This Saturday, February 16 at 4pm, LGBTQ advocates and allies will gather on the steps of the State Capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama to discuss the epidemic of violence that trans and nonbinary Southerners experience each year.
The event, the annual Vigil for Victims of Hate and Violence, will feature speeches from trans leaders in Alabama, including Daroneshia Duncan-Boyd in Birmingham. Daroneshia will speak about the January 2019 murder of a transgender person from Montgomery, the first known murder of a transgender person in the United States this year.
Daroneshia is a longtime friend to the Campaign for Southern Equality, including serving on the Southern Equality Fund’s Advisory Council from 2016 until 2017. She is an advocate for transgender women in Greater Birmingham and the founder of the TAKE (Transgender Advocates Knowledgeable Empowering) Peer Group, which creates a safe-space for transgender individuals. Watch this video of Daroneshia:
The crux of the event is a focus on the lack of laws penalizing anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in Alabama. Event organizers from Montgomery PRIDE United wrote this week, “Alabama has no Hate Crime laws, leaving our LGBTQ population without critical protections in place which recognize Hate Crimes based on gender or sexual identity. We would like to draw as much attention to this event as possible in order to raise awareness of the violence directed towards our LGBTQ community – especially our transgender brothers and sisters.”
