The transgender experience in the United States has been heavily misunderstood and stigmatized. Being transgender in this country has become a radical act of self-preservation in the face of a traditionally gendered society.
This year alone 238 transgender people have been slain worldwide, often because of their gender identity. Their deaths are rarely avenged or made visible by the media. Their lives veiled by the discomfort and ignorance of their cisgender counterparts. Their identities misnamed by historians and their experiences often believed to be too difficult to explain or understand.
On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, we remember them.
Being transgender means you have a different gender identity than the one you’re assigned at birth. Long has been the plight of transgender people. From work place to health care discrimination, from homelessness to economic disenfranchisement, from incarceration to humiliation, the act of simply being transgender reveals an onslaught of discriminatory practices. Unfortunately, no transgender person is safe from them, not even kids.
This year California passed a piece of legislation that aimed to rectify some of the discrimination young transgender people are facing. The School Success and Opportunity Act, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in August, ensures that all students, including transgender students, have the opportunity to graduate from California’s public schools, by helping them be themselves and fully participate in school facilities and activities such as sports and physical education that match their gender identity.
Unfortunately, anti-LGBT groups have taken to targeting these students and their families. In an unjust, discriminatory fight, they’re driving a narrative that demonizes transgender youth and unequivocally exclaims that they’re undeserving of the same experiences of other students.
Transgender students often face bullying at school and sometimes at home. Coupled with a lack of comprehensive education around transgender identity, those experiences can lead to a lifetime of difficulty with self-acceptance.
On this transgender day of remembrance, we honor those that we’ve lost and make a commitment to "fight like hell" for those experiencing unjust, discriminatory practices. Humanizing the experiences of transgender people is necessary to creating a healthy, positive environment for all people.
It is essential for schools – administrators, teachers and parents alike – to understand that transgender students – just like all students – must have a safe and supportive school environment where they can be themselves, fully participate and have a fair opportunity to be successful—if not for the true realization of LGB"T" rights, then in honor of the countless we remember especially today, and everyday.
Support all students to be themselves and fully participate in school facilities by signing this petition today.
Shanelle Matthews is communications strategist at the ACLU of Northern California. Follow her @TheShanelleM

Solitary confinement can eat away at someone's mind, making mental illness worse and leaving many people depressed, suicidal, hopeless or hallucinating. It's no place for individuals with mental illness.
In 1995, a federal court in California agreed. After a trial exposing the appalling conditions at Pelican Bay—the state's most notorious, all-isolation, supermax prison and the site of repeated hunger strikes—a federal judge ordered all mentally ill prisoners out of the prison's security housing unit (SHU) in a case called Madrid v. Gomez.
But, because of the sometimes frustratingly limited nature of legal decisions, this judge's order only impacted Pelican Bay. While Pelican Bay has for years been notorious for its conditions of extreme isolation—leading thousands of prisoners across California to participate in the largest prisoner hunger strike in history, some for as long as two months—it is the only California prison in which prisoners with mental illness may not be held in solitary confinement as a matter of law. This means that seriously mentally ill prisoners all over California continue to be held in long-term solitary confinement, even though the Madrid order prohibits those conditions for the mentally ill at Pelican Bay.
It's time to change that. Today in Sacramento, key witnesses, including experts in psychology and corrections practices, will take the stand in support of the first statewide case aimed at getting all mentally ill people in California out of solitary confinement. The case is called Coleman v. Brown, and beginning today these experts will help to expose the extreme and sometimes irreversible damage of holding people with mental illness in solitary confinement.
The Coleman plaintiffs have marshaled stunning evidence to support their claims that all California prisons must remove mentally ill prisoners from solitary confinement. Statewide, according to case filings, about 9 percent of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's (CDCR) approximately 123,600 total prisoners are held in some form of segregated housing—but that number includes 21 percent of mentally ill prisoners system-wide. This means that mentally ill prisoners in California are held in disproportionately high numbers in solitary confinement. Even more alarming is evidence uncovered by the Coleman plaintiffs showing the dramatically heightened suicide rate among prisoners in segregated housing: in 2011, more than one third of all suicides in CDCR facilities took place in segregation units; more than half of the individuals who committed suicide in the first half of 2012 were housed in segregation; and 58 percent of the 19 people who have taken their life to date in 2013 occurred in segregation units.
These disproportionately high instances of suicide are unfortunately not surprising to those familiar with the harms of solitary confinement. Psychological studies consistently show that solitary confinement can wreak distinctive harms on prisoners, including heightened symptoms of hopelessness, depression, hallucinations, self-mutilation, suicidal ideation, and suicidal acts. And a 2008 study of California prisons noted a striking correlation between segregated housing and prison incident reports of self-mutilation and suicide.
Although the harms of solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners are well known, many states, including California, have been slow to catch up to the growing trend against prolonged solitary. Across the country, corrections departments, judges, activists, prisoners and their families alike will be watching to see if the Eastern District of California holds that the CDRC must forbid the housing of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement. If the court holds that it must, then California—and the rest of the country—will be forced to rethink its statewide policies governing the use of solitary confinement.
Helen Vera is a fellow of the National Prison Project at the ACLU