( Stonewall, of course, began thanks to the bravery of another trans woman.) The film was released in 1968, a year before the Stonewall Riots that most of us are taught as the start of the American queer resistance movement. A decade later, in the late 1960s, Sabrina was a key character in The Queen, a documentary about the National Academy Drag Ball she hosted throughout the latter part of the 20th century, for which Andy Warhol helped her secure funding. She will be remembered as a gender expression rebel and entrepreneur who employed, mentored and championed queer Americans since the 1960s.īorn Jack Doroshow to a Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1939, the androgynous icon expressed an affinity for women’s clothes as a kid and fully developed the Flawless Sabrina identity by the time she was 19. Her life story is one of great achievement despite discrimination. While her life wasn’t lost to the kind of violence TDOR is intended to highlight, the timing of her passing is fitting. One of these leaders is Flawless Sabrina, who died this weekend of natural causes. The disproportionate violence means survivors have to be resilient and their communities strong in order to develop leaders who will continue to fight on behalf of queer people even when that fight feels insurmountable. As Cecilia Gentili says in the video below, no matter how prevalent this violence is, “This isn’t supposed to happen.” Typically, the names of the dead are read aloud at these vigils, ensuring none of the slain would be dehumanized as mere statistics in a world where trans people face violence and oppression at staggering rates - particularly trans people of color. And so, for the last two decades, people have gathered on November 20 at churches, schools, parks and LGBT centers to commemorate the lives of all the trans and gender-nonconforming people lost. Neither have those of the other trans people who have been killed simply because they were trans. Hester’s murder was never solved, but her life hasn’t been forgotten. Gwendolyn Smith began TDOR in 1998 in memory of Rita Hester, a black trans woman widely known in her Massachusetts LGBT community who had been brutally stabbed to death. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a yearly assembly of vigils hosted around the world to mourn all of the lives lost to anti-transgender violence, both in the given year and throughout history.