LGL Celebrates International Transgender Day of Visibility

The Transgender Day of Visibility (TDoV) is an annual holiday held on March 31st, dedicated to showing support and raising awareness of discrimination faced by transgender people around the world.

The day aims to shining light upon the accomplishments of transgender people while fighting transphobia by spreading knowledge of the trans* community. Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance (celebrated on the 20th of November), this is not a day to mourn the loss of transgender people to hate crimes, but to raise visibility, empower and celebrate living members of the transgender community.

The holiday was founded in 2009 by Rachel Crandall, a Michigan-based transgender activist and Executive Director of Transgender Michigan, the area’s foremost transgender support organization. Crandall wanted a day where transgender people could be proud of who they are and be out and visible. As Crandall said “trans* voices are really silenced, so we really want to showcase them. We want to let trans* people know that they do have a voice.”

In this day of celebration, the national LGBT* rights organization LGL takes the chance to affirm once again its commitment to empower the transgender community and welcomes every positive initiative by transgender individuals to gain public visibility in the Lithuanian society. Strongly believing that the transgender community contributes significantly to create opens space for social dialogue, LGL in the last years implemented several projects to empower and educate transgender people on their rights.

 Among our current projects, QuPiD: Queer Pathways into Diversity focuses specifically on political education, which critically deals with heteronormativity and the issues surrounding it. The project aims at combatting heteronormative and stereotyped assumptions and facilitating participation and active citizenship of the transgender community as well as groups discriminated for their sexual orientation. Project “Bleeding Love: Raising Awareness on Domestic and Dating Violence Against Lesbians and Transwomen in the European Union” aims at developing several awareness raising activities in order to broaden mutual understanding of domestic and dating violence against lesbians and transwomen in selected jurisdictions in the EU. Finally, in the past one of the most successful project was “Empowering Women”, whose goal was to raise awareness, support, education and advocacy skills of LBT women.

For further information on Transgender Day of Visibility please read here.