On Trans Day of Remembrance, advocates call on politicians to halt anti-trans rhetoric
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Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) honors trans people lost to homicide and violence at memorials around the world. This year, LGBTQ+ advocates are using the somber day to call on politicians to stop demonizing trans and gender non-conforming people — and to take responsibility for their anti-trans rhetoric.
In the past year, Advocates for Trans Equality counted 27 violent deaths of trans people in the United States, as well as 21 suicides. Those deaths include the kidnapping, torture and killing of Sam Nordquist, a 24-year-old Black trans man who endured horrific conditions before his death in upstate New York.
That killing shook the community. Gwendolyn Ann Smith, whose work chronicling anti-trans murders led to the creation of TDOR in 1999, said that Nordquist’s fate is one of the worst stories of violent trans deaths that she has ever encountered. She started the Remembering Our Dead project in 1998 after the murder of Rita Hester, a Black trans woman.
“Every story of an anti-transgender murder is horrific, but there are some that are just that much more notorious,” Smith said. “For example, an intersexed infant that was killed by their parents in 1999, or the lengthy torturous death of Gwen Araujo in 2002. Sam Nordquist’s murder is clearly among these.”
Underneath the violence is a layer of increasingly threatening language and rules that push for the erasure of out transgender people from public life.
This year, the Trump administration launched a blitz of executive orders, federal policies, and inflammatory rhetoric that portrayed trans adults and children as dishonest, mutilated, and part of an extremist ideology. In response, many trans Americans felt personally singled out and discriminated against. Transphobia has always been part of life for gender non-conforming people, but now, the federal government is steering it in unprecedented ways.
“This year, these deaths are punctuated by a political movement and powerful politicians who have fanned the flames of hate and are driving our trans siblings even further to the margins of society,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “Every anti-equality politician, from Donald Trump and his cabinet, to those in Congress and state legislatures, needs to see these numbers, see these names and faces, and see the cost of the cruelty they have greenlit.”
Seventeen of the 27 violent deaths tracked by Advocates for Trans Equality in the past year — from November 2024 to October 2025 — were caused by gun violence. And 61 percent of those lost to suicide were younger than 24, underscoring the urgent mental health needs of LGBTQ+ youth that have only increased under the Trump administration.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which has been tracking violence against trans Americans since 2013, finds that most trans people who are violently killed are people of color — and most are killed with a firearm. Black transgender women are targeted very often, bearing the brunt of the violence.
Amid the current political environment, more trans and gender diverse adults are choosing to be less visible about their LGBTQ+ identities in public compared to last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2025 annual community survey. Increasingly, many trans Americans feel like they are living in a culture of fear; and advocates are worried about how this could translate into more deaths.
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