photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Ruby Mae Johnson, at the lectern, reads the name of Lawrence resident Louise ImMasche at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at Ecumenical Campus Ministries.

When the list of names is read out each year on Transgender Day of Remembrance, there’s a question that Ruby Mae Johnson struggles with.

“Who will I know next year?”

This year, at Thursday’s Transgender Day of Remembrance observance at the Ecumenical Campus Ministries building, Johnson had to read the name of someone many people in Lawrence knew. “Louise ImMasche, age 41, died October 24, 2025 in Lawrence, Kansas. Louise was a beloved performer, a shining genderqueer light.”

ImMasche – an actor who died in a car crash less than a month ago after a performance at Theatre Lawrence – was the last name to be read on the list But there were many more to recognize too – almost 70 of them – from all over the U.S. A poet named Aziza, an editor named Norah, a welder named Blake, a veteran named Allyson, some people who were 15 and some who were in their 50s.

“Honoring lost lives during Transgender Day of Remembrance means that no one remains a statistic,” said Griffin Weber, one of the speakers. “No one will end up being just lines on a graph or numbers in a percentile.”

They may not have been, but statistics can still be sobering, and Johnson provided one: “There are two times as many people on this list as there were last year,” Johnson said. And “there are many people whose names we do not know and will not know.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Griffin Weber speaks at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at Ecumenical Campus Ministries.

When Weber began his transition, he said, he hadn’t heard stories of people like the ones named on Thursday. “I hadn’t ever known of anyone like myself,” he said. And he said many people are still like that. They’ve never been taught about transgender people by their families or at school, so they’re left with what they hear in the media.

“When the media is where people are receiving most of their knowledge about transgender people, it means that our lives, our stories and our legacies are determined by those who may not have our best interests,” Weber said. “Those who may reinterpret our stories for a flashier headline, who may purposely deadname and misgender victims of violence who didn’t live the way the author would have liked.”

That’s part of the history of Transgender Day of Remembrance itself, he said. It was started in 1999 to memorialize three Black trans women who were murdered in Massachusetts: Rita Hester, Chanelle Pickett and Monique Thomas. When Hester’s murder was reported on in the Boston Herald, Weber said, she was referred to with a male name and male pronouns, and the first Day of Remembrance was organized in reaction to that.

“The people who read this article would have never known she was a transgender woman,” Weber said. “… These articles were not how she was supposed to be remembered.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

D.C. Hiegert speaks at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at Ecumenical Campus Ministries.

Weber wasn’t the only one who spoke about the idea of organizing to support transgender people when established institutions won’t.

D.C. Hiegert, who spoke just after Weber, normally focuses on politics as a civil liberties advocate. But Thursday night, Hiegert said, the thing to focus on was “the power that exists in this room.”

There were a few recent “silver linings” in politics for transgender people, Hiegert said – such as a ruling allowing Kansans to change the gender markers on their driver’s licenses – but there were many more challenges at the state and federal levels, including Kansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Senate Bill 63, which is currently being challenged in a lawsuit.

It was therefore important, Hiegert said, to strengthen organizations that help trans people, like Trans Lawrence Coalition, as well as those that provide other social supports, because those community groups “are actually the spaces where change grows from.”

“I just want to encourage folks to feel more powerful,” Hiegert said. “People like Trump or (Kansas Attorney General Kris) Kobach … like to walk around like they have a lot of power. But really, they only have as much power as you let them have.”

And part of that power, the speakers agreed, was letting names be read and stories be told in the right way.

“We are being removed from the public record,” Johnson said, and paused.

“Until we say we’re not.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Attendees listen as the list of names is read at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at Ecumenical Campus Ministries.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Flameless candles illuminate a display at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at Ecumenical Campus Ministries.