Anchorage Assembly to vote on ‘Transgender Day of Remembrance’ recognition

The Anchorage Assembly will take up Resolution No. AR 2025-342 on Tuesday during its regular meeting, a measure formally recognizing Nov. 20, as Transgender Day of Remembrance in Anchorage and commemorating what sponsors describe as “lives lost to anti-transgender violence.”

The resolution is sponsored by Assembly Chair Chris Constant, Vice-Chair Karen Brawley, and Assembly Members Felix Rivera, Daniel Volland, Anna Brawley, Karen Baldwin Day, George Martinez, Zac Johnson, Kameron Perez-Verdia, Yarrow Silvers, and Mayor Suzanne LaFrance.

Transgender Day of Remembrance was created in the late 1990s after the killing of Rita Hester in Boston in 1998,  a case activists often cite as an example of anti-trans violence, even though police have never determined a motive or a suspect.

The unresolved case behind the observance

On Nov. 28, 1998, Hester, 34, left the Silhouette Cocktail Lounge in Allston around 5 pm after shooting pool and walked the short distance back to a first-floor apartment on Park Vale Avenue. Just after 6 pm, a neighbor called police after hearing a cry for help. Officers entered to find Hester on the floor with at least 20 stab wounds. Hester died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Interestingly, there were no signs of forced entry, and nothing was missing from the apartment,  circumstances often interpreted by investigators to mean the victim likely knew the assailant. To this day, Boston police do not know who killed Hester or why.

The case drew wide attention because Hester, born William Hester in 1964 in Hartford, Conn., was a well-known figure in Boston’s gay community. At 6-foot-2 and roughly 200 pounds, Hester was described by acquaintances as agile, outgoing, and a regular at clubs and cabarets in the Allston and Bay Village neighborhoods.

One year after Hester’s death, activists organized the first Transgender Day of Remembrance, and it has since expanded worldwide. Anchorage has marked the date in past years, and AR 2025-342 continues that practice.

Are transgenders really murdered at higher rates?

Advocacy groups frequently claim transgender people are murdered at disproportionately high rates. But the National Institutes of Health has cautioned that the available data is too incomplete, inconsistent, and fragmented to support firm statistical conclusions.

In its review of existing research, NIH analysts highlighted several problems:

• No federal system reliably tracks whether murder victims are transgender.

• Definitions of “transgender” vary widely across agencies, surveys, and news reports.

• NGOs that compile their own lists may intentionally or unintentionally produce urban-skewed or incomplete data.

• Law enforcement reporting to national databases is voluntary, inconsistent, and often lacks gender-identity fields.

The NIH concluded that, because both the number of transgender victims and the total transgender population are uncertain, no definitive national “transgender murder rate” can yet be established. The agency emphasized that advocacy claims should be treated cautiously until better data collection exists.

While patterns of victimization among young transgender women of color were noted as concerning, the NIH also found no evidence that transgender people overall face a higher homicide risk than the general population, a finding the authors attributed not to certainty, but to severe data limitations.

If approved, AR 2025-342 would place Anchorage alongside dozens of other cities recognizing Nov. 20 as Transgender Day of Remembrance. The vote will take place during Tuesday’s regular Assembly meeting, where the majority coalition has consistently passed symbolic measures aligned with similar policies.

The resolution carries no direct fiscal impact.