Two individuals support each other during the Trans Day of Remembrance vigil. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
By Wallace Baine November 21, 2024
River Nevaeh Goddard probably never got to visit the Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, or perhaps anywhere else in California. But on Wednesday night, River’s name was spoken, their photo was shown and their life was remembered to a crowd of about 100 people in Santa Cruz.
River, who used they and she pronouns, was a 17-year-old nonbinary student from Rhode Island who was stabbed to death by their boyfriend in Massachusetts in April. They were one of more than two dozen people remembered on Transgender Day of Remembrance at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, most of them trans women. It’s possible that none of them ever set foot in Santa Cruz. But a roomful of strangers in Santa Cruz gazed at their faces, heard their names and cried for their loss.
The annual Trans Day of Remembrance vigil — organized by The Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County and UC Santa Cruz’s Lionel Cantú Queer Resource Center, with co-sponsors the Resource Center, the NAACP’s local branch and the Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center — is the kind of event that everyone attending would wish isn’t necessary. It’s a moment to acknowledge the lives of trans and nonbinary people lost to violence in the past year.
The commemoration dates back nationally to 1999, and it’s been a Santa Cruz tradition for years. But after an election year in which trans people in particular were singled out by a winning presidential campaign, this year’s event was especially charged.
Among the speakers at the event were state Sen. John Laird, Cabrillo College trustee Adam Spickler and local NAACP president Elaine Johnson. Also speaking were poets, artists and activists testifying of their experience as trans or nonbinary people.
The evening’s host was Nic Laflin, lead program specialist at The Diversity Center, who opened the event with a sobering message acknowledging the potentially choppy waters ahead for the LGBTQ+ community under the second Trump administration.
“No one is coming to save us,” Laflin, wearing a “Trans is Beautiful” T-shirt, said to the crowd. “We can and will save ourselves. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.”
The event’s security was provided by a group of volunteers called the Rainbow Defense Coalition, which came together in 2023 to defend Drag Story Time in Watsonville. To ensure the safety of those attending, no one was allowed in-and-out privileges and everyone was asked to sign a pledge upon entering to respect the sanctity of the commemoration.
Several speakers evoked the example of the Santa Cruz AIDS Project, which did important work locally in mobilizing and organizing gay men in particular in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis. Laird was one of the principal activists at SCAP, and he spoke movingly on the crisis he and his cohorts faced in those days.
Others talked of their personal experiences not only with transitioning, but with grief. One speaker, 22-year-old Rian Nakahara, performed a spoken-word poetry piece (“I am a river of blood in the shape of a body”). Elle Vervoort also went for the personal over the political, relating how the death of her mother and her wife in the space of 10 days brought her to a grief that pushed her into transitioning into her true self. If those traumatic deaths had not happened, she said, “I probably would have stayed in my sad half-life.”
The evening’s final speaker, delfin w. bautista, issued a call to action, urging cisgender or heterosexual allies: “Don’t issue-ify us. We are not ‘issues.’ We are people. We are fighting every day, just to breathe, just to exist.”