Trans Day of Remembrance 2025

My day started early. The new electric radiator in my bedroom woke me, like an annoying alarm clock that I couldn't turn off, with volleys of irregular clunks and clicks as the heating process expanded the metal. Perhaps the current cold snap had brought on this change, something I hadn't noticed before, or maybe I was sleeping more lightly in anticipation of the day ahead.

I was tired before I started, having spent the previous day at an inquest and the evening at a Gendered Intelligence (GI) event. It was a challenging day, hours spent listening to details about a young trans person's death by suicide, holding his mother in my arms when the court read extracts from his diary without warning, words she had never heard. It was careless and cruel.

Then in the evening, such contrast, a presentation about the work GI do and a review of it's effectiveness. GI is a charity which centres its young trans people so wholeheartedly and without judgement, it was beautiful to observe. The care and kindness with which everyone spoke, the understanding and compassion in the room, a room full of predominantly LGBTQ+ people. It should hardly have been surprising, but I suppose I am so used to an absence of this level of 'getting it' in my own communities, when I do encounter it, it hits me almost physically. And I regret I couldn't help Alice access it.

It is unusual for me to do so much in one day, so for the next day to be Transgender Day of Remembrance was asking more of myself than I can usually manage. But I was determined to try.

Peter and I had planned to go to the crematorium to leave some flowers for Alice but time was tight. I had to be in London by midday for an in-conversation with my editor about Her Name Is Alice, for a Harper Collins Pride network event. Oftentimes, when I feel under pressure like this I am easily overwhelmed and unable to make a decision, but on this occasion I felt calm and clear. Peter would go and visit Alice without me, this wouldn't be abandoning Alice because I was 'visiting' her and remembering her in another way. We would travel to London separately and spend the afternoon and evening together as planned.

The Q & A went well. It was lovely to see Imogen, my editor, again and meet the team who'd organised the event. Again I felt the kindness and understanding of the previous evening, that I often don't feel when I mix in my cis-heteronormative circles. It's not that my friends, my peer group, don't try to be kind but their discomfort (at best) which leans into disinterest and disbelief (at worst) is inherently unkind. However much they try to mask it, I sense it.

They are not all like this of course. I have friends who are wonderful and I wish I could bottle what it is about them that allows them see the world through a lens that embraces and accepts, a lens that is curious but doesn't probe, that is always centring the subject and willing to change its focus according to what it finds. But they are the minority, more often than not the lens has a singular focus and filters out what it doesn't want to see, a cataract lens, old and fogged, that will never see clearly how ever hard it looks.

Imogen sees clearly. I remember the first time we met. I was so nervous, I had no idea what to expect. My book had been pitched to various publishing houses and I was meeting with those who had put in an initial offer. My route to this stage had been an unusual one, I didn't have a book proposal with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. I had a thirty thousand word chunk of writing, largely stream of consciousness, that I'd submitted to a competition on a whim.

As the meeting drew to a close Imogen asked if I had any questions. I only had one, 'What do you want from me? Her answer, 'More of the same', felt like a homecoming. I felt trusted and therefor reliable. I felt seen. It countered all the years of fighting to be listened to by doctors, nurses, teachers and friends. I was invited to tell my story, my way. I'd found my editor.

After the Q & A I met with Peter for lunch. It felt like any other day.  For some, a day of remembrance might be the thing they need to take pause and reflect, it might be the time they allow themselves to think about that which is perhaps often kept at bay, a necessity to make day-to-day living more bearable.  For me these days, the instruction to remember can do the opposite and push Alice away. When we have the minutes silence at the end of my bereavement support group I find myself thinking of anything but Alice. I used to berate myself for this, feel I wasn’t grieving properly, but now I don’t judge myself so harshly. Alice is always with me and if she has a habit of popping into my mind at the most unexpected and random times, but not to order, that’s ok.

After eating we popped to the Tate Modern and made the usual comments that people who don't understand art make about art. From, 'We have a roasting tin that looks like that', my husband on, Brown Picture, Ferdinand Kulmer, to 'I'd rather not have been reminded of Graham Linehan today', me on The Handsome Pork Butcher, Francis Picabia.

And then we headed to Soho Square for the vigil organised by Not a Phase which member's of my family have attended every year since Alice died. It was a beautiful evening of remembrance, grief, acknowledgement, anger, unity and love. I was struck by the threads that weaved our speeches together. There had been no instruction, no theme, we all had our unique stories to tell, but we spoke as one. Here are my words.

