by Lynette Alice

Created on: November 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 03, 2009

National Transgender Awareness Day is actually an offshoot of the National Transgender Day of Rememberance. What is the difference you may wonder? Simply put there is none aside from National Transgender Awareness Day that is the product of a different organization than its sister. They are celebrated on the same day each year which is November 20, find their roots memorializing the same woman whom was Rita Hester, and have the same agenda which is remebering our dead and trying to make sure each year there are fewer names added to the list than the previous.

With that little piece of confusion cleared up, the first National Transgender Day of Rememberance/Awareness was celebrated in 1999. Author and advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith organized the first memorial for Rita and the tradition has remained to this day. There is much more to the story though and it does us all well to be aware of it and the woman who sadly this day was created for.

Rita Hester was a Boston woman that made her life's work educating the community about transgender issues. Education was her passion and she was a leader in this area standing up for a group of people that sadly all too often have no advocate, especially in those days even though we are only talking about a decade ago. Rita was also a transwoman. On November 28, 1998 she was stabbed at least twenty times in the chest while in her apartment by an unknown murederer(s) who to this day are still at large. Rita expired from a cardiac arrest although the severity of her wounds would have done the job on their own anyway despite getting excellent medical care. All that is really known is that when Hester left the Allston's Silhouete Lounge, two men were seen leaving behind her, and the next thing anyone knew, she was dead.

Nobody has ever pinned down a true motive for the crime aside from Rita's status as a publicly visible well known transgender person. Nothing was stolen from her apartment. All the gold jewelry she wore which was quite valuable remained on her person. Hate seemed to be the only motive. As the story unfiolds we see how this galvanized not just the transgender community in Boston, but around the world.

As the press often does it smelled a story. A reporter at the Boston Globe theorized on a tip that nobody could substantiate she was murdered for being a prostitute working under the name "Naomi" at the hands of an angry John. Hester had no convictions or arrests for solicitation, in fact to a person the people that

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>