LJ Slovin is the author of Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, and a Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.

Today, cities and towns across Canada are marking the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR), an event that has been memorializing trans people who have been murdered since 1999. But as a trans educator, I have struggled with my relationship to TDOR for years.

It’s certainly enveloped in good intentions – honouring those in our community who have been lost to transphobic violence and bringing us together to galvanize support to protect the living. And to be sure, trans people face genuine risks to their lives: the Trans Murder Monitoring project reported that 350 trans and gender-diverse people around the world were murdered in the last year, one of the highest death tolls since the initiative launched in 2009. But TDOR is also a gathering that revolves around trans death – and that risks positioning trans people as little more than victims.

TDOR was created to bring attention to the issue of transphobic violence, which was being underreported,........

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