The Transfeminine Review

[Trigger Warning] This article contains remembrance and frank discussions of anti-trans violence and suicide in observance of Trans Day of Remembrance. Please take care of yourself and read this article at your own pace. If you’re struggling, you can call Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860 or find other crisis resources here.

Today (11/20/25) is Transgender Day of Remembrance, where we remember those we’ve lost over the past year, and those whose lives have been stolen by transphobic violence and suicide.

This year, the global trans community remembers the 367+ trans people who have passed away due to transphobic violence around the world. Community project Remembering Our Dead maintains a full crowdsourced list of names, which can be read here. Every one of those people should still be alive today, and tonight we light candles in their memory.

🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

The impact of transphobic violence extended far beyond this tally in 2025. Between the global assault on trans children, unprecedented rollbacks of healthcare, legal documentation, and civil rights, and the dehumanizing rhetoric of the fascist right, it’s impossible to know the true toll that transphobic violence has taken this year. I know that I’m personally struggling to wrap my head around it all. Tonight, we honor not only those known to the global trans community, but those who we do not know to mourn.

🕯️

May their memory be a blessing.

This year, the transliterary community observes the passing of three authors. While fortunately none were lost to transphobic violence or suicide, I want to take a moment to honor their lives and work with you all.

Among many of our minds today is Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, trans legend and activist icon, and one of the last living members of the Stonewall Riot that helped to kickstart the gay liberation movement in 1969. A community organizer wherever she went, known to hundreds of young trans people simply as ‘Mama,’ Miss Major lived through so much of recent trans history that it’s hard to cover it all. She was the founder of the House of GG, which organized to better the lives of trans people of color; worked tirelessly for prison abolition and trans access to care and support; was one of the most outspoken advocates during the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the queer community in the 1980s; and continued to fight for trans liberation and the people around her until the day she passed away.

Miss Major was involved with and credited in a number of oral history books over the past few decades. In 2023, she worked together with Toshio Meronek to produce her memoir, Miss Major Speaks: Conversation with a Black Trans Revolutionary. By my token, it’s one of the most important trans memoirs ever written, an essential link between the trans struggles of the 20th century and the challenges that face us all today. In the wake of her passage on October 13th from natural causes at the age of 78, I shared a passage from the end of the memoir that I found particularly moving, and I’ve shared it again below for those who might not have seen it on social media:

One of the things I hear with some younger trans people I know is they feel, “I’m gonna get this surgery, and I’m gonna learn that way of speaking, and I’m gonna be done.” You’re never done. If you’re a straight, cisgender person, you’re never done. Things are always happening that have the potential to change you. So all I am today is not who I’m gonna be tomorrow, because of the things that happened to me today and later tonight. People forget that. “Oh, after I transition, I’m gonna be through.” Well, good luck with that. ‘Cause if you’re through, then it’s time to leave, you know, and I don’t wanna go anywhere yet.

I’m in my seventies. Why didn’t I stop? Number one is community. My gurls. I’ve had moments of thinking about stopping, but I didn’t. I made sure I would step back, rejuvenate myself, and then got back out there, and that’s how you make a way. Our stories are not all the same, but the destination is: to get some place where we have some peace and harmony, and we can be at ease with ourselves and the people around us. You make the best of it all and hope you can help make it a little better for the gurl after you.

We will, Miss Major. We will.

On a tragic note, we observe today the loss of Valerie Amelia Thompson, who was killed at 38 in a fatal car crash this March. Thompson was the author of Tech Support (2020), a superhero novel that predated the current wave of transfeminine cyberpunk by several years. She is best known for her lead writing credit on the 2015 video game 2064: Read Only Memories, a pixel art cyberpunk point-and-click adventure that won several indie gaming awards (largely in Japan thanks to an excellent localization) and helped to break boundaries for trans representation in the gaming industry. GameSpot wrote in their 2015 review that the game was “a bold, declarative statement backed with aesthetic skill on nearly every front,” and praised its queer rep. I haven’t had the chance to read Tech Support myself, but I’m hoping to do so before the end of the year ❤

Finally, we remember Michelle Duff, who passed away at 85 of natural causes at her home in Nova Scotia. Famous across Canada for her stint as a motorcycle racer in the 1960s, she was the first North American and the only Canadian to win a race on the World Championship Grand Prix Circuit. Duff was almost killed after a severe racing accident in Tokyo in 1965, and was eventually forced to retire early from the racetrack. She transitioned in the 1980s, and found herself a new career as an author in the 2010s, where she penned six novels, a children’s book, and a memoir about her racing career. Michelle Duff is remembered as an inductee to the Canadian Motorcycle Hall of Fame, which wrote in the wake of her passing that she was “Canada’s top competitor” during her prime.

As with last year, I hope to leave this article open-ended. If you have a memory you want to share about Miss Major, Valerie, or Michelle, or if you have other people or memories on your mind today, this is an open invitation to use the comments section of this article to share them below.

I see you. I love you. You’re going to be okay ❤

Beth

If you’re struggling, you can call Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860 or find other crisis resources here.