As autumn brings its cooling air, raindrops, and the trees begin to shed, we, too, are invited to release, to make room for remembrance, for love and gratitude, for return. In this season of release and preparations for energy preservation, we turn our hearts toward our ancestors, those souls no longer embodied yet who continue to shape the moral and spiritual fabric of our families and communities. We give thanks for their enduring presence and for the ways they hold us together even through rupture and loss.
Each November 20th, Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) calls us to honor Black trans legacies and the lives of those lost to violence and erasure. We will not forget our loves. We speak their names as acts of resistance against fragmentation. We lift them in gratitude to restore connection, to remember that love persists beyond the physical, and to bring wholeness to our collective spirit.
In remembering the living‑dead, as theologian John S. Mbiti described, we heal ourselves (Mbiti, 1990). Within an African diasporic praxis of Sankofa, we call ourselves home to remember the forgotten and to reweave the cords of belonging that colonization reflected in trans‑antagonistic violence has tried to sever. Harrell, Comas-Díaz, & Bryant (2025) reminds us that within a Sankofa praxis we reclaim our ancestral continuity.
Ancestral Veneration as Healing Practice
Our trans elders and transcestors have always provided the blueprints for how to live and love expansively. Through courage and care, they showed us how to nurture the discarded, how to build a chosen family when the world turned its back. Our work now is to imagine and sustain new worlds rooted in African‑centered values, worlds where enlivened spirit, truth‑telling, and compassionate care are the foundation of community life.
For African diasporic peoples, ancestor veneration has always been at the heart of our healing lineages. Across countless traditions, death is understood not as an end, but as a transition, a return to Source, a transformation of energy that physics itself affirms cannot be destroyed, only changed.
We keep these connections alive through ritual and gratitude: building altars and shrines, pouring libation, lighting candles, drumming, dancing, invoking names aloud, and sharing stories. These practices create living links between the material and spiritual realms, between those who breathe and those who breathe through us (Talabi, 2019; Mbiti, 1990).
Rituals can take many forms: an altar may hold photos, objects that belonged to or symbolize the ancestor, flowers, incense, or food and drink offerings. A simple act of pouring libation while speaking the name of a departed loved one invokes their presence, nourishes their spirit, and reaffirms our continued connection. Drumming, singing, or movement can invite ancestral energy into our space, reminding us that healing and celebration are embodied experiences.
Storytelling that includes sharing lessons, struggles, and triumphs of our transcestors helps to keep their guidance alive in our daily lives. These rituals are active, communal, and deeply restorative as they reinforce that ancestors are not absent, but present and participating in our ongoing journey.
Cultural Frameworks: Asili, Living‑Dead, and Extended Self
Marimba Ani (1994) teaches that our asili, our cultural seed, rests in our understanding of interconnectedness. We are bound by responsibility to our ancestors, to one another, and to our descendants (Ani, 1994). To honor our ancestors is to sustain moral and social balance; it is to participate in a continuum of care that stretches beyond time and space.
The ancient Egyptians expressed this beautifully through the The Book of the Dead, which offered guidance for the soul’s journey beyond the body. These rituals were not about death alone. They were technologies of remembrance, affirmations that life and spirit are eternal and collective.
Mbiti (1990) frames the ancestors as the living‑dead those who have passed but continue to dwell in relationship with the living and guide moral life (Mbiti, 1990; Talabi, 2019). This communal ontology undergirds the African‑diasporic notion of the extended self, our identity weaves to our ancestors, to our descendants, through all of natural life which spans time and space.
Gender‑Diverse Legacies, Fragmentation, and Reconnection
Despite our multiplicity in oneness (Akbar), gender‑diverse and expansive people are often stigmatized, misunderstood, intentionally erased, and vilified in our communities. Black transgender people, in particular, are disproportionately impacted by family rejection, houselessness, and violence (e.g., Beltran et al., 2019; HRC, 2022). These become fractures within our community and often force trans community members outside of their families of origin to find other means to live and work.
We have also become disconnected from pre‑colonial gender‑diverse legacies, which brought important roles that same‑gender‑loving and gender‑diverse embodiments held within African societies as healers and keepers of sacred rituals (Somé, 1999).
TDOR echoes the ancient call to venerate ancestors. Created in 1999 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honor her friend Rita Hester, a trans woman murdered that year, TDOR became a vigil rooted in dignity, love, and truth. On this day, we gather to read the names of those lives lost, to light candles, to share food with each other and with the spirits, to drum, dance, and sing.
These are not mere memorials but they are acts of spiritual continuation, a refusal to let our people vanish. They keep the stories of our kin alive, allowing their spirits to guide us toward healing.
This year, we also uplift the memory of Miss Major Griffin‑Gracy, a mother to many, a survivor, and a leader whose life embodied love in action. Miss Major transitioned in October 2025 at the age of 78, a rare blessing of longevity among Black trans women. To generations of Black and Brown trans youth, she was the mother they were denied: fierce, funny, and unflinchingly real.
