I wrote and read this for Penn State's Transgender Day of Remembrance- Nov 15, 2024. The you tube video is my recording of it ( Listen HERE) . In two places, I spelled sentences out phonetically to aid in my pronunciation. (This is my reading copy)
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Hear
My Voice
Sophie
Kandler, TDOR 2024
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
VIOLENCE, MURDER, SUICIDE
Four hundred eleven
killed worldwide in the past year. Four hundred eleven
names.
Sixty-nine dead here in
the US. Not a record- 73 were killed in 2022.
Sixty-nine names.
Sixty-nine lives. Sixty-nine stories. Sixty-nine endings.
My name is Righteous
Torrence Hill, but my friends call me Chevy.
I ran an Atlanta salon
where black LGBTQ people could feel safe and be themselves.
I was 35 in March when my
freeloading cousin shot me in front of my home.
He has yet to be found by
the police.
Hear my voice.
I’m Kitty Monroe, a
Latina transgender woman from Phoenix, Arizona.
I was the sole caregiver
for my infirm mother from Mexico, and now I’m gone.
How? I was 43 when on New
Years Day 2024, I was chased by a man and woman, and the man kept beating me on
the back with a gun until I collapsed.
He then got into his
pickup truck and ran over me. I was then accidentally hit by another
car.
Neither the couple nor
the other driver, who fled the scene, have ever been
identified.
The police and press
misgendered and dead named me.
Escucha mi voz. (EssKOOCHah me
vohs.)
Hear my
voice.
My name is Serenity
Birdsong.
I was 21 when I killed
myself in the Middle Tennessee State University Library on October
28.
Friends said I had
the ability to light up a room.
I wrote a poem once that
contained the lines:
But all in all, that
which I hope most
Is to spend time with
those I love before I’m a ghost.
I had no close family-
just chosen family.
Not enough. Not
enough.
Hear my voice.
Call me Joan. You
may have heard of me.
Back in 1431, I was
burned at the stake three times until my body was
ash.
They wanted to charge me
with 70 crimes, then 12, but the only one they could convict me on was
crossdressing.
While the church has
since apologized and tried to make amends, I’m still just as dead.
My ashes drifted away in
the river. I was only 19.
Some things never
change.
Entends ma Voix (EEcoot ma vwah.) Hear my voice.
I have no
name.
Maybe I just disappeared
into homelessness and died in a tenement, unidentified.
Maybe I found more
comfort stepping out into traffic than from my parents who rejected me.
Maybe I was murdered, and
my bones still molder in a shallow grave somewhere.
Or maybe they found me,
but the police didn’t bother to look for my killer.
After all, what’s another
dead prostitute anyway?
Maybe I was found, but
deadnamed and my truth never told.
Not a name- just a
statistic.
I am a number cited by
advocates and scholars.
But once I lived, loved,
and had dreams- like you.
And like you, I am a
story waiting to be told.
Where’s your voice?
