on the left in the various lgbt debates?
The people who rule or win the votes, are the group that makes the most points in the media, period. We all know that now. Perhaps the silent majority needs to be rousted out of the bush where they always sit.
Writings for Families, Friends and Clergyby Lee Frances Heller and Friends (Author), Julie Ann Johnson (Editor)ISBN 0-9707947-0-3, SSP Publications – 368 Pages
