Special Days

Yesterday I went to Church in the morning, nothing unusual in that, I do practically every Sunday when I am at home.   I believe in collective worship, and corporate prayer, I also like the structure of a service and community of fellow believers.   Yesterday I did feel a bit conflicted though, it was the International Transgender Day Of Remembrance (as I think I may have mentioned before) I had contacted my Vicar (along with many others in the area) asking that the Trans community be remembered in prayers on this particular day.    Of all the Churches I contacted my own was the only one to reply, with a polite but firm decline.

I was left feeling rather conflicted, wondering if this meant that I was tolerated rather than embraced? was it just lip service being paid to inclusion? could it be personal?    Well I decided to go anyway, only to find on my arrival that yesterday was also the International Day of Prayer for Persecuted Christians.   I can see that for a Church this would take precedence, we are all more aware of these special days when they directly bear on a community we feel part of.   If we are not connected then we will be exceedingly unlikely to know of these days.   Given that a large part of the idea is to make those who are not directly affected aware of the problems then somehow we need to do better.   As Rosalind said yesterday we need many, many more people to  be aware of this and want to mourn those who have died/been murdered and support, at least, work to reduce, nay eradicate, hate crime in the future.

After Saturday's event we (that is the members of TransPALS who were part of the organisation) did have a bit of reflection, the main thing we want to change is to increase the general awareness of trans issues, particularly around safety, we aim to do this through increasing the publicity prior to TDOR 2017 and hope that we will see a lot more people at our event then. We cannot help if there are clashes with other notable days or events, we can just work to make sure that ours is as widely known about as possible.