To Those In Offices Of Power On This Transgender Day Of Remembrance, November 20th, 2016

To Those In Offices Of Power On This Transgender Day Of Remembrance 2016: Earlier today I read the list of the recorded transgender people who died by violence from November 20th 2015 to November 19tj 2016 and I think to myself, how many more that have gone unlisted? How many by suicide? By preventable illness? From malnutrition or other causes related to homelessness? From grief and from broken hearts? I wonder how many more transgender people are doing to die as a result of people emboldened by a Trump/Pence Regime, the promised rescension of Federal Transgender Protection and the promise of the outright promotion of discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people in the guise of religious freedom, how little lives are worth now and how much less will lives be worth a year from now, deaths cheap and scattered thick upon the ground. The promise of living in a society which regards you as a person, as human, full of love and fear and sadness and hope, only to have that promise, never fully proffered, revoked before it can be fulfilled. To those in offices of power or those ascending to offices of power, to those who would seek, as policy, these deaths, silencings, erasures, please know that although you consider your ability to hate unfettered greater than the extension of empathy to those unlike you, know that by closing that door, you are closing the door on friends, coworkers, family members, lovers. yourself. Do these faces not haunt you even now? Is your hatred that strong, that you can live with the faces, of those you have or have not met but would gladly condemn to death, to imprisonment, to poverty, starvation, injury, illness, to murder, tell me that you can live with these faces and the faces of all beings you deny life, deny personhood to, haunting you at every moment of your life, every time you close your eyes and ever after. Is it that you already have so much blood on your hands that you feel that much more won't make a difference? Do you feel righteous in your anger, in your hatred, in your condemnation? Are you so very sure that you are an instrument of holy vengeance? Would you gladly face that wrath yourself? Would that matter to you? From this day forth you have the option of not condemning these others to death or to a living death. You have the option to instead extend kindness, assistance, recognition. It is within your power. Even if you have already done horrible things, proposed horrible things, written into law horrible things. You need not continue to do so. You have the option of casting aside the unrecognizing gaze, the gaze which can only see what it has always seen, and begin to see anew, begin to see those unlike you as both different and yet capable of feeling the love and the joy and the fear and the sadness and the anger that you presumably feel, begin to use the power that you possess to make this world a kinder and more hospitable place for everyone. It is not too late to start. May Peace Be Upon You. <3 nathaxn walker PS: Please remember that offices of power are temporary and fleeting things, subject to change and dissolution, while what you do, the actions that you take inside and outside of those offices, that lasts forever, encoded eternally, reverberating endlessly. Please remember. nxww The Names And The How: https://tdor.info/ http://transrespect.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/TvT_TMM_TDoR2016_Namelist_EN.pdf