A Note of Solidarity in Grief

Due to today’s election results, American LGBTQIA+ people and those who love them may be experiencing many very big emotions, especially grief. The folks at Trans Doe Task Force are all right there with you, and it is particularly hard with the Transgender Day of Remembrance coming up in just two weeks as well. We spend a lot of our time here mourning the dead, but we also mourn the loss of rights and freedoms of self-determination and self-expression for those who already are one of the most vulnerable communities. As Trans people but also as parents of gender diverse children and young adults, we grieve the fact that there are so many young Trans and Queer people out there who are so persecuted that they have grown to fear their own classmates and neighbors, and sometimes even their own families. We grieve the Queer community’s fear that the outcome of the US election may increase the number of LGBTQIA+ people who go missing or become the target of hate crimes.

The one thing that we can do to help at this time as an organization is to remind people that our database, LAMMP (LGBTQ+ Accountability for Missing and Murdered Persons), is also set up to securely house and store your essential personal data if you are scared that you (or your LGBTQIA+ child) might go missing for any reason. The purpose of this service is to assure individuals that if they should go missing, we will have the correct information to assist in a search for them, such as chosen name and pronouns, recent photo, and preferred contact/safe person. These things are often left out of flyers and media reports, especially for Trans youth, making it less likely that the missing person will be found and identified. This project is detailed further on our #IfIGoMissing page.

We would like to offer some additional resources that may be useful to you or someone you care about, so please share. These resources will be permanently listed on our website at help.transdoetaskforce.org under ‘outside resources’, as well as linked below as a Google doc that you can download and keep on your phone to access any time. We will update it periodically, so if you have additional resources that you feel should be listed here, please email or message us. <3

Trans Help Resource List (Google doc)