The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance will be held Sunday, November 11th from 6 to 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church (1000 S. Cooper).
The candlelight vigil and memorial service honors the lives of transgender and gender non-conforming victims of violence. Locally, those victims have included Duanna Johnson, who was beaten by a Memphis Police officer in 2008 and was killed in a still-unsolved murder later that year, and Tiffany Berry, who was gunned down outside of her front door at the Camelot Manor Apartments in South Memphis in 2006.
The national Transgender Day of Remembrance was started in 1998 to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th that year kicked off the ‘Remembering Our Dead’ web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999.
