Deadly Data: Necropolitics and the Psychological Effects of Transgender Day of Remembrance

Trans youth are growing up in an empire of immi/a/nent death – a constant spatial and temporal closeness to death that has devastating psychological effects on the developing brain. The necropolitics of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) in particular demonstrates how the rhetoric of memorialization functions to foreclose the future life chances even of those still-living, causing them to exist in an ambiguous, haunted positionality where the possibility of trans flourishing appears to be foreclosed. The first part of this paper considers the data and accounting of trans death that is central to TDOR observances, and particularly the abstraction of anti-trans violence from race and class. The second half of the paper consists of ethnographic accounts from participants at an interfaith summer camp for trans youth to illuminate the psychological effects that TDOR rhetoric has on the livability of young trans people and considers the possibilities for remembering otherwise.