Tomorrow is the 9th Annual Transgender Remembrance Day, a day set aside to commemorate the lives lost due to anti-transgender violence and to raise awareness of the physical and verbal violence inflicted upon transgender individuals on a daily basis.

Many of the anti-transgender hate crimes, like the vicious murder of Rita Hester in 1998 which set off the First Annual TDR, have yet to be solved, and in many cases, no one has been prosecuted. 

GLSEN has a good organizing manual for students and communities wishing to address Transgender Remembrance Day, and for a shameless plug, here's a story from my college daily with a picture of yours truly at the TDR candlelight vigil in 2004.

This event was one of the most successful events that the Queer Student Union at the University of California, Santa Barbara ever held.  Allies came out of the woodwork.  First year students from the surrounding dorms came out to the lawn to see what was happening, and stayed silently just to listen to the reading of names and stories of transgender individuals who had lost their lives in the last decade.

A campus bureaucrat attempted to stop the event since students did not have a "permit to light fires on the grass," but participants wouldn't let him shut it down.

It was truly a moving evening, and yet another reminder that this generation is making strides towards ending hatred.

Check out this list of biographies of victims to read at vigils.