Amanda Udis-Kessler of Queer Sacred Music offer this moving hymn entitled “Say Their Names” for the wider church.

You can download the original score for this hymn, here.

Explore more from Queer Sacred Music, here.

Trans day of remembrance and resilience – an intimate and serious thing.
A necessary ritual for the ones grieving all year long
the perpetuation of unnecessary death.

May remembrance not be in vain nor in vanity,
coupled with conscious complicity in the structures that enable and encourage the destruction of life.

May participation in mourning precipitate working for change alongside the living.

Let this grief make way for resisting whiteness centering itself this day and others.

Let this ritual be a practice of collective refocusing on the roots of sexism and transmisogynoir in manifestations of anti-trans violence.

Let the visibility of this day,
the complicatedness of what it has become,
the chance to recenter its attention,
tell the entire truth
about what creates the conditions for such death:
The class realities. The prejudices and policies against sex workers.
The theologies. The misogyny.
The politics of respectability.>
The colonialization.
The transphobia in all its forms.
And the white supremacy from which so much of it is birthed.

Over these,
and all they steal,
we weep.

by M Jade Kaiser of Enfleshed