She created spaces of rest and resistance, places where trans people could heal from the traumas of racism, sexism, and trans-antagonism. Her spirit joins a long lineage of protectors like Ruth Ellis, who lived to over 100 years and opened her home to queer and trans youth in need of love and shelter. These elders model an African principle of fictive kinship where family is chosen through care, not just blood.
We matter too. Feeling more grounded in ourselves as gender diverse and gender traversing people, knowing that there were those before us who were similar to us. Their existence fortifies. Gratitude uplifts them and uplifts others like us. Connecting with where we come from shows where we can go. This is the spirit of Sankofa, which is the returning to retrieve what sustains the spirit, reclaiming the ancestral truth that gender diversity and queerness are sacred, not shameful.
Why TDOR Matters for African Diasporic Communities
When you are connected and protected within a community of care there is space to grow, develop, and live out one’s purpose. TDOR reminds us that we must do better as communities to prevent violence. It is our responsibility to increase the practices of safety, welcome, and visible support to prevent community alienation which makes violence and marginalization easier. No more turning away or intentionally erasing our trans kin.
These acts of violence and inequities are not occurring out of a vacuum as they are tied to interpretive regimes of religion and culture, rigid gender expectations, and social control. TDOR reminds us how deep our adoption of anti‑Black and colonized notions of reality is, how it separates and isolates members of our Black/African communities, and in effect commits self‑harm.
TDOR reminds us of how dangerous and courageous it is to live an existence that listens to one’s spirit, to live boldly and aligned with oneself. It invites us to assess the social climate and the sense of community Black/African peoples practice. Most of the deaths and violence faced by trans people are committed by someone the victim knew, such as family members, lovers, or other community members.
TDOR gives faces, names, and real‑life narratives behind the numbers and percentages of Black/African lives lost to trans‑antagonist violence. TDOR reminds us that Black trans people are Black, they are our children, our siblings, cousins, classmates, and coworkers. Being trans does not negate one’s Blackness or Africanness.
Trans is not anti‑Black or un-African. Trans-hostile violence is un-African and anti‑Black. Black communities cannot progress forward without remembering and including trans folks. As long as the violence and death persist, there will always be a reason for TDOR to remind us not to forget, to do what we can to recognize and stop the violence.
TDOR also signals trans and gender diverse folks, particularly those new in their transition journey, that the danger they may face is real, but that danger is not inevitable. This trend of violence is not African and does not have to be tied to Blackness; it was taught and adopted, so it can also be unlearned.
This season of remembrance, let us give gratitude to our transcestors who remind us that life is not linear but cyclical, that death is transformation. Through them, we learn that healing is collective, that we are extensions of those who came before, and that our freedom depends on how we tend to one another now.
Malakai Coté, Ph.D. (he/they/fam)
Dr. Coté is of Exoduster lineage that also extends back to the Mende and Yoruba peoples of present day Sierra Leone and Nigeria. He is the Executive Director of the Gender Health Center in Sacramento, CA and fam is also the Clinical Training Director at University of California, Santa Barbara's Hosford specialty clinic, Kindred Collective for Healing and Liberatory Traditions which trains the next generation of healers and scholars working towards liberation, rooted in ethics of love and care. Fam primarily works with folxs navigating the impacts of intergenerational trauma and resilience whose complex and diverse identities span human/personhood experience.
Ebrahim Mansaray, M.S. (they/them)
Ebrahim is a masters level counselor in training. Native of Prince George's County Maryland whose family of origin derive from the Mandinka, Loko, Fula and peoples of Sierra Leone and Guinea, West Africa. They currently reside and work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Ebrahim currently has experience as a counselor working with low income Black and Brown children and families; people of immigrant or refugee background; members of the lgbtq community. Ebrahim has a focus on the mental health concerns of Black and African folx across the diaspora who are gender expansive, trans, have diverse attractional orientations including same gender loving folx. With a specific interest in Black/African Queer and Trans Muslims, spirituality, Black masculinity, Black femininity, gender scripts, aging, body image, Black queer joy, and incorporating African frameworks of healing in healing/mental health.
References
Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An Afrikan‑Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior. Africa World Press.
Beltran, T., Allen, A. M., Lin, J., Turner, C., Ozer, E. J., & Wilson, E. C. (2019). Intersectional Discrimination Is Associated with Housing Instability among Trans Women Living in the San Francisco Bay Area. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(22), 4521.
Harrell, S. P., Comas-Díaz, L., & Bryant, T. (2025). Toward a decolonial-liberation orientation for psychological practice: Humanization, praxis, and the African wisdom of Sankofa. American Psychologist, 80(4), 670–684. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001552
Human Rights Campaign. (2022). An Epidemic of Violence: Fatal Violence Against Transgender and Gender‑Nonconforming People in the United States in 2022.
https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022
Mbiti, J. S. (1990). African Religions & Philosophy (2nd ed.). Heinemann.
Somé, S. E. (1999). The spirit of intimacy: Ancient African teachings in the ways of relationships. William Morrow.
Talabi, J. M. (2019). The Epistemological Perception of the Living Dead & its Metaphysical Implication in West Africa. Lasu Journal of African Studies, 3(4).
