On this International Trans Day of Visibility (TDoV), TGEU, in collaboration with partner organisations, is publishing the booklet “A brief guide to monitoring anti-trans violence” in English and Russian.
Given the present challenging circumstances and growing concerns around COVID-19, TGEU is concerned about the human rights of trans and gender-diverse communities. This guide serves as a tool to support organisations and activists in reporting, collecting, and analysing anti-trans violence in their contexts and engaging with regional and global monitoring mechanisms.
This booklet primarily focuses on trans groups, LGBTQ and human rights organisations working with trans people. It involves experiences and best practices from trans and gender-diverse organisations operating in Brazil, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The easy-to-use publication provides basic concepts of monitoring based on TGEU and its partners’ experiences in the field, accumulated in the past ten years. It also draws on the expertise from the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) research project, which has been systematically monitoring, collecting, and analysing reports of murders of trans and gender-diverse people worldwide since 2009.
Based on TGEU’s experience, the booklet highlights the overwhelming obstacles faced by front line activists during the monitoring and documentation process, such as lack of or insufficient human and financial resources, inability to offer services that could mitigate the effects of re-traumatisation of the victims, and the emotional distress that might be faced by those collecting violence-related data. As if that were not enough, trans groups also face hostility from so-called “feminist” anti-trans groups, and even more subtle forms of exclusion from mainstream LGBT groups.
The document explores tips for individual and community well-being, as well as campaigning as a force of community building, with activists from the various countries sharing their experiences. Also included in the booklet is a call to international organisations and funders to assist the trans movement in monitoring initiatives as well as taking into account the well-being and livelihood of activists working on anti-trans violence worldwide.
