This year's conference follows the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) on November 20, 2024, a day dedicated to honoring the lives of transgender individuals lost to violence. This session includes papers that build on the TDOR theme, exploring the intersection of psychology, trans and queer studies, and religion for trans and gender nonconforming persons. Presenters address queer and trans critiques of normative development in the context of psychology and religion; psychological, theoretical, and spiritual insights related to the Trans Day of Remembrance and its impact on communities, and exploring resources at the intersections of trans lives, queer and trans studies in religion, and psychology and religion for flourishing in the midst of violence.
This study follows an ecumenical and interfaith Trans Day of Remembrance/Resilience (TDOR/R) service, which took place in Atlanta, GA. Based on participant observation, thick description, and one-on-one interviews with service leaders, I explore how the TDOR/R service reveals the complex spiritual lives and religious gatherings of local LGBTQ+ communities in response to violence and trauma. Throughout the service, the community engages in a variety of spiritual practices: care, flocking, lament, veneration, and repair (among others). Combining ethnographic description with pastoral-psychological analysis, I consider the psychospiritual functions and impact of these spiritual practices and the TDOR/R service more broadly on the mind-body-spirits of people and communities. Ultimately, I offer a descriptive account of queer and trans resilience as reclaimed ancestry and spirituality.
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.
The relationship of transness to psych regimes is fraught. Caught between a long and still living history of attempts to eradicate transness, on the one hand, and, on the other, the practical need for validation from the gatekeepers of medical treatment, trans people must navigate a narrow middle way of proving themselves sufficiently gender-distressed to merit treatment without being deemed too mentally unwell for such treatment. This institutional demand for trans sanity is incompatible with the realities of trans life under cisheteropatriarchy, which both produces and punishes trans Madness. Trans Day of Remembrance has the potential to be a ritual space of resistance to the violence of the gender regime and a site for trans life to be honored in the fullness of its trans Madness and prophetic maladjustment.