Maine SpeakOut Project to Host 3rd Transgender Day of Remembrance

As part of the national Transgender Day of Remembrance, Maine SpeakOut Project will host a conference and ceremony at the Albert Brenner Glickman Family Library on the 7th floor at University of Southern Maine, 314 Forest Avenue, on Saturday November 18th.

The conference will feature facilitated workshops that will highlight the issues faced by the transgender community every day and will begin at 12:00pm. Registration is requested but not required for the conference, and there is a voluntary sliding scale that will be collected at the door.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance was created to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder in 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Since then, the event has grown to encompass memorials in dozens of cities across the world.

This marks the second year a conference is offered at Maine SpeakOut Project’s Transgender Day of Remembrance event. The conference will include workshop sessions “Transgender 101,” a Trans Youth panel, “Transgender Intimacy: Negotiating the Labyrinth,” “Transgender Narratives,” “Real ID,” caucuses and more. Stephen Wessler, executive director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence will be keynote speaker of the conference.

A candlelight remembrance ceremony will follow the conference in front of the Glickman Library at 4:30pm, weather permitting, or on the 7th floor of the library in case of inclement weather and is free and open to the public. For more information on the conference or ceremony, call Jen Hodsdon at 207.874.1030 / speakout@commcc.org.