It’s a privilege to speak this evening but a great sadness given it is Alice’s death by suicide that has led me here. I started to write memories of Alice to share with you but attempts to describe her in a few sentences always leave me feeling I never do her justice. She was my daughter and I loved her. That will have to do.

 Actually, I can find it difficult to bring her to mind on occasions like this. I become overwhelmed thinking of all trans lives lost, or blighted, by the relentless discrimination endured by your community. I worry that some of you here may be feeling hopeless and helpless and finding life hard to endure and I don’t want you to do what Alice did. What too many young trans people have done.

Tonight, I’m not just here for Alice but for Corei Hall, Leia Sampson- Grimbly and Zach Klement. Yesterday I attended Corei‘s inquest to support his mum. Corei was only 14 when he died. Leia was 17 when she took her own life, just over a year ago. Her mum is sorry she can't be here tonight. Zach died in 2021 aged 21. I met his mum at a bereavement support group I attend.

I also remember Joelle Plowright, forever 27, who died in 2023 of a highly treatable cancer that went undiagnosed for months and once diagnosed remained untreated whist Joelle languished in a single-occupancy side room, remote from the cancer ward and the specialists who could have helped her. Her mother is fighting for the NHS to hear her complaint, and I’ve written another of my letters to the health secretary to illustrate how his support for trans segregation in hospitals inflicts harm on trans people. We are ignored.

It seems that every day the gender critical trans-haters find new ways to chip away at your rights, your freedoms and your dignity. In just the last few weeks I’ve learnt that Alice and Leah are both named in a CitizenGO petition. CitizenGO is a far-right campaign group opposed to same sex marriage and women’s rights such as abortion, but this particular petition demands trans people be recorded in their assigned birth sex on their death certificate and it misgenders Alice and Leia throughout.

And recently Helen Joyce has been on tour in New Zealand and Australia where she expressed disgust that a person could be disciplined for misgendering a dead person in the course of their work. But as you can imagine she uses much more inflammatory language than that.

Alice was treated with the utmost respect at the undertakers. It was the first thing we said when we called them, Alice is trans we need you to respect that, and they did. They were wonderful. But if we’d asked and she’d subsequently been misgendered this would have harmed us. If it had happened and we’d asked for it to stop but it had then continued, this would have been abuse. But this is what the GC mindset demands - a worker’s right to misgender is held above a dead person’s right to dignity and a grieving family’s rights to respect and compassion at the very beginning of their grief journey, in some of their darkest hours.

And just yesterday at Corei’s inquest the coroner instructed the jury that it was for them to decide whether Corei’s sex is recorded as female, male or “born female lived as male”. This is a very disturbing instruction and appears to contravene very clear guidance from the chief coroner that trans people should have their death recorded in their lived gender.

Corei’s mum messaged this afternoon to say the jury chose “born female lived as male”. We’ll have to wait and see where this leads.

Also this afternoon I’ve heard that in the inquest of Aiden Longmuir a 20 year old trans man who also died by suicide earlier this year, that the coroner in his case deliberately ignored the chief coroner’s guidelines and recorded Aiden’s sex as female, against the wishes of his family.

Every new line of the story impacts my family’s grief and contributes to my own fluctuating feelings of helplessness and hopelessness – knowing that my child did not apparently matter to so many doctors and nurses, teachers and politicians, and does not matter at all to those who campaign to eradicate her, and people like her, from public life and the public record.

It’s easy to feel despair. It’s an understandable response to the harms inflicted upon us, I hope you don’t mind me saying ‘us’,  by a minority of very powerful cis people. And despair can lead to dark and dangerous places. We know that, this is why we’re here. But joining together like this is what gives me hope and lifts me out of despair, even whilst we mourn our dead. To see the love and solidarity in your community, how you hold each other up and look out for each other, and for me. This is the best protection.

But we can’t save everyone. People slip through the cracks.

As we remember those we’ve lost, we must not let their lives cut short fade into nothing. We must tell their stories because they no longer can, even when transphobes gaslight us and call us shroud wavers and irresponsible online actors. We must show the powers that be that they cannot destroy trans people and those that love them.

The trans community may be small, but it is mighty. Alice didn’t know her own powers. She didn’t know how loved she was and that three-and-a-half years after her death her friends would be my friends and we would share meals and dog walks and carve pumpkins together, because we all loved her and love her still.

I want you all to know your own value and to stay safe. I’ve heard the phrase “survive out of spite”, I know some people don’t like it, I kind of do. But know that you deserve to thrive, not merely survive.

Whilst Alice is no longer with me, I carry her inside me and her beauty, her kindness, her absence drive me to forge a future that celebrates in our diversity, a future where trans people can shine.

Thank you.